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Wiki Super Heavy/Starship - General Development Discussion

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The booster has two tanks, one LOX and the other Liquid Methane. (I don't know which is which, and a quick search doesn't tell me either definitively, but I think the bottom one is the LOX tank. LOX is denser than Methane, makes sense to put it at the bottom.) Anyway, there has to be a way for the contents of the top tank to get to the bottom where the motors are, and it has to be able to move a lot of liquid. The photo shows what is supposed to be a circular cross-section pipe going through the bottom tank, all crushed by pressure from outside. The rings welded around the pipe are there to provide rigidity to resist exactly these kinds of crushing force, and as the pipe crushed they got distorted in weird ways.
I think the rings are to resist pressure in the pipe. 24m of liquid methane is one atmosphere. Booster is 70m or so tall. Lox is almost 3x denser, so it will press on pipe, but those rings have almost no compressive strength, especially with the minimal welding.
 
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I think the bottom one is the LOX tank
I believe you are correct. Below is from Everyday Astronaut.

Note to @Cosmacelf : the downcomer tube is not shown in these diagrams, but visualize how the methane has to get to the engines if it is not routed to the outside surface of the vehicle. There is a “downcomer” tube from the base of the methane tank that goes straight down through the LOX tank.

Falcon-vs-Starship-Fuels.png
 
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I think the rings are to resist pressure in the pipe. 24m of liquid methane is one atmosphere. Booster is 70m or so tall. Lox is almost 3x denser, so it will press on pipe, but those rings have almost no compressive strength, especially with the minimal welding.
Yes. So my lesson learned here is that when we see a vehicle being cryo tested and visually it appears to pass the test, all may not be as it seems…

This is why an R&D program that is “hardware rich” can move fast. On to B8!
 
Anyone know if the cryo proof test was done at (slightly above) expected pressures, or did they test until fail?
I don’t think there is anyway we can know that for sure. But apparently there are cameras inside the tanks so perhaps during the test when the video showed the downcomer tube collapsed the test was ended, as the frost line did not rise to the top of that tank based on NSF camera views, if I recall correctly.
 
New NSF video shows some interesting activity. A new downcomer tube has been delivered. Not know which booster it is for, but B7 is still in the High Bay, has not been moved to the Rocket Garden. Is it possible that B7 could have its downcomer replaced? That would require a lot of rocket surgery.

Also, there is work being done on Suborbital Pad A (second screen capture below). Perhaps preparing for Ship static fires before stacking on the OLP.

5BC694F1-A0DD-4B4E-A86A-E79B7219BD9D.png
B7F14B71-950F-479E-BC84-8CEE15091658.png
 
there is work being done on Suborbital Pad A (second screen capture below). Perhaps preparing for Ship static fires before stacking on the OLP.
Thinking more about that; in the past the Ship static fires on Pads A and B were with up to all three sea level engines, correct? But never with the Vacuum Raptors. So perhaps that work on Pad A is to enable easier loading of the Ship tanks for static tests of both groups of three engines.
 
Wow thats pretty wide. Is that the tube through which liquid methane is pumped into the engine combustion chamber? That is wider than a farm irrigation pipe.
Yeah, all 33 chambers producing 17 million pounds of thrust in total.
Quick (probably wrong) calc puts it at 9,500 pounds of methane per second. 358 cubic feet per second. At a 6 foot diameter, flow velocity would be 13 feet per second or 9 MPH. 9 foot would be 6 fps, 4 MPH.
 
Wow thats pretty wide. Is that the tube through which liquid methane is pumped into the engine combustion chamber? That is wider than a farm irrigation pipe.
Yes, it is huge! Keep in mind that an F9 booster drains its tanks in about 2 1/2 minutes, and the Super Heavy booster will do the same. As @mongo pointed out that means that a massive amount of CH4 needs to be delivered to 33 Raptors very quickly.

It’s mind boggling to think about. :oops:
 
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Yeah, all 33 chambers producing 17 million pounds of thrust in total.
Quick (probably wrong) calc puts it at 9,500 pounds of methane per second. 358 cubic feet per second. At a 6 foot diameter, flow velocity would be 13 feet per second or 9 MPH. 9 foot would be 6 fps, 4 MPH.
Wow! You guys certainly keep my Imperial (US) to SI unit conversion skills well tuned :)
 
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Latest video from NSF starting at about the 5 minute point appears to show workers removing a section of the booster skin to access the interior, presumably to attempt to repair the downcomer tube. I don’t see how it is possible to replace the entire length of that tube without cutting the rocket apart, but what do I know, I’m not a rocket engineer.