u/Life_at_work5

For context, I am a rising sophomore in AAE at a good university. Due to circumstances, however, I’m currently on track to graduate in 2 yrs (2028) and can do very little to alter this. I have a okay GPA of 3.49 with a year’s worth of experience on a rocketry team at my school, with that mainly being contributing to thermal analysis and engine mounts. On top of that, I have a few minor personal projects but that’s it at the moment.

With that background in mind, I’ve (unsurprisingly) had a very tough time while searching for internships, with me applying to 100+ internships over the past year but haven’t heard back from a single one. This has caused me to feel very lost and not really sure on what next steps to take, which has only been compounded due to the limited time I have before I graduate.

I plan to approach profs for research opportunities this coming year and am in the middle of a personal project where I’m designing an injector using CFD. But I’m not sure that that will be enough to land me my first internship.

So with that in mind, I was wondering if I could get some advice on what I should do/prioritize to land that first internship?

For context, I am a rising sophomore in AAE at a good uni. Due to circumstances, however, I’m currently on track to graduate in 2 yrs (2028) and can do very little to alter this. I have a okay GPA of 3.49 with a year’s worth of experience on a rocketry team at my school, with that mainly being contributing to thermal analysis and engine mounts. On top of that, I have a few minor personal projects but that’s it at the moment.

With that background in mind, I’ve (unsurprisingly) had a very tough time while searching for internships, with me applying to 100+ internships over the past year but haven’t heard back from a single one. This has caused me to feel very lost and not really sure on what next steps to take, which has only been compounded due to the limited time I have before I graduate.

I plan to approach profs for research opportunities this coming year and am in the middle of a personal project where I’m designing an injector using CFD. But I’m not sure that that will be enough to land me my first internship.

So with that in mind, I was wondering if I could get some advice on what I should do/prioritize to land that first internship?

I’d like to apologize for the length of this post but I wanted to make sure I clearly conveyed my question so I hope you’ll humor me and read what I’ve wrote.

To my understanding, there are two main forms of time evolution in Quantum Mechanics (QM). The first is unitary evolution as described by the Schrödinger Equation and its equivalents, with unitary evolution being deterministic. The second is “measurement” which is the collapse of the wave function to a pure eigenstate of whatever basis the wave function was measured in (please correct me if I’m wrong).

With that out of the way, I wanted to ask if there is a general consensus of what measurement really is, and if so, how does it differ from what I’ll call “regular” interactions?

Getting further into what I mean, I want to use the double slit experiment. In the double slit experiment, the wave function of the particle being studied isn’t collapsed until the screen or a detector measures the particle; at which point the screen or detector interact with the particle to deduce its position. But if the experiment were to be done in a noisy environment like a non-vacuum, that particle will have interacted many times before interacting with the detector or screen. Yet none of these “regular” interactions collapse the particle’s wave function (they do cause decoherence, but decoherence doesn’t cause wave function collapse), only the detector or screen does. Why is this? What makes the interaction with the detector or screen special?

As another example, macroscopic objects have many “regular” interactions with the environment around them, causing them to decohere. What’s important here, is that decoherence doesn’t collapse the wave function associated with the macroscopic object, meaning that some other type of “special” interaction must happen to the object to make its wave function to collapse. What is that “special” interaction? And what makes those interactions “special”?

With the release of Sandrone next patch, I wanted to get an idea of what post player were thinking of doing next patch. Are you pulling for Sandrone? Someone else? Or skipping? Why so?

View Poll

Now, before all the SpaceX fanboys (and girls) come after my throat I was say off the bat that this is my opinion so if you disagree, great, more power to you, just don’t go trying to rip my head off in the comments.

With that out of the way, on to the main meat of this post/discussion.

As I’ve stated in the title of this post, I’ve started to lost faith in SpaceX over the past few months.

To start off with, I should give my view of SpaceX previous to these recent updates. Overall, I had a pretty positive view of the company. Falcon 9 is an amazing rocket that is extremely reliable and is only now really starting to face competition from rockets that can match it. I also found it really impressive just how much SpaceX has been managing to launch in to space, with the cadence being far higher than anyone else. While it definitely felt less impressive once you factor in that the majority of those launches are for themselves, it still is impressive.

Where things take a turn for me however, are with Starship. Starship, is an undeniably ambitious rocket, and because of that, I have always expected there to be many failures along the way. It is for this reason that, I am not surprised nor upset by the large amount of failures Starship has faced (Though admittedly, the sheer number of them had made me worried wether SpaceX will be able to stay afloat while sustaining the money sink that is Starship).

