[HN Gopher] Engine cooling - why rocket engines don't melt
___________________________________________________________________
Engine cooling - why rocket engines don't melt
Author : wolfram74
Score : 295 points
Date : 2022-01-13 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (everydayastronaut.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (everydayastronaut.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Making rocket engines by metal 3D printing has become popular. A
| rocket engine bell and combustion chamber has one big rigid part
| with lots of channels and voids inside. That's the ideal case for
| 3D printing. Much simpler than building the thing up by machining
| and welding together many individual parts.
| avmich wrote:
| There are different problems with 3D printing than with
| classical subtractive manufacturing. E.g. you need to get the
| supporting powder out of long thin passages in the cooling
| chamber - you don't have such problem with milling machine
| approach.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I remember reading in an article that without 3D printing they
| could simply not get the cooling channel geometry they needed
| on the Super Dracos on Dragon 2.
|
| Without 3D printing the combustion chamber they would need to
| use other cooling channel geometry, makin ghr engine heavier,
| bigger and less efficient.
| ortusdux wrote:
| One of my favorite bits from Tim's videos was during a tour of
| Firefly Aerospace's facility when they talk about engine cooling.
| They discuss EDM machining small holes into the coolant channels
| just before the throat, which lets a small amount of cryogenic
| coolant out to cool the interior. The funny part is that you can
| purposefully undersize the holes and they will melt larger until
| they are big enough to adequately cool the engine. You basically
| pre-season the engine with a test-fire and let it choose how much
| internal cooling it needs.
|
| https://youtu.be/ac-V8mO0lWo?t=2203
| jamesmunns wrote:
| This is just a really clearly written introduction of a lot of
| rocket engine concepts.
|
| It was a super good read.
| mountainwalker wrote:
| Tim's videos are always so well done! Even if you're not a rocket
| enthusiast there's tons to get out of this video.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. Tim was an old friend of mine in university, but we
| lost touch over the years. He was always a good, quirky,
| creative, and talented guy. He bought an old cosmonaut suit on
| ebay on a lark and started doing funny/silly photo shoots with
| it and then photo shoots at rocket launches and then real
| educational stuff. It's been wild to see it take off (pun
| intended).
| bernulli wrote:
| Minor nitpick: fluids are not either liquids or gases, this is
| particularly true for rocket engines where many of the discussed
| processes (injection, compression, regenerative coolant flow)
| actually occur at super- or transcritical conditions.
|
| Also, I don't think you can say the faceplate is heat sink-
| cooled. Remember that just behind it is the propellant manifold,
| so it's rather some form of regenerative cooling.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Ignorant question: are solid-fueled rockets at all interesting,
| anymore? Do they have any advantages (e.g. simplicity of design)
| over the fancy throttle-able liquid-fueled engines?
| anarazel wrote:
| Depends on the purpose. E.g. for military uses like ICBMs
| they're quite important...
| evo wrote:
| I suspect their primary advantage remains shelf-stability at
| room temperatures, which will make them stay relevant for
| military applications, e.g. you don't want a cryogenics
| facility in your submarine or cruise missile launch platform.
|
| Historically, I think they're cheaper than an equivalent
| disposable liquid fueled engine but don't hold up to the fully
| reusable designs of today, and from a reliability perspective
| there's not a lot of room between working-as-intended and
| "activate the flight termination system" at a total loss.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I suspect their primary advantage remains shelf-stability
| at room temperatures, which will make them stay relevant for
| military applications
|
| I while ago I read--but barely understood--a book that went
| into a lot of this: "Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid
| Rocket Propellants" by John D. Clark.
|
| _____________________
|
| IIRC there were some cases where a fuel was not militarily-
| acceptable because you would need to warm/thaw the mobile
| missile prior to firing in a Russian winter, or other cases
| where a permanent missile-silo meant it was cost-effective to
| run heating/refrigeration all the time, etc.
|
| > [I]n applications which do not require a low freezing
| point, hydrazine itself is fused, either straight or mixed
| with one of its derivatives. The fuel of the Titan II ICBM
| doesn't have to have a low freezing point, since Titan II
| lives in a steam-heated hole in the ground, but it does need
| the highest possible performance, and hydrazine was the first
| candidate for the job.
