The starship doesn’t use stainless steel anymore. Musk personally tore apart the “$3 myth”
Back then he said: rockets should use the same material as a bathroom sink—$3 per kilogram, ridiculously cheap. The global aerospace community basically knelt—aluminum-lithium alloy costs over a dozen times more, and composite materials are more than sixty times pricier; you just can’t get by with stainless steel.
But today, he flips it with one shot: Starship abandons commercial stainless steel and switches to a self-developed 30X alloy. “30X” is essentially still a 300-series austenitic stainless steel, but the nickel content is lowered, hardness is increased, and cold-rolled thin-wall performance is pushed even harder. After switching to V3: structural mass drops by 10%–15%, while the payload bay volume increases by 20%.
The worst is the followers. Blue Arrow Zhuque-3, Long March 10th Yi, and Tianlong-3 all bet everything on the 301 stainless steel route—the templates were copied. Now the person who set the exam has changed the question themselves; how is the one copying the homework supposed to survive? $SPCX
Back then he said: rockets should use the same material as a bathroom sink—$3 per kilogram, ridiculously cheap. The global aerospace community basically knelt—aluminum-lithium alloy costs over a dozen times more, and composite materials are more than sixty times pricier; you just can’t get by with stainless steel.
But today, he flips it with one shot: Starship abandons commercial stainless steel and switches to a self-developed 30X alloy. “30X” is essentially still a 300-series austenitic stainless steel, but the nickel content is lowered, hardness is increased, and cold-rolled thin-wall performance is pushed even harder. After switching to V3: structural mass drops by 10%–15%, while the payload bay volume increases by 20%.
The worst is the followers. Blue Arrow Zhuque-3, Long March 10th Yi, and Tianlong-3 all bet everything on the 301 stainless steel route—the templates were copied. Now the person who set the exam has changed the question themselves; how is the one copying the homework supposed to survive? $SPCX
