Iteration
The process of continuously improving a concept, design, or product to make it better or bring it closer to a solution.
Welcome back to The Overview! It’s been an incredible week in aerospace, from SpaceX successfully catching a rocket booster with “chopsticks” to the Europa Clipper setting off on its mission to explore Jupiter’s moon. We’ve also got an exciting article for you this week, diving deep into commercial aircraft design.
🛫 Join Aurelien as he explores the question: What does it take to design a novel commercial aircraft for the 21st century? Dive into the complex trade-offs that balance safety, weight, and cost in commercial aircraft!
🚀 SpaceX catches Starship booster mid-air with massive “chopsticks,” a major step towards proving the full and rapid reusability of the Starship launch system.
🧊 The Europa Clipper embarks on a groundbreaking mission to explore one of Jupiter’s icy moons. This mission could reshape our understanding of this distant world and its potential to sustain life beneath its frozen surface.
🛫 Featured Technology
Commercial Aircraft Design: A Brief Introduction
Half a century after the first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, took flight, we now have more than 100,000 flights circling the planet daily. And yet, almost every commercial aircraft looks the same as when the Comet took to the skies in 1949. Why hasn’t aircraft design changed more dramatically?
The answer lies in the complexity of balancing weight, safety, and cost. The high safety and commercial risks lead to a very conservative design climate, where engineers rely principally on trusted historical trends and tools, small modifications to existing designs, and large safety margins. Every aspect of the system must inform the overall design, and a compromise that works for every discipline must be reached.
In this article, Aurelien Ghiglino offers a bird's-eye (or plane's-eye) view of aircraft design and points you to resources to start your journey. If you’re curious about how to create truly novel aircraft for the 21st century, this is the perfect place to begin.
To explore the intricacies of balancing design trade-offs and explore how commercial aircraft are designed, read the full article below:
🚀 Aerospace News
It’s been an absolutely jam-packed week for aerospace news (so much so that two major news points removed any other candidates for this section), so let’s jump right into it!
Starship Booster is Caught by the Launch Tower
Starship took off from Starbase, Texas, Sunday morning for its fifth integrated test flight, and boy, what a show it provided. SpaceX has been steadily iterating on the goals for each flight over the last year and a half, and flight 5 had a very ambitious step forward: recovering the booster. For this, the booster would have to return to the launch site and be caught by the launch tower where it launched from 6 minutes prior. The catching would be done by large mechanical arms called “chopsticks,” each over 20 meters long.
And that’s exactly what happened. On their very first attempt, SpaceX managed to perform a precision re-entry and landing of the booster, with the chopsticks catching the booster during the final phase of landing. This was the first time in human history that a rocket had landed back at a launch tower (the same one that it launched from)!
There’s a ton of incredible footage from this launch, some of which are shown in the video below.
Another significant accomplishment was that the upper stage, Starship, survived atmospheric re-entry and made its first pin-point landing in the Indian Ocean. Overall, this flight was a major step towards proving the full and rapid reusability of the Starship launch system, which is critical to getting us back on the Moon and Mars!
This was also a big win for one of The Overview’s authors, Anshuk, who spent his last two summers working on guidance and control for booster landing and catch :)
Europa Clipper is on its Way!
Europa Clipper launched on October 14th on board an expendable SpaceX Falcon Heavy and is now on its way to its final destination: Jupiter’s orbit! Its primary mission is to explore one of Jupiter’s most fascinating moons: Europa.
Jupiter has 95 moons, so what makes Europa interesting enough that we’re dedicating an entire 5-billion-dollar mission to it? Evidence shows that Europa has an enormous sub-surface ocean of liquid water below its icy surface and potentially at the right conditions for sustaining life. This would make it an extremely interesting place to explore. Europa Clipper will reach its destination around 2030 when it will do 49 orbital fly-bys of Europa and gather various scientific measurements from its nine science measurements. Clipper’s massive solar panels make it the largest interplanetary vehicle we have ever developed!
Europa is primarily operated and built as a joint effort between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, although its scientific instruments are from various other academic institutions. Europa has already deployed its solar panels and is settled in for the long journey to Jupiter, which it will reach by 2030. Some great info is available here.
💬 Quote of the Week
“Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.”
— Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design by Dr. David Akin
Thanks for reading The Overview—The Iteration edition. We hope you are inspired to keep iterating, whether it’s on your projects, ideas, or even your mindset and worldview.
We'd love to hear your voices—if you are interested in contributing, whether it’s sharing crazy stories, fun technical content, or cool experiences, apply to write using this form. As always, feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org with any feedback or requests for topics you’d like to see in the future!
Stellar vibes,
Aurelien, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac