SpaceX successfully completed a full mission test of their 9-engine heavy lift monster. You can watch a video of the test on their website, but I can’t say I recommend more than the first few seconds. Unfortunately, their sounds equipment isn’t up to the task of capturing the truly throaty roar that must produce.
The caption for the video was much more interesting:
Photo/Video Caption: The full mission duration test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket first stage lasted 178 seconds, nearly three minutes. Conducted at the SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas, the nine Merlin engines produced 855,000 lbs. of thrust and consumed over half a million pounds of liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene during the test.
That’s a lot of kerosene!! According to this example problem the stoichiometric equation for oxygen and n-decane (approximate for kerosene) is 15.5 moles oxygen for each mole of n-decane. That’s a fuel/oxygen ratio by mass of about 0.28. So half a million pounds of combustion material is about 400,000 pounds of kerosene. That’s almost 60,000 gallons!![1]
To put that in perspective, I fill up my car no more than once a week with 10-11 gallons of fuel or roughly 500 gallons a year. So that’s enough fuel (if cars ran on kerosene) to drive over 100 cars for a year. And those 9 Merlin engines burned that in 3 minutes. Now you know why satellite TV costs so much!!
- Thanks Google Calculator. [↩]
November 24th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Just when you think it’s safe to forget stoichiometry…