Elon Musk’s Mars rocket gets radical fin redesign to prevent flight failures

Interesting Engineering ^ | August 15, 2025 | Mrigakshi Dixit

[Sacajaweau]

With Optimus onboard...How cool...

Wait till he finds out he's the cook, the dishwasher, the maid etc etc

[Bobbyvotes]

All this expense to collect few martian rocks 😂
There is no air to breathe on mars, temps are extremely hostile to humans, and no water to grow crops.

The money will be much better spent on making planet earth a better place.

[ptsal]

Bkmk

[Red Badger]

Optimus, Open the Starship airlock hatch ....

“I’m, sorry I can’t do that, Elon.”...................

[Carry_Okie]

I needed a better picture to visualize this. This is an image of wind tunnel testing at NASA Ames. That's one hell of a moment load against the structure.

[Red Badger]

It’s what humans do.

Ever since we left the savannas of Africa.....................

[butlerweave]

and I believe the soil is toxic

[Carry_Okie]

The money will be much better spent on making planet earth a better place.

Think of it as a mitigation. If the earth took a hit from a serious comet, what would happen to humanity? Learning to populate and possibly eventually "terraform" Mars is one heck of a project. If Musk wants to spend his money that way, who's to argue? We all learn a lot along the way.

[TexasGator]

“All this expense to collect few martian rocks”

You have no idea ...

[GingisK]

What is the driving idea between using a large number of small engines over a small number of large engines? Wouldn’t that increase the statistical number of failure points?

[Zathras]

Thanks!
I couldn’t figure out what they were referring to.

[simpson96]

re: the headline - I’m sure a DEI hire would’ve thought of that...

*eyeroll*

[Red Badger]

Yes, but smaller and less likely catastrophic failures...............

[GingisK]

The money will be much better spent on making planet earth a better place.

The money spent DOES make earth a better place. The money goes to scientists, engineers, suppliers, manufacturing companies, and so on. In the process of preparing for space, new materials, processes, techniques, and so on are developed and made available for mundane things.

[Jonty30]

Mars cannot be terraformed. It’s too small to hold an atmosphere. Even if we collected the entire asteroid belt and dragged Pluto to Mars, we would only increase its mass by about 5%, which is still too small.

The best we will be able to do is domed cities.

Venus is a better candidate, if we can figure out how to relieve the greenhouse effect.

[GingisK]

The vanes on those airfoils are startling.

[Red Badger]

My first thought was ‘feathers’ or ‘scales’......................

[GingisK]

That makes sense. It results in a smaller loss of thrust.

[Bob434]

This is all I can think of when envisioning living on mars