Elon Musk founded SpaceX in order to achieve his dream of establishing a colony for humanity
to live on Mars.
To do so, a spacecraft must successfully transport humans to the red planet without casualty.
He felt the starship would be a dependable way of transporting many persons in a hundred
to Mars.
Therefore, he began establishing various engineering factories and technology to construct the
starship.
But something about the starship that operates more than we could lay our thoughts on is
the super heavy booster.
The booster has been designed to be able to transport itself, stacked with starship on
top, and couple with a hundred persons across the earth’s thick atmosphere.
Now the gist is - this booster is designed with a typical engineering concept that you
may not know of, especially how 33 see level-optimized raptor engine is installed beneath it, and
the powerful thrust emitted from these raptor engines.
We are going to find out all these in this video.
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If we check through history of rocket launches, no rocket has ever been recorded to be fired
by 33 engines, and neither Roscosmos nor NASA has been able to create such a rocket.
The starship is the sole hope for SpaceX, and Elon to win the honors and accolades that
the world will bestow upon him.
If it successfully travels to the moon and returns safely, the world will award Elon
Musk and officially celebrate him.
Though Times magazine has given Musk the person of the year; According to Time;
“Bezos was the choice in 1999 when Se-commerce was just beginning to take off.
Zuckerberg was selected in 2010, well before it was clear what Facebook’s full effect
on society and democracy would be.
We don’t yet know how fully Tesla, SpaceX and the ventures Musk has yet to think up
will change our lives.
At 50, Elon Musk has plenty of time to write the future, his own and ours.
Like it or not, we are now in Musk’s world”
"Elon Musk is TIME's 2021 Person of the Year for solving an incredible problem, symbolizing
the potential and hazards of the age of digital giants, and driving society's most ambitious
and disruptive innovations."
On December 13th, 2021, the Times News released these statements on its News trend.
Time praised Elon for the improvements he made to the space system, but a beastlike
vessel that transformed rocket innovation, and space launch theory, as well as SpaceX's
rocket inventory, is none other than the super heavy boaster.
It stands 160 feet tall and is powered by 33 engines.
Other rockets launched into orbit use a maximum of 3 to 4 engines, not to mention the more
than 30 raptor engines installed under each super heavy, which dramatically transformed
the first stage starship or super heavy into a monster.
It's as if SpaceX printed it from other universe, with distinct technological concepts.
Or you may argue it's from an alien planet.
We can't really tell anyways.
The engine of the super heavy generally referred to as the raptor engine, uses what’s known
as a full-flow staged combustion engine.
Wait a minute, sometimes you might not have an idea of what this type of engine means,
but here’s an explanation;
A full-flow staged combustion engine is a twin-shaft staged combustion cycle, with oxidizer-rich
and fuel-rich preburners.
The term comes from the fact that the cycle permits complete passage of both propellants
through the turbines.
It often refers to how a pump spins a turbine to drive the engine, with a preburner injecting
a tiny quantity of fuel to start the process.
In a standard open cycle engine, some propellant is spent to start this process, but Raptor
will utilize every drop of propellant available, making it one of the most efficient rocket
engines ever built.
"Raptor burns that fuel at a high enough pressure, which it would guide the fire from the preburner
back into the combustion chamber, and totally burn that propellant with the rest of the
propellants," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology space specialist Charlie Garcia.
"And it does it in a really clever way that only the Russians have done before... by feeding
all of the propellant into the engine through the preburners."
He added.
Now, you know what full-flow staged combustion engine is, lets move on to more important
discussions;
The raptor engine is just the third in history to use this method, while Merlin employs the
more common open cycle system.
Other engines that attempted to employ the full flow approach include one in the Soviet
Union during the 1960s, and another in the United States in the early 2000s, although
this one did not make it through the testing stage.
As a result, Raptor has almost three times the pressure of Merlin, making it the highest
pressure rocket engine in existence and leading in the aforementioned superior thrust than
Merlin despite its identical size.
Musk said in 2016 that the raptor engine's main chamber has an incredible chamber of
approximately 300 bars, which necessitates the creation of a new metal alloy.
Previously, most rocket engines depended on fuels such as kerosene instead of methane.
The fundamental advantage of employing methane is that, it performs better than other fuels,
allowing the rocket to be more cost effective on every launch.
Of course, the usage of methane, which harkens back to SpaceX's ultimate aim, is Raptor's
second key advance over its predecessor.
SpaceX isn't the only corporation going to methane; Blue Origin, lead by Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos, is also constructing its own methane engine, known as the Blue Engine 4 or B-E
4 engine, although its chamber pressure is far lesser than that of spacex, which is 134
bar.
The second stage starship vehicle is planned to fly with six Raptor engines, in addition
to 35 on the Super Heavy rocket — a total of 41 per launch.
The Falcon Heavy, SpaceX's largest rocket to date, is powered by 28 Merlin engines (27
on the bottom and one on the upper stage).
During Dodd’s tour at spacex starbase, he pointed out that, since they’re using so
many raptor engines, "they're going to have to scale up manufacture to an absolutely incredible
pace."
"Elon has mentioned creating one in 12 hours, which would be unprecedented in the business."
Even if one is being made every week, that's rather outstanding."
Then Musk confirms that SpaceX is considering ways to construct one raptor engine in 24
hours, but for the time being, they're just producing one each week, which is rather possible
and outstanding.
This is critical to SpaceX's ambition of making regular journeys to and from Mars with Starship,
which will allow it to be nearly self-sufficient in terms of fuel.
"This has been humanity's golden grail of Solar System entry," Garcia adds.
"Because when you can refuel in orbit, your propellant no longer has to originate from
Earth."
Along with these extravagant promises, Raptor represents a major shift in SpaceX's objectives
from modest Earth-based missions to, Solar System exploration.
The latest Starhopper test was an important advancement, and if Raptor even lives up to
some of its promises, the future might be very bright indeed.
Raptor will play a vital role if SpaceX is successful in reaching Mars.
Furthermore, Starship has a massive edge over other rocket's lift-off development, including
NASA's long-delayed Space Launch System, and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.
The upper part of the rocket is planned to be refueled around the Earth's orbit by other
Starships, allowing it to devote more of its lifting capacity to scientific instruments
rather than fuel.
Getting humans to the moon, for instance, may need eight different launches, with each
successive "tanker Starship" delivering fuel to the "lunar Starship," which then travels
to the moon with research equipment and crew.
Musk has estimated that SpaceX might launch up to a dozen Starship test flights in 2022,
with missions to the moon and Mars on the horizon, as well as lots of research potential.
That is, if the FAA finally concludes their everlasting environmental investigations,
and grand spacex to lift off at any time they want.
At this point, the general belief among close observers of SpaceX's Starship program is
that, the extraordinary amount of time it took the company to complete Booster 4's initial
test, was due to the orbital launch location required to completely test it, rather than
the rocket itself.
To put it differently, SpaceX must be confident enough in the quality of the first few Super
Heavies leaving its Starbase factory that, it deems unnecessary to test.
The structural integrity of the first truly completed Super Heavy booster before putting
the one and only orbital Starship launch site, directly in the line of fire.
Regardless, based on how far Super Heavy Booster 4's first cryogenic proof test progressed,
SpaceX's assumptions appear to have been right.
SpaceX may also do extensive study on the recent raptor 2 engine, and by mid-2022, we
may learn that SpaceX has finally launched something better than the Raptor 2 engine.
What other rocket engines do you think are exactly equivalent to the SpaceX Raptor engine?
Please do well to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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