captain_spalding said:

Spiny Norman said:

Just watching the Spacex latest flight.
The big booster was scheduled to attempt a catch by the tower at the end of the flight but something went wrong in the last minute or two and they diverted to simulate a tower catch but over the ocean not far from the beach.
But something I’ve not seen before was the booster itself imploded as the propellant tanks ran out. The pumps in the engines must be so good they sucked the atmosphere out of the interior.
The damaged rocket then fell into the ocean and was on fire for a few minutes but was floating quite well otherwise.

I looked it up.

Pumps on Space-X rockets work at between 30,000 and 40,000 revs per minute. The pumps on the Merlin engines boost pressure to over 1,400 psi.

Here’s a table of the flow rates per second through those pumps on Raptor and Merlin rocket engines:

To put the scale in perspective: a single Raptor moves roughly the mass of two adult elephants per second of propellant.

So, yeah, they suck hard.

Forget , that ‘two adult elephants’ stuff. My source was indulging in some exaggeration there.