One thing I noticed from the videos, is that a number of 1st stage
engines didn't light. Could that have something to do with the failure?
On 21/04/2023 10:15, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Fri, 21 Apr 2023, John Dom wrote:
N1 had too many relatively tiny engines bundled imo and maybe so has Musk's Starship. Detonation altitude anybody?
Consider a 747 upgrade with 20 engines, go figure :-(.
How about a Falcon Heavy with 27? Five flights so far, if I've kept count correctly, and all successful.
There's nothing particularly wrong with using big engine clusters, if they're reliable engines. It looks like SpaceX hasn't got all the bugs out of the Raptors yet, and one might suspect that they haven't done enough testing of their big clusters.
That last was the N1's problem: the full first stage had *no* ground tests -- none, zero -- because Korolev had wanted to avoid the costs and bureaucratic complications of building a big new test stand for it. (The Soviet lunar program was *not* a mirror-image of Apollo, and never had Apollo's blank-check budget or national-crisis priority.) Unless I've missed something, SpaceX has done only one or two full first-stage firings, which is better than none but hardly a systematic test effort.
What about designing/building a bigger "F6"= 6*F1 engine ?
A number of the 1960s proposals for "post-Saturn" launchers used the hypothetical "F-5" engine, equal to about five F-1s. No serious work was ever done on it, though, and combustion stability might have been a major problem (like the F-1, but worse).
Henry