Oh yeah, the Nova rocket was to have 8 F-1 engines and ultimately have 260"
solid strap on motors.
Then there's Sea Dragon, brain child of my mentor Bib Truax which was to
have a single chamber
LOx/Kerosene of 80 million Lbs thrust and launched from the ocean.
If interested see the web site - neverworld.net, for info on that.
They thought big back then. Artemis is barely larger thrust wise than
Saturn but with less to LEO because of the dirty low performing solids
which make up most of the Total Impulse of the vehicle.
Ken
On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 6:35 PM John Dom <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I overlooked Falcon heavy has 27 Raptors.
Your mention there was ever considered an F5 concept in the 60ies
surprised me. Yes there were so many gargantuan rockets considered only to
be found in magazines now brown & falling apart.
John
F5s could maybe have made the shuttle unnecessary to build the ISS and an
early moon base.
John
Verzonden vanuit Proximus Mail
Van: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Verzonden: 21 april 2023 02:15:39 CEST
Aan: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Onderwerp: [AR] Re: starship abort?
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