|
| _____________________
|
| Another fuel-choice issue involves how badly it might self-
| destruct if anything unusual happened:
|
| > [I]n the summer of 1960, we tried to fire a 10,000-pound
| thrust Cavea B motor. [...] Well, through a combination of
| this and that, the motor blew on startup. We never discovered
| whether or not the [detonation] traps worked--we couldn't
| find enough fragments to find out.
|
| > The fragments from the injector just short-circuited the
| traps, smashed into the tank, and set off the 200 pounds of
| propellant in that. (Each pound of propellant had more
| available energy than two pounds of TNT.) I never saw such a
| mess. The walls of the test cell--two feet of concrete--went
| out, and the roof came in. The motor itself--a heavy,
| workhorse job of solid copper-- went about 600 feet down
| range. And a six-foot square of armor plate sailed into the
| woods, cutting off a few trees at the root, smashing a
| granite boulder, bouncing into the air and slicing off a few
| treetops, and finally coming to rest some 1400 feet from
| where it started. The woods looked as though a stampeding
| herd of wild elephants had been through.
|
| > As may be imagined, this incident tended to give
| monopropellants something of a bad name. Even if you could
| fire them safely--and we soon saw what had gone wrong with
| the ignition process--how could you use them in the field?
|
| > Here you have a rocket set up on the launching stand, under
| battlefield conditions; and what happens if it gets hit by a
| piece of shrapnel? LRPL came up with the answer to that. You
| keep your monoprop in the missile in two compartments: one
| full of fuel-rich propellant made up to A. = 2.2 or 2.4, and
| the other containing enough acid to dilute it to X = 1.2.
| Just before you fire, a can-opener arrangement inside the
| missile slits open the barrier separating the two liquids,
| you allow a few seconds for them to mix, and then push the
| button.
| j8asic wrote:
| Not really. Gel propellants are a new direction.
| jandrese wrote:
| They are useful when you need a rocket that can take off at a
| moments notice but sit idle for decades at a time. For typical
| rocket launches they don't make much sense.
|
| I suspect the Space Shuttle SRBs were chosen because they were
| a handout to ICBM manufacturers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "interesting". If you mean do
| people still use them for practical purposes, then yes they
| are. If you mean are people still researching them for use in
| exploring space, then probably not.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Extremely simple (basically just one big rocket combustion
| chamber with the propellant already inside, no pumps or
| plumbing) and shelf storable and potentially extremely high
| thrust to weight ratio.
|
| Useful for munitions and for one-time-use. I'd like to think
| we're going to reusable rockets and not as much war, so I'd
| LIKE to think they have fewer uses, but...
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| This thing I can not comprehend about rocket engines is how the
| turbopump manages to hold together.
|
| A turbine blade in the SSME about the size of your thumb makes
| 600 horsepower.
|
| https://www.enginehistory.org/Rockets/SSME/SSME6.pdf
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| If that interests you then this series of videos is definitely
| worth watching. It details several parts of the German V2
| missile, the grand father of all modern liquid propellant
| rockets. This one is about the turbopump which is one of the
| most interesting parts.
|
| https://youtu.be/EgiMu8A3pi0
| kunai wrote:
| It is pretty mind-boggling. Makes the average turbofan's
| turbine assembly look like child's play, and those are also
| pretty ridiculous in terms of power-to-weight ratio.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's mostly because the working fluid is at very high
| pressure (much denser than the air coming through an aero
| engine). The turbine side works with hot gas at 100+ bar, and
| the pump side is dealing with liquid. Therefore small parts
| can exert a lot of force (large pressure differences) and do
| a lot of work (high speeds).
|
| The most similar technology is a boiler feed pump (used to
| feed the boilers in a steam turbine system, e.g. in a ship or
| power station) - these work in a similar way, high pressure
| steam is bled off from the system to drive a small turbine,
| which drives a high pressure pump to feed the boiler, which
| feeds the 'main' steam turbine. Similar pressure (>100 bar),
| but the turbine on the rocket engine needs to handle much
| higher temperatures (hot gas rather than steam).
| bernulli wrote:
| Also try to imagine the thermal stresses when you have
| cryogenic propellants on the pump side and hot exhaust gases
| (gas generator or staged combustion) on the turbine side!
| jaywalk wrote:
| Well, 63 blades together make 600 horsepower. But as that paper
| notes, each blade is subject to 50,000 psi which is wild.
