Ian said:
this was a baby-step along the long road to conducting orbital and interplanetary flights
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I reckon Elon can do it on one leg.
> “tethered hop”
Tethered rocket, shudder, rather you than me mate.
> Not only was the test successful, it set a new record for combustion chamber pressure.
Nice.
> During this test, the propellants were kept at temperatures just low enough for them to remain in a liquid state. Musk has indicated that when the propellant is kept at cryogenic temperatures, it will boost efficiency.
Well, duh.
> 31 Raptor engines
Again, rather you than me, mate. Unless one is kept as a backup in case one of the other 30 fail.
I’m not sure whether anyone (me, for instance) has solved the problem of the most efficient packing of 31 circles.
“Raptor is a staged combustion, methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX. The engines are powered by cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than the RP-1 kerosene and LOX used in all previous SpaceX Falcon rockets which use or used Merlin 1A, 1C, & 1D and Kestrel engines. The earliest concepts for Raptor considered liquid hydrogen as fuel rather than methane. The Raptor engine will have about two times the thrust of the Merlin 1D engine that powers the current Falcon 9 launch vehicle.”
> “highly reusable”
In what sense? Reusable as in restartable many times = good. Reusable as in shuttle = bad.
> “staged-combustion”
They keep saying that, but what do they mean by it? “Full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) is a twin-shaft staged combustion cycle that uses both oxidizer-rich and fuel-rich preburners.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full-flow_staged_combustion_cycle
