[AR] Re: starship abort?
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2023 20:15:39 -0400 (EDT)
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
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