A month or so ago, Tim Dodd, the "Everyday Astronaut" on YouTube and the web, did a walk through of one of the buildings at Boca Chica with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The focus of this video was a look at the Raptor 2 engine and what makes them special.
It apparently took a lot of editing because the video was released
today. I'm guessing a lot of you haven't seen it yet.
This isn't a new thing. Last August, Dodd got to take a long tour of SpaceX Boca Chica, given a tour by Elon Musk, posting two hours and 21 minutes of video. Just a few weeks ago in May he posted another, shorter video, on updates to Starship and Starbase itself, and back on June 12, he posted a different video on the Raptor 1 engine.
There's a lot of rather interesting technical details in there. I'm by no means an expert on engines but I found it easy to understand and follow. There has been vast amounts of simplification of the Raptor 1 design, including getting rid of parts that many (like Dodd) would have considered impossible to get rid of.
Screen capture from the video. The engine with the red arrow pointed at it, saying "1" is a Raptor 1; everything else you see is a Raptor 2. Yes, the tag on the Raptor 1 says, Merry Christmas, a reference to it having so much stuff on it, it's like a Christmas Tree. The difference between #36, between Elon Musk and Tim Dodd, and the leftmost engine right behind Musk is that #36 has the hardware to be gimballed while the other doesn't.
In the video, Elon Musk describes the Raptor 1 as a crazy Christmas tree and one even has a painting of a snowman on it. “It’s not super easy to see but you can compare how much less there is if you just look at–just eyeball the fiddly bits level there versus the fiddly bits level there,” Elon Musk said as he pointed at the Raptors 1 and 2.
In the video, Musk reiterates his Five Laws of Engineering that they follow religiously in development of the Raptor 2, and that were in Dodd's first video. Definitely worth watching.
Amazing! Musk has advanced rocketry more in the last ten years than anybody since Goddard and Von Braun
ReplyDeleteWow, about 500,000 lbf from one of those and your article the other day had test values to 540,000 lbf. When you look at those, the size just does not imply that level of power. I will second drjim, Elon Musk and SpaceX have done more to advance rocketry since the early pioneers of rocketry. I wonder where it will be in 10 more years if SpaceX can continue.
ReplyDeleteI finally got time to watch the video. Enough technical "crumbs" to give a better understanding of where SpaceX is headed. The company has good leadership, a good approach to engineering and a defined path forward.
DeleteI do hope in my lifetime to see SpaceX make it to Mars despite the roadblocks that will be thrown in front of them which will mostly be non-technical (more likely "political").
Agree, definitely worth the time.
ReplyDeleteI have less an eye for the engineering challenges that they discuss, and find myself in awe of what Elon/SpaceX have accomplished.
And: How many CEOs are taking multi-hour interviews with social media fans? I suspect the answer is: the CEOs who actually know what is happening in their companies.
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ReplyDelete"The best part is NO part" is a logical extension of the KISS principle - he also said that you need to eliminate parts after designing, then add back the necessary minimum. If you aren't doing it that way it's unnecessarily complex...
ReplyDeleteGood ideas to live by!