Starship Launch live

[Skylarking]

kinda makes u think too with the saturn 5 engines only 5 of those made only a million or two less thrust then 33 raptors, saturn 5 were a beast, look them up and u will see a good flame diverter

With many more parts with 33 engines, you’d think reliability would be way less than having 5 bigger engines

Kinda makes me wonder which is the better approach… 5 Saturn rocket @ 7.6M pounds of force (with a huge bang if things go wrong) or starship rocket with 16.5M pounds (with the same sort of bang when things go wrong).

If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t it Musk that recovered the main stage Saturn rocket, the one that put people on the moon, from the ocean floor? Story goes that they couldn’t replicate the welding skills needed to make the rocket nozzle and thus build a huge metal 3d printer instead…

 

[Immortality]

I believe the raptors are a lot more efficient though. Everyday Astronaut did quite a good breakdown comparing each of the different rocket engines that have been used over the years.

 

[Skylarking]

Efficiency =/ reliability if modern car engines are any guide

Reliability has to be proportional to the number of parts that some widget comprises, all other things being equal

 

[Immortality]

Everyday Astronaut covers that too, he's done a few video's with Musk including one where they talk about the Raptor engine development and how they try to remove parts to improve reliability.

 

[Pollushon]

The Raptor is a full flow, a marvel of engineering and maybe only one of two or three successful attempts to use a full flow mainstream. Full flow is super efficient and requires less maintenance which is handy for reuse and feeding it less energy dense fuels like MethOx. As immortality said Everyday Astronaut has some great vids on this type of engine and comparisons to old

More smaller engines is a better way to go for reliability and cost, the F1 as amazing as it was had major risk associated to its use

 

[Immortality]

 

[07GTS]

been a while since i watched those vids but pretty sure the F1 engines never had any failure during use on rocket, think they done one test then next had people nothing like now days testing

 

[Immortality]

I believe they fixed the instability of the flame front/burn pattern early on in the development of the F1 but had issues with the 2nd stage for a bit.

 

[07GTS]

I believe they fixed the instability of the flame front/burn pattern early on in the development of the F1 but had issues with the 2nd stage for a bit.

yea talk about getting that injector plate correct crazy stuff

 

[Immortality]

SpaceX Starship rocket grounded after botched launch created 9km dust cloud

'Ash' and other debris rained down on nearby town where windows shattered.

www.stuff.co.nz