The man behind the scenes at SpaceX (SpaceX's J. B. Straubel) is Tom Mueller. He is rarely seen and runs the MacGregor facility. Here is a very recent interview of him. It is filled with lots of detailed information:
Twitch
Twitch
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Should be "phase", not "face", I believe.Merlin 1D uses a method called “[face] shut off”,
Should be "phase", not "face", I believe.
I listened to that call with Mueller. Nice guy. Hope he didn't reveal too much. Some of the things he said have not been publicly stated before.
Even airliners are kind of expensive for our cost trades. From Elon, I’d always get, you know, how much does it cost to make a Model S, a Tesla? Start from there, and work my way up to the rocket.
Like, here’s a conversation I had maybe about five years ago on the Merlin 1D when we first developed it. He asked me; he said, “How much do you think it costs to make a Model S?" And I’m like “I don’t know; 50 thousand dollars?” He said “No, about 30 thousand dollars.” That’s the marginal cost for that car.
And he said, “How much does that car weigh?” And I said, “About 5 thousand pounds.” And how much does a Merlin engine weigh? I go, “About a thousand pounds?” So, he’s like, “So why the heck does it cost, you know, some fraction of a million dollars to make a Merlin engine?”
And I mean, he has a good point. And the material you’re using isn’t aluminum, it’s not stamped, so I’ll give you a factor of five. So it’s equivalent to a five-thousand-pound rocket engine. So why’s it 20 times the cost? So that’s the way we look at it and the way we think at SpaceX trying to get the amortization cost of the rocket down. Once you start reusing it, the real big cost becomes the amortization cost of the rocket, the operational costs, and the fuel costs, which is basically the same model as the airliners.
Should be "phase", not "face", I believe.
I listened to that call with Mueller. Nice guy. Hope he didn't reveal too much. Some of the things he said have not been publicly stated before.
thanks for the correction! The audio quality on that skype call was poor and I was sure I heard "phase". My apologies."Furthermore, with proper design the sleeve can be made to fully shutoff both propellants at the injector face (hence, “face shutoff”), thereby eliminating all dribble volume from the injector."
http://www.rocket-propulsion.info/resources/articles/TRW_PINTLE_ENGINE.pdf
That was a good analogy, though if one were to set up a manufacturing facility to make 100,000 Merlin engines a year (assuming there were buyers for that kind of volume) than it probably would be a lot easier to get the cost down. But when one is building far less than 200 Merlin engines a year (currently) it's a lot harder to reduce costs.The story about Elon comparing a Model S to the Merlin engine is fantastic. It absolutely clarifies why Elon is such a great CEO/CTO.
Model S ~400 kW
Merlin ~3,000,000 kW* ~= 2.5 time traveling DeLoreans
*(like all heat engines only 1/3 goes to move the exhaust gas, also using power as measure in rocket engines is meaningless, but fun)
;P
@AudubonB
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