| jhgb wrote:
| 600 horsepower _each_. The whole turbine has tens of
| megawatts of mechanical power output.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Yep, you are correct. I misread.
| TylerE wrote:
| It is wild, but not as wild as you might think.
|
| The fuel rail in a modern diesel engine is operating at
| 25-30,000 psi all the time.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I the power level of these engines is difficult to comprehend.
| The _fuel pump_ has thousands of horsepower. Compare this to
| the fuel pump on a car engine, which is a tiny little electric
| thing. The combustion power must be in the gigawatt range.
|
| Edit: the SSME high pressure fuel pump turbine produces 63000
| hp (46 MW). There's also one for the oxygen, and a pair of low
| pressure pumps as well. Crazy...
|
| Edit edit: the fuel pump transfers 155 lb/sec of liquid
| hydrogen. If fully combusted (142 MJ/kg), that would release
| 10.0 GW of heat per engine.
| skykooler wrote:
| This is why electric turbopumps (like those used on
| RocketLab's Electron rocket) don't scale up to larger rockets
| well - the power draw is just infeasible to support with
| current battery technology.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Not quite. Electric pumps scale just fine (that is,
| linearly), but turbopumps scale better. It's hard to build
| a very small turbopump but not much harder to build a
| larger one, and turbopumps improve in efficiency as they
| get larger. BTW, the largest electropump (4 times that of
| RocketLab's Rutherford electropump engine) for a rocket
| engine is the electropump for the 100kN (10 ton) thrust
| rocket engine for the reusable crewed suborbital Spica
| space rocket by the volunteer-run Copenhagen Suborbitals
| group, which more people ought to know about:
|
| https://twitter.com/CopSub/status/1468280164404666373?s=20
| sephamorr wrote:
| The major issue is the energy storage, not the power
| plant itself. The penalty of the battery mass scales far
| worse than a tank holding very energy dense rocket
| propellant.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Again, the energy storage scales just fine: linearly.
| Rocket propellant tends to scale better than linear, but
| it is not in every case better than lithium ion
| batteries! For example, the R7/Soyuz rocket family is the
| most-launched orbital rocket ever, and it uses a hydrogen
| peroxide gas generator to drive the turbopump. That has a
| concentration of 82.5% peroxide. Pure peroxide has a heat
| of decomposition of 2.84MJ/kg, and turbine that is
| typically 30% efficient (actually, it might be much less
| than that... I think the V-2 turbine was only like 10%
| efficient, maybe worse... so 30% is optimistic) gives you
| a usable energy density of only 700kJ/kg, or about
| 194Wh/kg. The best lithium batteries available are about
| twice that, up to 400-500Wh/kg (with those in the lab
| even better still), and electric motors can have 90-95%
| efficiency.
|
| And gas generators using main propellants are better,
| certainly, but less than you might think because they
| have to haul all their oxidizer with them (unlike
| aircraft) and are also usually run very far from
| stoichiometric (maybe just 0.3 O:F ratio compared to a
| stoichiometric 3.4) to keep the temperature down. So
| unless you have a pretty high temperature turbine, you
| might not beat peroxide by much!
|
| So the easiest gas generators have worse energy density
| (keep in mind RocketLab does stage off batteries if
| necessary...), and the next easiest, while better, aren't
| MASSIVELY better without careful efficiency improvements.
| The real efficiencies come when you use like an expander
| cycle or a staged combustion cycle or you feed the gas
| generator exhaust back into the nozzle like Merlin Vacuum
| or F-1. And those are all much more complicated. A level
| of complication that is not worth it for small rockets
| but is for larger.
|
| So it's really not about electric scaling poorly
| (electric scales just fine) but about the greater
| complexity of better engine cycles being worth it at
| larger scales.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Doing this in a controlled fashion
| is the hard part; a largish wooden building on fire can also
| dissipate 10 GW.
|
| A .22 LR rifle bullet might acquire 200 J in 2 ms, which
| means the firing gun is producing 100 kW mechanical, plus
| probably another 300 kW thermal. So another way of thinking
| of this is that an engine dissipating 10 GW is equivalent to
| something like 25000 handguns firing at once, without ever
| stopping.
| 7952 wrote:
| Saturn V at take off had an equivalent power of 166GW. If
| that was electricity it would be around 2x the total capacity
| of all the power stations in the UK.
