4 ms·
I am not a rocket scientist, but one of the main reasons it is so unique is that it will be the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engines to successfully
by njarboe 6y ago
I am not a rocket scientist, but one of the main reasons it is so unique is that it will be the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engines to successfully be used on rockets.
Rocket engines have powerful turbo pumps to move large amounts of fuel quickly to the combustion chamber to create thrust. Usually these pumps are powered by burning some of the propellant in a turbine and exhausting the resulting gas on the side of the engine. A full-flow engine mixes this turbo pump exhaust gas back into the main combustion chamber. This makes the engine more fuel efficient but it is a difficult engineering problem. All previous types of these engines blew up too often to be used on spacecraft. Check out the Wikipedia page for more info [1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor
- xcskier56 6y agoTo add on, one of the biggest challenges with a full flow staged combustion engine is that the exhaust gas from the oxidizer rich turbopump is almost pure gaseous oxygen at very very high temperature. This combination likes to corrode and eat away any thing, metal included. To solve this, SpaceX had to develop special metal alloys that could withstand this incredibly corrosive environment for long durations.