[AR] Re: thinking big once more
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:26:46 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 28 Sep 2016, John Dom wrote:
what/who convinced Elon that to go for 42 engines in stage 1 makes
sense? Reusable en plus! Could it be developing F1 size motors is beyond
the SpaceX budget or capability?
Or they just decided that it wasn't the best use of the money. They're
already clustering 27 for Falcon Heavy.
Will SpaceX go for Korolev's N-1 rocket, the disaster design?
There wasn't anything blatantly wrong with the N1 design. The mistake was
that the N1's first stage was never tested on the ground -- not once. The
Soviet lunar program did *not* have Apollo's national-crisis priority and
blank-check development budget, and Korolev decided he couldn't afford an
N1-sized test stand.
Instead of going for 40 H-1 (the Saturn 1B engine) the number required for
the 35000 kN Apollo thrust, NASA chose the hard way of developing F-1 of
which only 5 sufficed in the first stage.
It looked like the easy way, actually -- the F-1 was already well advanced
in development (or so it seemed), because it had been started years
earlier, on the expectation that bigger engines would be needed.
Had von Braun known the grief he was going to have with F-1 combustion
instability, quite possibly he *would* have decided to do the Saturn V
with 40 H-1s instead.
Henry
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