| beerandt wrote:
| And then on top of it all, throttling ability.
|
| People don't grasp what an unbelievably complex engineering
| problem that is. It's at least an addition of difficulty at
| the same magnitude as building a steady-state 63000 hp
| turbine pump in the first place.
|
| Mechanically implementing it in the inherently steady-state
| design rocket of most rocket cycles. Having variable controls
| able to work at those pressures. Testing structural dynamics
| for a range of harmonic conditions instead of one. And do all
| of that with materials that need to tolerate temperatures
| going from cryogenic to white hot, without allowing thermal
| expansion to affect the mechanical tolerances of parts
| running at thousands of RPMs. And now you have varying flow
| rates and negative pressures in the lines coming from the
| external tanks, so have to design such that cryogenic liquids
| (that normally would require immense positive pressure to
| keep liquid) don't spontaneously boil or cavitate or cause a
| shock-like wave (think water hammer turning off your bath
| faucet) under changing negative pressures.
|
| It's really difficult even for seasoned engineers to grasp
| the scale of difficulty involved.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Appreciation of engineers for the difficulty of an
| assignment like this seems bimodal.
|
| On the one hand, you have https://xkcd.com/793/ responses:
|
| > _You 're trying to predict the behavior of <complicated
| system>? Just model it as a <simple object>, and then add
| some secondary terms to account for <complications I just
| thought of>. Easy, right? So, why does <your field> need a
| whole journal, anyway?_
|
| Just pressurize the tanks, and meter the flow with some
| valves. Easy, right?
|
| They move to the other side of the distribution after a
| little more thought, when they they realize it's simply
| infeasible to put thousands of horsepower in a pump that
| size, and declare the whole endeavor completely nonsensical
| and impossible.
|
| Ran through this on a recent project involving an automated
| sewing machine. At first, it seems ludicrous that you could
| tie knots thousands of times per second. Oh wait, it's a
| single motor and old cam-driven tech from the 1800s,
| available off the shelf for a couple hundred dollars?
| avmich wrote:
| They also move to the "simple" side as well. The phrase
| "the rocket science is not a rocket science" has reasons
| to exist.
| codeulike wrote:
| _It 's really difficult even for seasoned engineers to
| grasp the scale of difficulty involved._
|
| Its rocket science
| InitialLastName wrote:
| A joke you hear unceasingly when you take tours of
| engineering schools with a heavy aerospace focus.
| post_break wrote:
| Reminds me of fuel injectors of funny cars. Watch it go from
| just idling, to full throttle. Then remember there's 8 of
| them on the engine.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGTbQuhhluY
| jcims wrote:
| Top Fuel copypasta -
| https://wediditforlove.com/techtalk21.html
| dekhn wrote:
| It sounded incomprehensible to me too but as I did some more
| learning about the process of building rocket engines I learned
| some interesting details. First, remember that people have been
| making high strength metals through careful processing for
| thousands of years. Second, the parts of engines are not made
| as part of large-scale industrialized manufacturing. Almost all
| the parts are made as few-offs, with far more energy, time, and
| effort put into making sure that a single instance of something
| is extremely reliable. Third, we got damn good at materials
| science in the past 100 year, and metals can be absurdly
| resistant to deformation under heat.
| [deleted]
| dokem wrote:
| They also only run for a few minutes.
| beerandt wrote:
| SSMEs are reusable.
|
| Designing for thermal cycles and serviceability[0] is at
| least as difficult a problem as running a hypothetical
| rocket engine an equal amount of time in one longer, hotter
| burn.
|
| (Such a design isn't needed and wouldn't be practical, but
| then again multiple aspects of SSMEs being reusable turned
| out not very practical either, depending on what version of
| design criterea you evaluate and how the expected vs actual
| usage changed over the lifetime of the program.)
|
| [0]In both the engineering sense, as durability of the
| various loading cycles (ie lifetime turbine rotations or
| number of thermal cycles before eol or failure), _and_ as
| being constructed as able to undergo maintenance and
| refurbishment between launches.
| avmich wrote:
| > SSMEs are reusable.
|
| Not as much as RL-10s. SSME you can disassemble - because
| you should do that, as thermal stresses on turbine blades
| are too dangerous, so you have to periodically replace
| the parts which nearing the fault.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Engines in dragsters are also know to have very high power
| comparing to engine size, but they also make less than 10k
| rotations at full power before they fail. That is enough to
| last one drag race which is several seconds.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Don't think of it as "making horsepower", think of it as
| "resisting the forces upon it".
