Poll

When will full-scale hot-fire testing of Raptor begin?

Component tests - 2017
3 (0.6%)
Component tests - 2018
21 (4.2%)
Integrated tests -  2017
19 (3.8%)
Integrated tests -  2018
237 (47%)
Integrated tests -  2019
181 (35.9%)
Raptor is not physically scaled up
33 (6.5%)
Never
10 (2%)

Total Members Voted: 504


Author Topic: SpaceX Raptor engine (Super Heavy/Starship Propulsion) - General Thread 1  (Read 869997 times)

Offline Navier–Stokes

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #560 on: 10/21/2017 09:08 pm »
This is proof that Raptor is way behind even ULA's AR-1 engine. They have to start power-pack tests again for the full scale engine at Stennis. Full Raptor development is going to take at least 2 years.

What I find typical is that: 33.6mln + 67.3 mln = 100.9mln development cost for 1MN raptor.
?what was the prometheus engine development going to cost?
I fail to see any evidence of which to draw such an extreme conclusion from.

Stennis was included in original contract as well as the modification. In fact, under the modification, McGregor has actually been added to the locations of performance.
Quote from: CR-203-17
The locations of performance are NASA Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Hawthorne, California; and Los Angeles Air Force Base, California.
Quote from: CR-008-16
Work will be performed at NASA Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Hawthorne, California; McGregor, Texas; and Los Angeles Air Force Base, California[.]

Offline John Alan

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #561 on: 10/21/2017 09:56 pm »
This is proof that Raptor is way behind even ULA's AR-1 engine. They have to start power-pack tests again for the full scale engine at Stennis. Full Raptor development is going to take at least 2 years.

What?... Proof it's behind?... No!...

The test unit fired 46+ times in the last year retired a LOT of unknowns for SpaceX and Tom Mueller on this engine architecture...
The design and layout of pumps and turbines is sound...
The method to light it off, control thrust, and shut down the engine is sound...
The stated run times over the last year indicates the cooling of key parts is not in question...
All at the 200 bar chamber pressures stated... already...

SO... it's thought they only need to physically scale it about 12% (chamber and throat)
And then work up to 250bar with 300bar as an end goal (and design for such)

Start over... Stennis... Full redesign... 2 years... HA!!!

This thing will be flying on a BFS "Grasshopper" test bed... BEFORE 2 years from now...  ;)
And that IS an upper stage of a rocket...  :)

On edit...
The USAF (and we the taxpayers providing the funds) are getting one heck of a return on investment in Raptor tech...
This is Tom Mueller (and his team) doing what they do best...
Designing the best value, lowest cost thing able to turn Methane and Oxygen into delta/v...
Low cost comes from using it over and over and over... reusability...
« Last Edit: 10/21/2017 10:11 pm by John Alan »

Offline oldAtlas_Eguy

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #562 on: 10/22/2017 03:10 am »
Something I was trying to read the tea leaves about and that is total spending that will have been done on Raptor thru April 2018 looks to be at >$300M. The $300M is ~$105M from the AF and $195M from SpaceX just during this contract duration from FY2016 thru April 2018. So my speculation is that Raptor development up to start of production will likely end up being ~$500M. This would include quite a bit of spending that had occurred prior to the AF contract. Probably easily $150M total spread over multiple years.

In all I would expect that a 380Klbf production prototype test article is in testing by April 2018. Once such a test article has successfully completed testing then production is not far off (as in months away not years). If production starts in 3Q2018 I would expect about 1 year later the first flight article production engines being delivered for qualification and acceptance testing. With assembly into a flight thrust structure occurring after 3Q2019. This then suggests a flight vehicle could be ready for its testing phase to begin in 2Q2020.

Offline Mike Jones

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #563 on: 10/22/2017 09:42 am »
How did you get to 105 M$ investment from US Air Force ? They only communicated on 33+40 M$ contracts to SpaceX. And only 66 M$ investment from SpaceX has been confirmed so far in the frame of this OTA with USAF. Do you have complementary information ? 

