I apologize if this has been posted before,
But it knocked me out.
The increase in simplification.
I wonder if the thrust is the same?

I'd love to see an F1 in the picture for comparison.

Or something from an earlier era.

The internet is amazing...


The Raptor 3 engine is smaller than the Saturn V rocket, but it's more powerful and has a streamlined design:

Size
The Raptor 3 is about 10 ft high and 4.27 ft wide, while the Saturn V's F1 engines were 19 ft high and 12 ft wide.

Thrust
The Saturn V's five F1 engines generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust, while the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor 3 engines generate 19.5 million pounds of thrust.

Design
The Raptor 3's simplified design is the result of SpaceX applying lessons learned from previous versions of the engine.

Fuel
The Raptor engine is powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane, known as methalox.

History
The Saturn V was NASA's most powerful rocket, used in the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

Height
When stacked on top of each other, Starship and Super Heavy are 394 ft tall, which is 31 ft taller than the Saturn V.

Actually the V3 Raptor is claimed to produce 560,000 lb of thrust which is about one third of the 1,500,000 lb thrust produced by a single Rocketdyne F1 engine. To get the same total thrust that the Saturn IV made would require about 14 V3 Raptors.

The specific impulse (a measure of a rocket engine's efficiency) of the two engines in space is pretty similar but the Raptor is slightly better (Raptor V3: 350, F1: 304). Some of that difference is due to the use of methane vs kerosene for fuel.

When I saw the first pictures of the V3, I assumed they left off most of the control hardware but given that they've shown videos of that same engine in a static fire test I guess I was wrong and those pictures are of a complete, ready to fire engine.

The story is that they moved everything 'inside' by using 3D printing to manufacture, in addition it's all fuel cooled.

The story is that they moved everything 'inside' by using 3D printing to manufacture, in addition it's all fuel cooled.

It was enough to fool Tory Bruno who tweeted “They have done an excellent job making the assembly simpler and more producible. So, there is no need to exaggerate this by showing a partially assembled engine without controllers, fluid management, or TVC systems, then comparing it to fully assembled engines that do.”

Gwynne Shotwell replied with this image of the same engine firing on the test stand: https://x.com/gwynne_shotwell/status/18 ... vUBm_gIWjA

“Works pretty good for a “partially assembled” engine ”

OFT#6 target is Monday the 18th of November in the afternoon.
From the SpaceX update at X:

An inflight Ship relight.
Steeper ship reentry profile to make it more spicy...
Key tiles omitted to see how that goes
Daylight ship splashdown.
Various improvements
Booster catch.

Flight 7 will be the first of the New Ship with lots of changes.

Woof

Berger's been right more often than he's been wrong.

I don't have the solution but I do see the problem, SpaceX is producing a superior product, at a superior price, and they are doing it as fast as they possibly can

The primary things slowing them down are regulation and bureaucracy, while China and others try to copy their designs and approaches

Boeing and the other companies in this sector are not producing a superior design or superior product, instead they are using lobbying and other means to slow SpaceX down, and that isn't going to help us get ahead of China and the others in the world

This is one area of running fast/loose that I can get behind, the space race is 100% on

Those are also the things slowing NASA down. They still have great rocket engineers, if only management would let then engineer a new rocket instead of rehashing a 40 year old design over and over again.

Totally agree. Plus, modern technology reduces the risk presented by a fast/loose approach. In the 1960s there were things that simply couldn't be tested without a human, and we paid a dear price with Apollo 1 that sent us back to the drawing board. SpaceX has the ability to take the test/fail approach without risk to human life.

Eric Berger makes a good point in the Epilogue to his latest book “REENTRY”.

His hope that Elon keeps focused on SpaceX and not stray into other nonsense.

As it stands already if SLS were to be canned the chorus of claims that it was Elon’s political doing (as opposed to the actual technical beat down).

Spacerace is cool.

You don't have to "Cancel" SLS. Just take it's current (or revised upward) budget and tender that on the open market for a fixed-price contract to get to the moon.

Just watched today's launch.
Such an ambitious program
They're making it look easy.

I still can't believe the capturing of the first stage.
It reminds me of balancing a pencil on your fingertip.
Mind numbing.