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Ken Bowersox, sporting the STS-73 shirt he wore while on the ISS…
and reflecting on the beauty of a shiny SpaceX Merlin 1c engine this afternoon.
16 responses to “The Merlin”
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B&C – This is a large, professional rocket engine. It has enough oomph to put a spacecraft into orbit (if you feed it enough fuel and oxydizer!).
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Must be so exciting to be a part of this private sector move into space. I think we will see much more rapid advancment over the next 50 years. The wheels in government tend to turn slowly (if at all)! Also, I must say that this looks like it could make a wicked cappuccino!
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bling!
DAD – funny coincidence – in the new employee orientation video we watched yesterday, this guy proceeds to make a cappuccino machine blow up!
Jhagerty is right. This is the engine take took the Falcon 1 to orbit with a commercial satellite, and 9 of the same engines boosted the Falcon 9 into orbit… and 27 for the Falcon 9 Heavy… You’ll notice a pattern. The Merlin 2 engine will be 3x the size, so you can configure those rockets later with 1/3 the engines, but still maintain an engine-out safety margin on the larger rockets.
That’s part of the design – to get cost economies across scales through modular components.
P.S. I just had a flashback to the triplicate design in Rendezvous with Rama, the Arthur C Clarke book that ends with "The Ramans do everything in threes."
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Quite an advance over the original Merlin which reached a kind of performance/efficiency peak in the V-1650 model built by Packard (developed under license from Rolls-Royce) and one of the first ever to attain a 1/1/1 ratio of cu-in/lbs/hp
1600 cubic inch displacement
1600 lbs weight
1600 horsepowerAny idea what the lbs/hp ratio is on this descendant?
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Not quite so cool as a NERVA or a DUMBO engine, but still–flight-proven hardware has great merit. May SpaceX continue its good work!
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jitze: love the 1/1/1 stat…had never heard that before…Big fan of Merlin V12s… especially in the P51d
re: lbs/hp… deriving HP from thrust is tricky…but at "cruise power" in jet engines its about a 1:1 ratio (e.g., 1 lb of sustained thrust at cruising speed requires 1 shaft horsepower). You can get this by comparing marine turbine engine HP stats to their air transport brethren (e.g., latest GE 747 engines are used in both planes and Military cruisers and you can compare the numbers…which I have…and they are ~1:1).
SpaceX Merlin puts out between 125,000 (sea level) and 134,400 (vacuum) lbs of thrust = ~ 125,000 (556 kN) to 134,000 (616 kN) horse power equivalent…or about 2 to 3 times as much thrust as a modern 747 engine (newest GEnx expected to produce thrust from 53,000 to 75,000 lbf or 240 to 330 kN)…but the SpaceX rocket motor weighs only 1300 lbs (or so)…Published thrust to weight ratio is a whopping 96…Pretty much blows away (no pun intended) anything that reciprocates or spins.
For fun:
Old fashioned RR Merlin V12
http://hooniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Rolls-Royce-Merlin.jpg
Super cool "Merlin Power" sticker from champion P51 Reno Air Race Team Strega
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@sbove: Many thanks for the thrust info – that explained and scratched my itch nicely… I had to fix the first url you provided, it had an embedded space in it. Here it is corrected
hooniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Rolls-Royce-Mer…
Same sort of problem in the second URL – but there’s something more amiss that I couldn’t seem to fix in that one
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ltze: 2nd url is fine…its Flickr’s wacky embedded url tagging system…it adds stuff after you post (e.g., "rel’"nofollow") etc. probably aimed at thwarting spammers/bots/crawlers that is screwing up something when it is clicked…If you want an RR Merlin Power sticker go to the Strega.com site, go to the store and look under "other strega stuff"…They’re way cool, but pricey at $10.
SpaceX should make a "Merlin Power" sticker variant!
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The new employee orientation video was hilarious! Is there any way to get a copy of it?
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I have some cool Apollo era and space shuttle era items for sale that I bought at the charles Bell aerospace auction 20 years ago Steve Jurvetson email me for photos: vcvdc@msn.com
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