Offline oldAtlas_Eguy

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #564 on: 10/22/2017 03:30 pm »
How did you get to 105 M$ investment from US Air Force ? They only communicated on 33+40 M$ contracts to SpaceX. And only 66 M$ investment from SpaceX has been confirmed so far in the frame of this OTA with USAF. Do you have complementary information ?
The original AF commitment of the contract was $95M over a execution period covering 3 years. This option execution just made some modifications by adding McGregor and increasing the total by ~$8M by upping the amount on this option from $33M to $40.7M. Making the new total of AF funding increasing from the $95M to ~$105M I think the new value may really be closer to $103M.

So it is not really that much of an increase over what the AF already was planning to spend.

Offline vaporcobra

Wow, I poked a hornet's nest of dickishness on Twitter. Really disappointed at how consistently arrogant Blue's own purported engineers are, especially publicly so on Twitter.


In response to Jeff Foust's simple Raptor funding article, a BO propulsion engineer commented (utterly unsolicited, I might add)
"Or they can pay $0 for a more reliable engine that produces more thrust and already tested at full scale 🙃". An extraordinary statement that is really hard to rationally parse for an engine that has fired for no more than 3 seconds at half thrust and experienced at least one serious failure during testing.

Another BO employee chimed in, "How exactly is a subscale version of an engine "ages closer" to flight readiness than a full scale version of an engine?"

Me: "That 1MN Raptor has been tested for 100s nonstop and > 1200s total should be self-explanatory"
Me: "I would also be a fool to totally discount a company's CTO saying that it is "simple to scale the dev Raptor to 170 tons""

BO guy: "You'd also be a fool to just blindly believe everything that person says when they've proven to not do things when they say they will."
BO guy: "But since you admittedly have no tech expertise, sure just believe what others say. I have technical expertise and know it's not that simple"


It doesn't exactly take a genius to understand that Musk has a habit of understating the difficulty of doing relatively hard things, but both of these BO engineers were dead-set on a single 3s 50% thrust firing of a full-scale engine indicating that BE-4 was somehow closer to flight-readiness than subscale Raptor, with (probably multiple) successful ~100s hot-fires and more than 1200s total. It boggles the mind.

I really want to cheer on Blue Origin but s*** like this makes it rather difficult to support a company with such a seemingly arrogant culture. These are anecdotes, of course, I can only hope that they are representative of a tiny minority. But it's starting to feel like Jeff "Welcome to the club" Bezos managed to only hire clones of himself...



Edit: Someone requested links, and links you shall have! Some additional entertaining public quotes from BO employees below, too.

BO guy: "These are same people who thought it'd be simple to just strap on side boosters to falcon 9 and poof now we have falcon heavy. Not the case."

Me: "Ah yes, the ole FH strawman 😉 If we're that off topic, let's just wait until Blue has reached orbit NET '20 and take stock of the industry."

BO guy: "It's not a straw man. You used appeal to authority fallacy by saying "oh well CTO said this so it must be true." I used FH to disprove that."


Me (coulda had a little more tact but c'est la vie): "1200 seconds > 3 seconds."

BO guy: Lmk when they test full scale for 3 seconds lol

Me: Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled for BO and wish you guys the best of luck, but Raptor is ages closer to flight readiness.

BO guy: That's cool and all but my argument is BE-4 costs 0 taxpayer dollars. So I'm all for that.

Me: [The] USAF costs taxpayers $160b a year whether or not it includes rounding-error funding for RPS. Rockets are cool regardless of funding sources.


Me: "Blue's consistent arrogance is truly disappointing. The willingness to discount actual launch providers doesn't befit reasonable people."

Me: "It doesn't take a technical expert to understand that orbital rocketry provides more experience than sub-Mach 4 flight regimes

BO guy: "It's hilarious that you think Blue is the arrogant company"

"So I'll go on actually changing the future of spaceflight by working in the industry and you can go on "covering" stuff. Have a nice day."

