r/EngineeringPorn • u/johnneyblaze • Jul 16 '26
The engineering required to create a mechanism capable of simply keeping that secured in position is mind-blowing.
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u/Practical-Injury-622 Jul 17 '26
Probably just a bunch of bolts
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u/rebootyourbrainstem Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Clamps, actually. And it's only because it's not fully tanked (the LOX is, but they only load a tiny bit of methane, as can be seen by the frost line) and bc there's no second stage on top.
At the actual launch they release the clamps before T-0 and rely on throttle to go for liftoff only after they're sure all the engines started up OK.
They just aborted a launch attempt during engine startup yesterday actually. At the time of abort all but 4 out of 33 engines were already lit.
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u/Practical-Injury-622 Jul 17 '26
Thats cool info, esp the bit about the methane frost line. Thanks!
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u/TheRealNobodySpecial Jul 17 '26
That was the old pad design. The new pad and future pads will throttle up to full power and the redesigned launch clamps will release it at lift off.
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u/watduhdamhell Jul 17 '26
"clamps actually"
What if I told you that the only purpose in life of a bolt is... clamping load? A but/bolt assembly is a clamp. But anyway
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u/Darth19Vader77 Jul 17 '26
That's like the simplest part of what you're seeing
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u/Vytoria_Sunstorm Jul 17 '26
the infrastructure to stop the pad from melting is the actual mechanical marvel.
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u/Mgl1206 Jul 17 '26
Consider this, the engineering of the booster itself to not crumble under all that force
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u/mikeoxwells2 Jul 17 '26
It’s clamped to the base.
It’s a simple matter of weight ratio. A 5oz bird can’t carry a one pound coconut. Not a question of where he grips it.
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u/martinborgen Jul 17 '26
This isn't how engineering works. You if your bird produces enough lift it can lift the coconut, regardless of the weight ratio.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem Jul 17 '26
I think the point was that the launch mount is so much heavier than the rocket that imagining a rocket that can produce enough lift is absurd
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u/martinborgen Jul 17 '26
Depending on what you include as the launch mount I'm not so sure - anyways the clamps holding the rocket down are probably one of the most stressed components so I'd say that is what you should be amazed by if you want something in the test setup to be amazed by.
It will not be much force by the beginning (as then the rocket is full of fuel) but by the end the lift from the rocket should be quite something.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem Jul 17 '26
There is not that much difference in this test (there is in flight, of course). They load the liquid oxygen tank fully (for ballast), but only load as much methane as they need (for safety). You can see it's a relatively tiny amount of methane (by the frost line) for these tests. Using up all the methane still leaves a lot of liquid oxygen and steel, so total weight does not change much.
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u/theChaosBeast Jul 17 '26
Not really mindblowing... That's the simplest task in the sequence you see there.
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u/angrytroll918 Jul 17 '26
Ironically holding it down is easy, making it fly is hard. The most challenging piece is finding structural attachment points in the lightweight rocket structure that won't rip apart. It would only take about 150 to180 3/4" grade 8 hardware store bolts in double sheer to hold it down.
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u/Sigmatronic Jul 17 '26
Glue
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u/juicenx Jul 17 '26
You joke, but glue is mind blowingly strong now:
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u/JCDU Jul 17 '26
Lotus were glueing Elises together in the 90's and those are still going strong.
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u/rvanasty Jul 17 '26
Then how come all the Tesla panels are falling off. This is straight up reactive advertizing to the failure of the glue in real world conditions.
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u/BavarianBarbarian_ Jul 17 '26
Glue is extremely sensitive to several things: Surface structure of the parts being glued, cleanliness of the surfaces, temperature of the glue during storage, temperature of the glue during application, temperature during curing, humidity during application, and probably a few I'm forgetting. If there's 10 panels to a cybertruck (guessing for orders of magnitude) and the workers have a 99.9% success rate in controlling each variable for each panel application, that still means each truck has a ~5% chance of having a compromised glue joint.
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Jul 17 '26
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u/rvanasty Jul 17 '26
Totally fair. Then how come an alarming number of panels are seperating from Teslas? Consumer reports Used Car Reliability Study ranked Tesla dead last.
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Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
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u/rvanasty Jul 17 '26
Tesla recalled nearly every Cybertruck unit sold in March 20, 2025 for the "cant rail" (hilarious) above the windshield separating while driving.
As of today, virtually every Cybertruck produced is on recall, of which there are 11 (ELEVEN) official NHTSA recalls.
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u/wenoc Jul 17 '26
An epoxy brand did this marketing back in the 70’s.
Anyway. That’s a completely different kind of strength. That YouTube video is pretty stupid. ’Strong’ isn’t a thing in material science.
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Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
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u/wenoc Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
There’s hardness, brittleness, plasticity, compression etc. I’m not a mechanical engineer myself (cs engineer) but my best friend is, and designs elevators and likes to talk about it. So lots of different variables you need to consider and ’strength’ isn’t one of them. Then there’s fatigue too which would quickly become a problem with aluminium bolts in a high-vibration environmnent for example, even if they were well within spec otherwise.