|
| A gear tooth the size of your thumb pulls a semi truck up a
| mountain.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Everyday Astronaut is such an impressive dude, I don't understand
| why he doesn't just work for SpaceX at this point. He knows more
| about rocket engineering and can explain it 10x better than most
| aerospace new grads.
| guynamedloren wrote:
| Small pedantic note: this article is authored by Claire
| Percival, not Tim Dodd.
|
| I'm not familiar with the working dynamic - Tim very well could
| been involved in authoring this piece - but, credit where
| credit is due.
|
| Edit: I partially recant this. The article includes a video by
| Tim.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| As I understand (as a Patreon), in general, Tim writes the
| video and then one of his team write an article that covers
| what the video says only with more text to substitute for the
| lack of visuals.
|
| For Pre-Launch Previews they are written first by a team
| member.
| colordrops wrote:
| He's probably making more money with his media that he would
| working there.
| paxys wrote:
| Having a YouTube channel with 1M+ subscribers and videos that
| get 5M+ views each is a _much_ more profitable and generally
| better gig than SpaceX employee #10,000+ working 60-80 hours a
| week in a high pressure culture.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| There's a big difference between researching a topic to a
| standard good enough for 'popular rocket science' and
| 'understanding the maths well enough to work in the field'.
| kragen wrote:
| Has he built prototype rocket engines like Integza, Ben
| Krasnow, or Tech Ingredients? They're still primarily
| _divulgadores_ (there isn 't a good word for this in English)
| but they have a certain amount of practical experience
| getting things to work.
|
| OTOH at the point that you're EDM-drilling thousands of
| micron-scale holes in your combustion chamber for film
| cooling, you may start to need practical experience with
| different things.
| patrickyeon wrote:
| I've never heard the term _divulgadores_ (I don't speak
| Spanish, so that's no surprise), but it sounds maybe like
| "science communicator" in this context? There's something a
| bit more to the people you've listed in that they are also
| entertainers, not straight educators, I don't know if
| that's wrapped up in divulgadores as well?
| mlindner wrote:
| I don't actually think he's that impressive and I don't get
| people's praise for him. His videos have a lot of mistakes in
| them and while they're written in a way that dumbs down a topic
| well for an audience who doesn't understand the subject very
| well, that's his only major skill that's involved here. He's
| not especially smart or ingenious, he's just a good
| communicator. If he was to work somewhere it would be in a
| communications department, but he probably makes more from
| Youtube than such a job would provide.
|
| That's why he doesn't work for somewhere in the industry,
| youtube makes him more. (He makes enough money to hire other
| people to write for him, as we can see in the linked article.)
| HectorRamos wrote:
| Tim spends countless amount of time going through the
| scripts, read throughs, first recordings, and so on, with
| Patreons. I've been on many of these read throughs, usually
| with several engineers in the aerospace industry present, and
| it's meticulous how Tim makes sure any possible mistake is
| identified and rectified. Even then, once you upload, there's
| no editing of a video.
|
| The goal is to bring the subject down to a level where
| everyday people can still follow. It's not meant to be a
| college course, so of course there will be some dumbing down.
| criley2 wrote:
| SpaceX sounds pretty nasty to work for. Long hours,
| machismo/sexist culture, aggressive management, and certainly
| not the best pay you can find.
|
| He's probably happy where he is.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I worked there for a few years, on flight software. The
| culture depends quite a bit on what department you're in. I
| learned how to push back on schedule pressure and was able to
| strike a reasonable work-life balance, and the head of my
| department was very good at buffering us from management. My
| departure was uncommon in that I left on good terms while I
| was happy. There were other departments, though, that seemed
| to operate more like a fraternity, and plenty of burnt-out
| people.
| geocrasher wrote:
| He is definitely knowledgeable, but strikes me as too much of a
| fanboy to be taken seriously. I have a hard time taking his
| videos all that seriously. And it's not about his knowledge,
| it's about his presentation.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Take seriously? Ok let's use his last Russian rocket program
| history piece....what exactly did you feel was factually
| inaccurate about it?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > And it's not about his knowledge, it's about his
| presentation.
