What's The Genius Trick Behind SpaceX's Merlin Engine?

I explain what makes SpaceX's Falcon 9 Merlin engine so special!

#SpaceX #starship #elonmusk #starbase

Editing: John Young, Alex Potvin, Stefanie Schlang
Photography: Jordan Guidry, John Cargile, John Winkopp & Stefanie Schlang
3D Animation: Voop3D
Script & Research: Nathan, Soren, Oskar Wrobel, Felix Schlang
LIVE Production: Jonathan Heuer, Jordan Guidry
Host: Felix Schlang
Production: Stefanie & Felix Schlang
Graphics & Media Processing: Jonathan Heuer, Felix Schlang

Credit:

⭐SpaceX
⭐NASA
⭐VirtualSpace_3D on X: @Lolomatico3d
⭐The Ring Watchers on X: @RingWatchers
📄Links for this Episode:

[Zengotim]

Well, to be fair the Merlin engine has to do one thing no other engine currently does regularly: be used a second, third, fourth, etc time.

[zugzug]

Thats like saying a car that you can drive 1 time is better than a car you can drive many times.

[TamagoHead]

Re-usability.

There’s 9 of them in the Falcon 9, and 27 of them in on the assembled Falcon Heavy.

The Raptor engines seem even more amazing with methalox & world-leading 3D printing.

[John-hwds]

It's the 1GR-FE of rockets engines. Nothing flashy just routine maintenance and run it.

[potato]

Not the best Rocket Engine but the best Rocket.

[nurelic_og]

It's the small block Chevy of rocket engines can't wait till the LS version comes out

[curiousgeorge]

It's a balance between performance.Survivability full of date longevity of the engine being able to count on it in the long run😊

[repairworld]

Rolls Royce made the Merlin first. And boy does it sound good 🇬🇧😁

[robwilkins]

Tom Mueller was the guy who designed and built the Merlin.

[Workerbee-zynx]

Success? Not without Werner Vonbruan..😉👍

[imconsequetau]

Legacy rocket makers started with hydrogen fuel for boosters because the ISP was so great, but they missed the whole point of boosters - maximize the thrust.

SpaceX has always aimed to make the Merlin engine have the highest possible Thrust/Weight ratio. The Merlin engine uses open-cycle combustion for turbine power and gets fantastic T/W.

[ekij]

You can thrash an engine a whole lot harder if it only has to work for an hour or two. If you want to re-use it over and over again you need to be a little more gentle with it.

[petercoutu]

When trying to design something beyond a limited cyclic, use, reliability is much more important than overall power or efficiency.

And you have to take into account that that efficiency is the direct fuel conversion efficiency. However, when you take into account the economies of scale of needing to reproduce the engine entirely for each mission, as was done previously during NASA space programs, you find that Cost of production and the efficient use of materials.It's a lot higher with these engines.

[beogrum]

It also has to reliably shutdown and restart in flight.

[caldodge]

Define "best". Laptops have a high power-to-weight ratio, but laptop technology isn't used in supercomputers. Elon's metric is "cost per mass to orbit", not "mass fraction" or "ISP". A RELIABLE engine which is cheap to manufacture and maintain contributes to "low cost per mass to orbit".

[michalfaraday]

It also has the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any rocket engine. That enabled the resusability while keeping heavy payload

[gardenlifelove]

Merlin engine is awesome.. the first of a new begining of space exploration.

[LandR]

Seems they could redesign it, more efficient, thrust etc. Then it could send a “recoverable” second stage and make it fully reusable.

[finscreenname]

I thought Sace X didn't even used the 3rd gen line yet?

[ZowskiTV]

Its the Merlin is the Toyota of Rocket engines. 😅