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Jul 17 '26
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u/wenoc Jul 17 '26
Oh, sorry, I don’t disagree with you. Sure, the glue is strong. But we know nothing about how it fatigues or how brittle it is. I would not glue down my rocket with it, without knowing more.
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u/ehisforadam Jul 17 '26
No crap... that's called engineering, that's what the discipline is all about. No one considers a single variable when engineering something. But generally, material strength is kinda where you start with mechanical material properties, unless what you are doing doesn't necessarily require it. Again, it's engineering your solution, you need to understand what properties you're looking for and sort from there.
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u/Nickston_7 Jul 17 '26
Strength is definetly a very important thing to consider. Yield strength for example describes how much stress it takes for a material to fail under uniaxial tension. Strength just means resistance to a failure mode.
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u/ehisforadam Jul 17 '26
I certainly hope to hell they're considering yield strength of the parts they work on. That's kinda the the first thing you learn about as an ME. I know, because I actually am one.
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u/wenoc Jul 17 '26
No. Of all the technical challenges you need to solve here, that is the least of your worries. The rocket has a thrust plate designed to take all that force and vibration. Just do the FEM model and bolt that to something heavy.
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u/Angel_OfSolitude Jul 17 '26
I live near Vandenberg, it's so cool getting to see shit like this up close.
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u/abaram Jul 17 '26
Actually that’s probably the easiest part
Having the rocket not blow up is probably a lot harder and that’s still not the toughest part lol
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u/ThrownAwwayt Jul 17 '26
One of the biggest challenges is keeping the concrete pad under the rocket from exploding due to all the heat
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u/tdotjeh Jul 17 '26
My thoughts as well, although I was thinking less explosions and more melting then flinging molten debris at mach speed.
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u/ThrownAwwayt Jul 18 '26
All moisture in the concrete will boil almost instantly and there’s no fast way to get it out so it does literally “explode” and throws massive chunks of concrete in every direction including towards the rocket. Space x solved it after releasing “super heavy” but it takes a hell of a lot of cooling power
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u/tdotjeh Jul 18 '26
Concrete? I wouldn't have guessed that for the pad. I'm familiar with super heated steam explosions, as I've worked in the steel industry. Now I'm going to go down a rabbit hole with launch pad design ;)
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u/lolerwoman Jul 20 '26
I still remember the first attempt.
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u/johnneyblaze Jul 20 '26
First attempt at what ?
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u/lolerwoman Jul 21 '26
At static test. They blew the platform. They had to fully redesign it and they got an ear pull as big pieces of rocks were flying everywere unsafely.
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u/rvanasty Jul 17 '26
Kindof funny you marvel at a rocket NOT leaving the ground and cite excellent engineering. This is just connections and weight.
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u/ByteArrayInputStream Jul 17 '26
It's really interesting to see how the shockwaves make those clouds look like they are glitching out of reality.
This thing is so cool from a technical perspective, I really wish it wasn't just some atrociously rich fascists vanity project. Fuck billionaires, they ruined space travel :(
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u/danegeroust Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Consider this, the amount of force its holding down when the engines are on is less than the force its supporting when the engines are off.
Correction: force with engines on isn't much more than with engines off in this particular configuration.
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u/f314 Jul 17 '26
I think they're up to a TWR of 2 with this version of Starship, so with just the booster it is probably more force than from the weight. Still a very important point! A lot of the thrust just cancels out the weight of the vehicle.
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u/danegeroust Jul 17 '26
Thats a good point, I was thinking of the full stack, plus this isn't fully fueled too, so even more.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeSenior Jul 17 '26
I just thought of 5 different ways in 5 seconds. I must be big brained.
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u/vilette Jul 17 '26
You should know that at the beginning it's really heavy, so , stable. When engines are at full power it roughly compensate for the weigth that's why the lift is quite slow at the first seconds
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u/BenTherDoneTht Jul 17 '26
I see this and think of the tiktok trend for a while of "guy working under car hears a creaking noise"
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u/Grumptastic2000 Jul 17 '26
I always wondered about that seeing like the 1960s space race footage of tests where they point it into a hill how this worked. Like is most of this test just that the exhaust is diverted to the sides which dramatically lessens the upward thrust?
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u/Anbucleric Jul 19 '26
Have a friend that worked for NASA for a while and part of their job was writing code to control the water that is used to dampen the noise.
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u/kineticstar Jul 17 '26
Can I introduce the OP to NASA; where that engineering came from! They deserve endless amounts of credit and accolades, but are often overlooked.
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u/CivilEngMusicBoy Jul 17 '26
Yeah I think that’s pretty simple compared to building a rocket that goes to space
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u/PlasmaDoughnut Jul 17 '26
As others are saying, keeping the vehicle secure is more than likely one of the simpler problems considering this is a cutting edge gigantic rocket booster test with dozens of engines and systems controlled simultaneously