Right in the journalism :'(


F i n .
« Last Edit: 10/25/2017 11:19 pm by vaporcobra »

Offline Peter.Colin

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #566 on: 10/22/2017 07:36 pm »
Wow, I poked a hornet's nest of dickishness on Twitter. Really disappointed at how consistently arrogant Blue's own purported engineers are, especially publicly so on Twitter.


In response to Jeff Foust's simple Raptor funding article (http://spacenews.com/air-force-adds-more-than-40-million-to-spacex-engine-contract/), a BO propulsion engineer commented, "Or they can pay $0 for a more reliable engine that produces more thrust and already tested at full scale 🙃". An extraordinary statement that is really hard to rationally parse for an engine that has fired for no more than 3 seconds at half thrust and experienced at least one serious failure during testing.

Another BO employee chimed in, "How exactly is a subscale version of an engine "ages closer" to flight readiness than a full scale version of an engine?"

Me: "That 1MN Raptor has been tested for 100s nonstop and > 1200s total should be self-explanatory"
Me: "I would also be a fool to totally discount a company's CTO saying that it is "simple to scale the dev Raptor to 170 tons""

BO guy: "You'd also be a fool to just blindly believe everything that person says when they've proven to not do things when they say they will."
BO guy: "But since you admittedly have no tech expertise, sure just believe what others say. I have technical expertise and know it's not that simple"


It doesn't exactly take a genius to understand that Musk has a habit of understating the difficulty of doing relatively hard things, but both of these BO engineers were dead-set on a single 3s 50% thrust firing of a full-scale engine indicating that BE-4 was somehow closer to flight-readiness than subscale Raptor, with (probably multiple) successful ~100s hot-fires and more than 1200s total. It boggles the mind.

I really want to cheer on Blue Origin but s*** like this makes it rather difficult to support a company with such a seemingly arrogant culture. These are anecdotes, of course, I can only hope that they are representative of a tiny minority. It's almost as if Jeff "Welcome to the club" Bezos managed to only hire clones of himself...

They have a bigger engine with more thrust to match their ego, it’s understandable.
What they seem to forget is that their 7 big engines have less thrust than 31 small engines.



Offline JamesH65

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #567 on: 10/22/2017 07:36 pm »
To me it just sounds like actual rocket engineers being cheesed off that they've been told what's what by armchair rocket engineers.


Offline vaporcobra

To me it just sounds like actual rocket engineers being cheesed off that they've been told what's what by armchair rocket engineers.

I fully agree that I am a complete non-expert in comparison to actual propulsion engineers, but that doesn't excuse the highly irrational and arrogant attitude towards Raptor. Even if scaling thrust by ~70% is far more difficult than SpaceX's RPS engineers believe it to be, almost completely discounting 1200 seconds of hot-fires, half a decade of Merlin 1D mass production, and orbital and vacuum rocketry experience fly directly counter to the ideals a functional and rational engineer/scientist ought to hold.

and FWIW, I did not start the discourse. The trash talking was begun unsolicited by a BO propulsion engineer.

« Last Edit: 10/22/2017 07:47 pm by vaporcobra »

Offline John Alan

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #569 on: 10/22/2017 09:11 pm »
Who do you think will post a 30+ second video to YouTube as proof of actual goal reached first?
(full design production thrust stated, for long enough to show it will not melt parts (engine rich exhaust) and/or RUD)

A) Blue Origin with a ULA Vulcan SL spec BE-4 firing at 2450 kN thrust for 30+ seconds...

B) SpaceX with a BFS/BFR SL spec Raptor firing at 1700 kN thrust for 30+ seconds...

Based on what I have seen to date and the leadership within and the culture of the two companies employees...
B is my guess... 

BUT... enough of that BO bashing... when will the first full scale chamber and throat Raptor be fired up?...
I'm thinking springtime... at the latest...  ;)
« Last Edit: 10/22/2017 09:14 pm by John Alan »

Offline ChaoticFlounder

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #570 on: 10/22/2017 09:20 pm »
To me it just sounds like actual rocket engineers being cheesed off that they've been told what's what by armchair rocket engineers.

