I always thought it looked cooler with the orange tank anyway
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Cooler with white, but heavier.
Cooler depends on the amount of sunlight available
The real question is why the default color is orange and not white or gray.
The polyurethane spray foam insulation is orange.
I'm too dumb for maths because I have dyscalculia, but i am always amazed by the engineering crowd on how they could improve efficiency by finding and tweaking just the little things.
Its simple rocket math. Every lb of weight must consume fuel.
Si.pky. 1 lb of weight needs 1 lb of fuel to escape orbit. But the fuel has weight also. So the effective fuel you need to lift the rocket and payload is exponential.
The harder stuff is orbital mechanics. Getting things into orbit is easy. Having thwm go where you want is the hard part.
The tyranny of the rocket equation. Generally, 1% of weight is payload, 85% is fuel.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/escaping-the-tyranny-of-the-rocket-equation/
Fun fact: Columbia, pictured with the white tank, was the heaviest shuttle and was not modified to have the airlock necessary to dock with the ISS because the performance losses compared to the other shuttles made it difficult to use for ISS operations.
High end bicycle equipment has weight specs in grams.
It's always hillarious to me to see boomers on expensive bikes that aim to save every gram while they could save 20kg on themselves.
But, why ? You drink a bit more water that day and it’s void.
It's a competition between brand. They're at the point where decrease a single gram is incredible task and are all racing to become the lightest weight and aero-est bicycle and get to claim that.
But what if you drank more water and you didn't have the weight savings?
Context hat
Back when NASA was flinging things into space for the first time, the tolerances that were even possible were extremely tight. Every pound mattered (every pound still matters, but because we have other things to do once we get to space nowadays, plus every pound is expensive).
600 pounds of white paint for the fuel tank was considered unnecessary, once the engineering team figured that it didn't actually protect the special foam covering of the fuel tank anyway. Thus the distinctive orange color!
For all the people in the world except the ones from Liberia, Myanmar and the United States, 600 freedom units = ~272 kg
Oh, I thought the pictures were backwards. The orange being the natural color and the white being paint is really critical information for it to make sense lol
Oh my eyes glossed over the word "paint". Thanks.