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SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

arstechnica.com

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Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why Canada would restrict international players from disrupting sectors like telecom (a commodity really) but didn't seem to have any problem with Airbus taking over the CSeries program for almost nothing.

OT, but: > but didn't seem to have any problem with Airbus taking over the CSeries program for almost nothing. This is actually a somewhat amusing to bring up in this context, because US protectionism is what made that happen. Boeing tried to kill off the C-Series by getting the US administration to impose 300% (sic!) import duties because ... it threatened US jobs. Airbus was targeting the program aggressively as we…

Bombardier already had a huge backlog of orders and the program was getting profitable. Since the tariffs were later ruled illegal, why not simply get the government support to weather the storm?

Could you imagine the French letting Dassault, Airbus or the US government letting Boeing fail?

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile here in Oakland, this is what Mathematics teaching looks like in schools [PDF]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... These people are actively undermining the American spirit - I am saying this as an immigrant to USA and a person of color. I am fine with understanding racism in USA, it is completely unacceptable to inject this into STEM education. The next generation is going to g…

I just skimmed through that document. Based on your description I was expecting a polemic. But actually about 90% of what they recommend looks like really good ways to improve math instruction. The big problem to me is that teaching math is hard, and teaching math well, as recommended in that booklet, is really hard. You can write all the pamphlets you want, but in the end the answer will be about the same - get real…

I suggest to read the open letter (signed by more than 600 professors and professionals including 2 Nobel laureates) before you make conclusions: https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13658

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#273

What's the scaling like for rocket engines? How much more efficiency (in various forms) could you get if you made 1 giant engine instead? (Disregarding reliability)

The short answer to your question is that larger engines have very few advantages and many disadvantages.

Specific impulse is the most obvious parameter of a rocket engine, but it's relatively less important for a first stage where thrust/weight is also a very important concern. Specific impulse depends on the chemistry, combustion cycle, combustion efficiency and nozzle design. There isn't any obvious reason why it would scale either way with engine size.

Thrust/weight is very important for engines on a first stage because of gravity losses. Imagine if the rocket sitting on the pad had a thrust/weight of just 1.1; that would mean that at liftoff 91% of the thrust would be wasted just countering gravity. You both want a high thrust/weight at liftoff and a small dry mass to give the second stage the most momentum possible at stage separation. High thrust also helps for reuse in making the burn time of the first stage shorter (for fixed specific impulse and propellant load), which means that at stage separation the first stage isn't too far downrange and is easier to return to the launch site.

Note that there's both the thrust/weight of the rocket as a whole, and of the engines themselves. The engines comprise a significant proportion of the first stage's weight, though, so looking at engine weight (and thrust to weight) is also useful. Consider the RS-25, Merlin 1D, and Raptor. Their specific impulses are 366s, 282s, and 330s (at sea level), so the RS-25 looks pretty good. But their thrust/weight ratios are roughly 60, 185, and 200 (target). The Merlin 1D was, I believe, the highest thrust-weight ratio liquid-fueled engine ever. This is one of the primary reasons, in addition to cost, it is considered so good, despite having such anemic specific impulse.

You can optimize thrust/weight several ways. Firstly, you can try to cram more thrust out of an engine of a fixed size. This is done by driving up chamber pressures as high as you can, which might be easier with a smaller engine due to square-cube scaling. Secondly, you can make the engine smaller, without changing its thrust, and try to cram as many of them in as possible. Consider thrust/area as another important metric -- for fixed rocket dimensions, being able to cram more engines into the base is an easy way to get more thrust and improve the total thrust/weight of the stack.

Another consideration, which has all too often been ignored in the rocketry business, is cost. More specifically $/thrust, if we're looking at a first stage. Here, smaller engines have a clear advantage in that your tooling doesn't need to be as large and expensive, and you're going to need more of them so you can start to leverage economies of scale rather than having each engine being an individual, artisan-produced artifact. That obviously has a limit -- there's a point at which more engines would make things more expensive, but judging from the thrust and cost of the Raptor, I would guess it's right around the optimal point.

