Is RD-170 one or four engines? Is RD-180 one or two?
Both systems fed all separate TCA's from a single common closed cycle
turbopump.
Ken
On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 5:23 PM George Herbert <george.herbert@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
You start to consider whether pump packs with multiple chambers make more
sense in some of these scenarios, both because of better length for
packaging the engines compartment and because unless ignition is a problem
smaller chambers are generally pretty reliable and more instability proof
and easier to manufacture. Turbopump sets may scale differently.
Is RD-170 one or four engines? Is RD-180 one or two?
-george
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 20, 2023, at 5:16 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
Musk's Starship. Detonation altitude anybody?
On Fri, 21 Apr 2023, John Dom wrote:
N1 had too many relatively tiny engines bundled imo and maybe so has
count correctly, and all successful.Consider a 747 upgrade with 20 engines, go figure :-(.
How about a Falcon Heavy with 27? Five flights so far, if I've kept
they're reliable engines. It looks like SpaceX hasn't got all the bugs out
There's nothing particularly wrong with using big engine clusters, if
of the Raptors yet, and one might suspect that they haven't done enough
testing of their big clusters.
tests -- none, zero -- because Korolev had wanted to avoid the costs and
That last was the N1's problem: the full first stage had *no* ground
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.
hypothetical "F-5" engine, equal to about five F-1s. No serious work was
What about designing/building a bigger "F6"= 6*F1 engine ?
A number of the 1960s proposals for "post-Saturn" launchers used the
ever done on it, though, and combustion stability might have been a major
problem (like the F-1, but worse).
Henry