HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour - United Launch Alliance) - Smarter Every Day 231

A lot of rocketry advancement would not be happening if SpaceX didn't enter as a competitor. For that reason alone SpaceX should be lauded. It helps that SpaceX is pursuing the dream of a space faring civilization that was promised decades ago. Relativity Space looks cool. But until they launch they will sit in the stack of neat tech to maybe be excited about. I am excited by humans doing things to advance the species. I don't care much who is doing it. But, I have been burned by too much vaporware to get excited by marketing pieces. If you haven't watched Smarter Every Day's ULA factory tour I highly recommend it. There is even a nice bit about how their materials have improved as computers were better able to model stresses. [VIDEO]

Smarter Every Day has a very interesting video[1] inside the factory of United Launch Alliance in which, among a lot of other things, shows the friction stir welding used in their Atlas Rocket[2]: [1] [VIDEO] [2] [VIDEO]

It's so cool to get a tour like this, fascinating stuff. The part at 13:30 seems to be some really valuable knowledge, when he says: if you are not occasionally adding things back in, it means that you are not eliminating stuff aggressively enough. Smarter Everyday did a tour of the ULA facilities [0], which is also worth checking out if you like this kind of thing. [0]: [VIDEO]

In fairness, ULA has done that too. [VIDEO] Also literally everything Destin/SmarterEveryDay puts online is worth watching.

There’s a great “Smarter Every Day” video on how rockets are made and the guest host was Tory Bruno. [VIDEO] Two things I recall from this video from years ago 1. Tory really seemed to be a true expert. Not a typical “CEO”. 2. Seems like a genuinely nice guy, see this moment when Tory recognized Dustin’s dad [LINK]

> Ideally you would use a turntable to rotate the cylinder while welding the sections together with a sub-arc machine. [LINK] Uh, at least in the video that steel is pretty thick. Starships skin is slightly less than 4mm thick... while in that video they have a 2cm deep groove, would the same technique actually work? For what it's worth, ULA stainless steel (<1mm thickness) upper stages are resistance welded instead [VIDEO] That said, I think a lot of the decisions right now are based on "what can we quickly experiment with" not "what is a good long term plan". Building a 9m turntable (diameter of the rocket) would take a long time.

Doing a model rocket would be tougher there's a lot of bits they just couldn't show him due to ITAR restrictions. Also beyond the engines rockets are a LOT of empty space, there is some interesting structure in the skin but most of the volume is just empty. Destin from Smarter Every Day did a tour of the ULA factory where you can see the skin that provides a lot of the structure for their rockets. [VIDEO]

I'm far from an expert but it seems like at least some companies use cnc milling very extensively which I can't imagine is all that fast either. Many of the huge parts in this SmarterEveryDay video at ULA have tool markings e.g. at 8:40. I'm also skeptical of 3d printing being as big of a boon as they pitch but I also wouldn't be super surprised if it nets an improvement in speed for some parts. [VIDEO]