Finally, it's worth noting that, all other considerations aside, going bigger in rocket engines tends to make the engineering more difficult. The square-cube law makes heat flux in the combustion chamber scale roughly linearly with engine size, which makes cooling more difficult. And the larger the combustion chamber, the more at risk it is of combustion instabilities. Look, for example, at the Russian RD-170 engine. It looks like four engines but is actually one engine with four combustion chambers. They did that because while it looks more complex, it actually makes things easier.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#274
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an annoying argument. The government gave $18B to the SLS and so far has vapor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this year at a fraction of the cost. NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal. I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians did a much be…

SpaceX has had very impressive successes, some government programs have failed or run over budget. Some government programs were also impressive, both in the US and abroad. I think we can all agree on those points. The point of the GP that I (and I think many others) react to is the "Only in America things like this can happen" part. I just don't get American exceptionalism I guess.

It's a "standing on shoulders of giants"-type figure of speech that American's use. Like, NASA is foundational to the accomplishments of SpaceX. Many countries on Earth do not have space programs at all. Our history with space as a nation is profound to our national identity whether we realize it or not.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#275
post #5
post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generati…

No, you’re wrong. Every little bit of friction counts. Funding, regulation and public support all contribute to the end result. It’s already super hard, the only way any progress has been made is because we rolled one in a trillion with an super genius who is immune to stress and is interested in space. The amount of stress, the relentless pressure of doing all this and doing it in the public eye and suffering the cosmic level of irony of being publicly maligned for it… it would crumple you. It would crumple ten of you.

If it were at all easy or probable then there would be other players in the space. There aren’t. If you contribute to the friction that opposes spacexs forward progress then you bear the responsibility for working against the things that you claim to love as a self proclaimed nerd.

There were people who put on demonstrations against wealthy people spending their money on being patrons for scientists and early biologists. It was very unpopular for rich people to sponsor nonsense, the collection of random fluids and samples. All of which is the basis for modern biology and medicine. So which side of history are you going to be on? The idiotic mob or the people making things better?

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#276

How so many educated, intelligent people seem to think that we (as a species, or even as Americans) are so resource-poor that “space exploration” and “improving the earth” yield an either/or decision absolutely mystifies me. You want to free up resources for either one? Start with global military spending and the financial sector. Both have their place and both have grown far beyond it.

Using these resources to improve chemical flamethrowers is sub-optimal. A dead end. Nuclear fusion is a more likely answer to spaceflight and Earth's clean energy problem. It likely should be the priority.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#277
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Only in America things like this can happen. > Semi-Conductor doubling every 18 months IIRC, the recent doublings have been happening in Taiwan. That's why people make such a big deal about TMSC. America (i.e. Intel) actually has some catching up to do.

EUV LLC. that their current nodes are based on was started in America through DARPA, DoE, and a US industry consortium. That's why we are still allowed to enforce export restrictions on EUV tech via ASML, even though it is European.

Maybe so, but Intel hasn't been able to make it work yet, unlike TMSC.

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines They kind of did invent full-flow engines though, which were an unattained holy grail of rocketry.

Just ... No. Read the history. At least read Wikipedia. "Staged combustion (Замкнутая схема) was first proposed by Alexey Isaev in 1949. The first staged combustion engine was the S1.5400 (11D33) used in the Soviet planetary rocket, designed by Melnikov, a former assistant to Isaev.[1] About the same time (1959), Nikolai Kuznetsov began work on the closed cycle engine NK-9 for Korolev's orbital ICBM, GR-1. Kuznetsov…

> The first flight test of a full-flow staged-combustion engine occurred on 25 July 2019 when SpaceX flew their Raptor methalox FFSC engine at their South Texas Launch Site.[8]

(Yes, there are others listed, but SpaceX was first to actually fly something.)

Re: SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night

#280
post #5
post #2

Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…

The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that. I'm as much into spaceships as the next nerd, but people need to get real. The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generati…

We can fix the Earth's ecology from the damage of the last century and expand into space at the same time - these are not mutually exclusive. There can be enough people and funding to do both. And even better - the technology developed from the latter can assist for the former.
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