I fully agree that I am a complete non-expert in comparison to actual propulsion engineers, but that doesn't excuse the highly irrational and arrogant attitude towards Raptor. Even if scaling thrust by ~70% is far more difficult than SpaceX's RPS engineers believe it to be, almost completely discounting 1200 seconds of hot-fires, half a decade of Merlin 1D mass production, and orbital and vacuum rocketry experience fly directly counter to the ideals a functional and rational engineer/scientist ought to hold.

and FWIW, I did not start the discourse. The trash talking was begun unsolicited by a BO propulsion engineer.

I don't know if you really understand what he's saying:

What he's saying is that the Blue Origin engine is full size ... Combustion Chamber, injectors, preburner injectors, pumps, everything is full size, that requires no drawing changes (in theory) when they go to flight, full thrust SHOULD be as easy as opening up the fuel valve to the preburner to let the turbopump spin faster... i don't know if this is what they're using to alter pump speed (inevitably engine power level) or not... whether this happens or not is yet to be seen

SpaceX's Raptor is: what, help me out here ... 80% geometrically the size of the flight engine size, this means new part numbers for the combustion chamber, injector, preburner(s) injectors, pumps, if i'm understanding what Elon has said correctly, everything has to be geometrically scaled up to reach flight engine size, that is not a small task, also, dynamic similitude in fluid mechanics doesn't mean you multiply or divide everything by 0.80 ...

^ my $0.02

C



Offline Robotbeat

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #571 on: 10/22/2017 09:29 pm »
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.
« Last Edit: 10/22/2017 09:30 pm by Robotbeat »
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline jpo234

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #572 on: 10/22/2017 09:38 pm »
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/921106486272675840
You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. That's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and believing the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than being out there among the stars.

Offline whatever11235

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #573 on: 10/22/2017 09:45 pm »
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.

Space or orbit? ;D

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #574 on: 10/22/2017 09:46 pm »
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/921106486272675840
That's okay. He doesn't actually follow SpaceX very closely.

Also, I worded what I said very particularly.

But there's a pretty decent probability that one of those 4 will beat it. But I doubt more than 1.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline Torbjorn Larsson, OM

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #575 on: 10/22/2017 10:19 pm »
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/921106486272675840

Berger is trying to compare apples and pears by pointing at citrus (stress issues in multi-body launchers).

Between SX and BO, the former has launched multi-engine, multi-stage rockets to LEO. And while SX has developed almost all the key elements for BFR/BFS into LEO [excluding the refuel maneuver for other uses] in some form or other, BO has done little. Maybe BO can compete with SLS ME2, maybe they will all be close when the combusted fuel hit the launch pad, maybe they will spread over many years, maybe some will fail. But Berger is out on a fishing expediting for bad analysis.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #576 on: 10/22/2017 10:20 pm »
I think Blue will be able to compete eventually. I just think SpaceX is ahead with BFR.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline oldAtlas_Eguy

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #577 on: 10/22/2017 11:07 pm »
I think Blue will be able to compete eventually. I just think SpaceX is ahead with BFR.
Wandering somewhat OT. But anyway, if BFR was just a much much larger version of F9 then I would agree that BFR would be ahead and would get top flight first. But BFR is much more complex with more testing gates to successfully pass than what NG has to.

As far as engines go they are both from the standpoint of going into "production" in the near future about even. With both Raptor an BE-4 both likely starting production of flight units around mid 2018.

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #578 on: 10/22/2017 11:18 pm »
I'd say SpaceX is a year ahead with Raptor and is generally faster at executing anyway.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Offline spacenut

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Re: ITS Propulsion – The evolution of the SpaceX Raptor engine
« Reply #579 on: 10/22/2017 11:41 pm »
The BFR would be similar the F9 booster.  It is the BFS that is going to take time.  They may have the booster ready 2 years before the BFS.  It could launch 4 F9 upper stages in a cluster for second stage or stages going to different orbits.  Probably wouldn't be worth it, but, they could build a big expendable upper stage to get some things launched before BFS is ready. 

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