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by Osmium
4944 days ago
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SpaceX are absolutely right to be using tried-and-tested technology in their rockets, and so Elon Musk's scepticism is sensible in context of what they're trying to achieve. The technology mentioned in this article is more applicable 10, 20 years down the line; the R&D costs would be prohibitive to make it cost-effective to be used by SpaceX now, even if they could get it to work reliably and secure the IP rights. |
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His objection isn't based on technology though. It's based on physically enveloping the problem and comparing the two cases.
His assumptions seem to be: LOX will remain cheap. The atmosphere will still have 21% oxygen. Your technology can't separate the N2 from the O2 before ingestion.
Elon says that the braking effect of ingesting that nitrogen vastly overwhelms the small benefit of having a smaller O2 tank. That's it.
This argument doesn't rely on the air-breathing stuff being more complicated or expensive or heavy (though it will be). Technology might fix those problems, but that simple kinematic fact is enough.