Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
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Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
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Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#2TL;DR; - You get more fault-tolerance with a large number of smaller engines
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#3It makes sense from a reliability perspective to have more smaller semi-redundant parts, especially since it sounds like they have the whole control system down, "scaling up" from managing and controlling 3 engines probably isn't all that different from managing 9, and eventually 31. (obviously this is still rocket science, and nothing is "easy")
I'm curious if there are other benefits. I'd imagine that manufacturing the smaller engines gets easier and faster and more reliable as they make more of them.
Also, I wonder if this plays into their reusability? If there is a defect found in one of the 9 F9 engines, theoretically you could replace just that one and refly the rest. I have no idea if this is even possible, but it seems like it could be.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#4It all depends on how an engine fails. A failure to provide thrust is survivable with more engines. But a vulnerability that causes a fuel line to go boom, taking out the whole rocket, is made more likely by having more engines.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#5TL;DR; - You get more fault-tolerance with a large number of smaller engines
Interestingly, the Soviet Н1 Moon-bound rocket [1] used a similar setup, and it was plagued be reliability problems: making many smaller parts work reliably at the same time is harder for obvious reasons.
Either reliability of engines went seriously up, or software control (impossible in early 1960s) made it possible to operate a bunch of less-than-ideal engines successfully.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#6Can we have less spacex here please? Thank you.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#7It all depends on how an engine fails. A failure to provide thrust is survivable with more engines. But a vulnerability that causes a fuel line to go boom, taking out the whole rocket, is made more likely by having more engines.
IIRC, the engines in the Falcon 9 are pretty well separated from each other, such that even a catastrophic failure of one engine is survivable by the rest. Indeed, that seems to be what happened the one time an engine did fail (albeit on a very early version of the Falcon 9 with the "square" engine layout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvTIh96otDw
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#8>For computers, Musk said, using large numbers of small computers ends up being a more efficient, smarter, and faster approach than using a few larger, more powerful computers.
I always figured, in theory, a super-super-powerful single threaded single processor would out compete the multi-threaded multi processor design on efficiency, because of the hardware and software inefficiencies in inter processor hardware connections and communication. In practice, I suppose there is always a physical limit on the total capacity of low latency addressable ram and storage you can manage to shove into an architecture.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#9Can we have less spacex here please? Thank you.
Be a big boy and click the downvote/hide buttons instead of hoping the universe adapts to you.
Re: Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines
#10TL;DR; - You get more fault-tolerance with a large number of smaller engines
Interestingly, the Soviet Н1 Moon-bound rocket [1] used a similar setup, and it was plagued be reliability problems: making many smaller parts work reliably at the same time is harder for obvious reasons. Either reliability of engines went seriously up, or software control (impossible in early 1960s) made it possible to operate a bunch of less-than-ideal engines successfully. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(ro…
so...you didnt bother to even glance at the article but you still invested the time to write this post... people are confusing.