29 Raptor engines in the first stage booster? Who designed this thing, the Soviets?
29 Raptor engines in the first stage booster?
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Sort of like the Tesla with thousands of AA batteries.
I have a bad feeling about this. Last year I learned that in the late 1960s the Russians built a rocket powerful enough to send men to the moon, by clustering together 32 smaller rockets. It was called the N1. They couldn’t get the smaller rockets to work together, so in all four of the test flights, the N1 either blew up, or fell back to earth. Can Elon Musk do better?
Yes...Musk borrowed heavily from existing Russian rocket engine designs.
Here's a recent interview (and tour) Musk gave where he talks about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw&t=428s