|
| They're not quibbling with the factual content.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I never said anything about his accuracy.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| Weren't you aware? learning is #SeriousBusiness, no fun
| allowed.
| geocrasher wrote:
| It's not about _fun_ it 's about getting past the "ZOMG
| SPACEX!!!!!" stage.
| [deleted]
| Bellend wrote:
| I know you are getting a lot of snarky comments, but
| honestly I know what you are saying. I can't watch his
| channel for whatever that gushiness thing is.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I appreciate that. Thanks.
| m_mueller wrote:
| Worth checking it out again, he toned it down a lot
| recently IMO. Still prefer Scott Manley, but only
| astronaut gets the level of access like that. I mean Elon
| showed him basically everything in front of a camera.
| geocrasher wrote:
| There's definitely reason to watch his channel, and that
| particular two part series was one I consumed in whole.
| Loved it. HUGE takeaways from it.
| lilyball wrote:
| > _too much of a fanboy to be taken seriously_
|
| I would be really interested to know why "caring too much" is
| a disqualification.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I guess some people's exuberance can turn people off, but
| honestly its great in my opinion. Why should someone's joyful
| exuberance for something make his educational content not
| worth watching? The guy is obviously just very passionate
| about spaceflight and people who are pushing the boundaries
| of science/technology. I think 99% percent of the people I
| talk to approach this kind of stuff with mundane indifference
| and cynicism, so I think seeing someone genuinely passionate
| and excited by it is a breath of fresh air.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I sincerely appreciate his passion. It just goes over the
| top _for my personality_ and keeps me from really getting
| into it.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Classic SpaceX fanboys, always making 90 minute documentaries
| about the history of every Russian rocket engine.
| geocrasher wrote:
| If you can pick your video to base your assessment of my
| comment on, then so can I:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7STa-tiQajQ
|
| And by the way, I never mentioned SpaceX
| thamer wrote:
| I've seen this kind of comment before about his presentation,
| and I don't really understand it. It's true that he's a
| fanboy and that's especially visible in his video
| interviews/visits with Elon Musk, but the style of those
| videos is markedly different from the more educational ones
| which are often trying to cover a topic with a lot of detail
| while remaining relatively accessible.
|
| I watched the video version of the article linked here this
| morning, and don't recall any part that was fawning over
| anyone or anything in particular.
|
| What is it about his presentation that puts you off?
| geocrasher wrote:
| I don't know what the right word is for it. I used "fanboy"
| but maybe there's some other better word. Somebody else
| above used "gushiness" I think and that sounds about right.
|
| It's like having a friend who won't shut up about a new
| sushi place they found. Yes, the sushi is amazing. Yes, the
| staff is nice. Yes, the atmosphere is great. And I could
| enjoy it more if my friend would stop making a big deal
| about every little thing about it.
|
| Edit: Just skipped through the video this thread is about
| and that vibe just won't go away. I don't feel like I'm
| being informed, I feel like I'm being _sold_. The
| information itself is very, very good!
|
| For what it's worth, the Professor of Rock on YT has the
| same vibe for me.
| mlindner wrote:
| I completely agree, but the fanboy aspect isn't really my
| main sticking point, it's his tone that feels like he's
| teaching elementary schoolers something.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Isn't that the point of the channel? Making astronomy
| accessible to "Everyday" people?
| piyh wrote:
| He's teaching literal rocket science to the masses.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I find he toned down the fanboy aspect a bit. A few years
| ago, he could have been part of SpaceX marketing department.
|
| He still loves SpaceX, and to be fair, who doesn't. You may
| not like Elon Musk, his fanboys, the outrageous claims, and
| the way the company is run, but most of the exciting news in
| rocketry for the last decade are about SpaceX. But for the
| last few years, it is clear that he makes some efforts to be
| impartial and focus on the technical aspects.
|
| And you should watch the videos he made with Elon Musk when
| he visited SpaceX. I expected little more than an ad for
| SpaceX, and it turned out surprisingly technical and hype-
| free.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I did watch both those videos, and they were excellent!
| Well, Elon's parts were excellent. I still found the
| questions to be more on the fanboi side than the
| engineering side, and that's okay. It's his brand, he can
| do what he likes.
|
| I prefer Scott Manley's approach to things, and so I watch
| him instead. And when he says that EverydayAstronaut has a
| great video, I go watch it :)
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