What really gets me however, are the constant, blatantly unrealistic goals and promises that are made and broken by SpaceX about Starship. As a modern example, Block 3 has a promised payload capacity to Leo of 100+ tonnes. However, a few generous back of the envelope calculations I made show that the max payload is actually closer to 90 tonnes (For a full breakdown of the methods I used in my calculations, see the end of this post). Another example is Raptor 3. For some time now, Raptor 3 has been poised to be this “messiah” of a rocket engine that will end most of the reliability issue’s Starship has had. What happens on flight 12 though? A major Raptor 3 failure leading to the destruction of the booster. Now I want to clarify that I’m not upset that the Raptor 3 engine failed. Space flight is really hard so failure should be expected. What gets me is that SpaceX still made all these claims about Raptor 3 without being able to back them up.

Couple this with the stupidity that is the IPO, and these factors have lead me to loose faith in SpaceX. But these are just my thoughts, what about you guys?

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As promised earlier, here is my methodology for calculating the payload capacity for block 3:

Let’s start with the delta v (dv) requirements. Now based on a few google searches, the typical low end for dv to LEO is 9400 m/s. This is the dv that I will be using for the necessary block 2 calcs. Now for block 3, we have to account for the fact that block 3 accelerates quicker than block 2. Based on the work I’ve seen from others on the internet, block 3 accelerates ~10% faster than block 2. From this and an additional 1%-3% due to the earlier pitch-over, we can say that block 3 suffers 6%-8% less gravity losses compared to block 2. Now, assuming that gravity losses typically increase dv by 1000-1500 m/s, we can conclude that block 3 shaves off 120 m/s from the dv on the high end, making the block 3 dv 9280 m/s.

Now, I will define M* as the theoretical maximum payload a rocket can take to LEO assuming no losses and full expenditure of fuel. I will then define E* as the percent of M* that a rocket can actually achieve (keep in mind that this actually achieved payload is in a reusable configuration for both block 2 and 3 as those are the configs we have irl data on).

Now based on irl analysis, it seems that there is a general consensus that block 2’s maximum payload capacity irl was ~50 tonnes so to be generous, we will use 55 tonnes. Assuming this irl capacity of block 2, this gives block 2 an E* of ~35% when computing an M* of ~163 tonnes using the rocket equation.

Now when M* is computed for block 3, I get a value of ~228 tonnes. Now if we are generous and say that the block 3 upgrades somehow give an additional unaccounted for +5% bump to the E* compared to block 2, that gives a final computed Starship Block 3 payload capacity to LEO of ~91 tonnes, well off the 100+ tonne goal.

Hi, I’m currently an undergraduate at a well-known undergraduate university for aerospace engineering. As of right now, I am in finals week finishing up my freshman year. This past year, I’ve applied to ~100 internships (all in the space sector as that is my area of interest) and have either been rejected or didn’t hear back from any of them. This really worries me as I currently have ~2 yrs left of undergrad (with potential another 1-2 years of grad if I go for a masters) as I came in with a bunch of credits. And given the state of the aerospace job market, I’m worried that if I don’t land an internship over this next coming year, I won’t be able to land a full time position when I graduate. Because of this, I was hoping to get some advice on what I should do over this summer and my upcoming sophomore year to increase my chances of landing an internship.

For reference, I currently have a 3.6 GPA (projected to stay roughly the same after this semester) and am involved in a Liquid rocketry club and ASIC design club. Additionally, I have had a class with lots of projects where I created CAD Models, Assemblies, and Drawings. I also have a few minor personal projects that I have been working on as well.

Starship is a rocket that humans have never seen the likes of before. It promises rapid reusability, on the order of multiple launches per day (correct me if I’m wrong) for dirt cheap (relatively speaking).

With being said, however, I’m starting to become worried about the future of Starship. Now, let me be clear in stating I am not worried about whether or not Starship will become reality, because given enough time, it will. My worry is that Starship won’t be able to meet the projected specs Space X has projected quick enough.

I think it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that Starship is a very ambitious project. And with such ambition, comes a whole host of complexities and challenges, many of which Space X are still working on and, which from the looks of it, will take considerable time to solve.

Now, Space X has had a history of making very ambitious goals for itself and slowly scaling those back as time progresses to better match the technological progress that has been made. Because of this, I have begun to believe that a similar story is/will happen with Starship, that in due time, Space X will have to cut back on the scale of Starship to make it more feasible to complete in a reasonable timeframe.

With that in mind, you then have to consider the rest of the space industry. While Space X is still well ahead of its competitors, the gap has been slowly shrinking, especially when international competitors are considered. This then, in my mind, could pose a potential issue to Starship, because if Space X takes too long to develop Starship, then competitors could easily close the gap that Space X has and potentially create their own systems that can rival Starship.

So with all that said, what do you guys think? Do you guys think that Starship, as it currently is, will be a feasible rocket?