Elon Musk: observation

Transcript context

…You made that decision. That wasn’t people going around saying, “Oh, we found something better, boss.” That was you encouraging people against some resistance. Can you tell us how you came to that whole concept of the steel switch? Desperation, I’d say. Originally, we were going to make Starship out of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is pretty expensive. When you do volume production, you can get any given thing to start to approach its material cost. The problem with carbon fiber is that material cost is still very high. Particularly if you go for a high-strength specialized carbon fiber that can handle cryogenic oxygen, it’s roughly 50 times the cost of steel. At least in theory, it would be lighter. People generally think of steel as being heavy and carbon fiber as being light. For room temperature applications, like a Formula 1 car, static aero structure, or any kind of aero structure really, you’re probably going to be better off with carbon fiber. The problem is that we were trying to make this enormous rocket out of carbon fiber and our progress was extremely slow. It had been picked in the first place just because it’s light?…

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