What Is The Most Powerful Rocket Motor? 

I want them to add it to KSP with a 50% chance of just exploding when started. For authenticity.

@@operator8014 33%

@@antediluvianatheist5262 How about 50% chance it explodes, but uf it does, you get 20 science?

Bill: "So we'll be adding these 12 MN SRB's" Jeb: "ok, yes, but, what if, hear me out on this, what if, we made it bigger"

James Dallas I love this

And specific impulses

just join him

​@@emmata98yeah

KSP also fortold they tend to explode.

i build a big cluster rocket in KSP yesterday. 5m diameter and around 30 Engines (Booster included). That thing could lift the entire ISS into Orbit.

welcome to 60's soviet rocket design. coincidentally the N-1 also had a tendency to blow up shortly after liftoff XD

NASA should change their motto to MOAR BOOSTERS!

Nah, you should definitely leave it to Soviets. Just look up UR-900, that kerbalized beauty of a rocket.

Very impressive.

I'm pretty sure he had a script, and he obviously edited it.

Scripted or not, Scott is quite the savant when it comes to rocket engine history and knowledge.

Legend

Earth got off the orbit and is falling on the Sun.

I remember going outside as a kid and seeing the glow from the Rocketdyne test site 70 miles away in Everglades City

Doesn't get more kerbal than this

I'm just imagening they somehow fit it upsidedown and it flew off... Hollywood don't steal!

I... that is the best thing I have ever heard.

I laughed for a few minutes. That's so stupid to imagine. There's no way that's scientific, right?

someone is reading the description...

¡uᴉɐƃɐ oƃ ǝʍ ǝɹǝɥ

Axodus TENSERIHUISEOU?

im confused

Lucky likes

Yet probably only the 2nd loudest. I hear burning man gets pretty wild.

Incorrect, the N1 did fly... just not well xD

@@raffaeledivora9517 I mean, it went up, and it came back down again. what more can you ask for in a rocket? :P

tha saturn V was bigger. but the N1 had more thrust.

It did went 40km in altitude in the last launch

@@closetman7757 I'm pretty sure the n1 was bigger than the Saturn V

Tweakscale a hammer

I second this!

During the 3 test firings the light, flame & roar from the rocket exhaust was seen & felt from 50 kilometers away, all in all the AJ/ SL solid fuel motor was about as controllable as an earthquake.

Oh and it burned 840 tons of fuel at a rate of 6 tons per second

Cool, i'll take 5 of them for my first stage. Just to get off the pad at creeping velocity

So true lmao

You pick up some dirt and hand it to him and say "Done, what next?"

There is a video that shows what it would take to do that with rocket engines. It's ridiculously impossible as you can imagine lol

Without the atmosphere, earth orbit may have shifted.

The boss was sitting his ass on the nozzle

Im so mad thats not a thing.... The science just seems so perfect.

@@CrossWindsPat I know!

Well they used the same manufacturing process to make nuclear core containment vessels for PWRs.

@@x-37sfs-thesfsspaceplane5 I always wanted them to try it with two max Qs. Launch it a hundred meters below the waves to utilize the water as something to push against increasing efficiency... Maybe...

The Armadilliest One. I think you have to stand a long way back

Waaaayyy baaack

The payload was mounted upside down and needed to perform a 180 flip before orbital insertion.

Thanks for the answer :)

Obviously the Soviets put the rocket upside down on the pad, so they wouldn't have to do the 180 flip of the payload before orbital insertion, instead opting to do it on the pad. Sadly they made it a 360

Tiax Anderson) No they had to mount the payload nose down (retrograde,) something to do with its engines I think. Anyways, after the payload (Polyus) separated it needed to flip 180 to face nose forward (prograde) and roll 90 degrees to perform its orbital burn. Instead of stopping at 180 and doing the burn, it continued until it had done a complete 360 and THEN did it’s burn. It promptly fell back to earth.

I was waiting for someone to ask this.

Jared Peterson Doing that would somewhat diminish the likelihood that people would watch the videos, if they had the sources where he makes the videos from.

Google? ;~)

old rocket books I bet

DowzerWTP72 having the source and having the patience to do the research are to very different things. I am willing to watch a 10 minute video about space every day but i would never do hours and hours of researching.

@@Jehty_ but I'm the kind of person who wouldn't mind at all spending a couple of hours to learn the complexities and history of all these things he talks about, so I'd love to know where he gets it

Not really. The exhaust created a slightly lower pressure area which compensated for the thrust down. This also makes sense from a closed system perspective. Unless the burn expelled gas into outer space, the Earth would not show any net movement.

Oh indeed, the engine and its derivatives have a stellar reputation.

Energia aka ENERGy. Seriously, man? That's bordering on purposely botching it when you mispronounce something that exists in English as well.

nardgames. The Energia was a beautiful design. If only it had continued or revived instead of the milquetoast that is Angara. Still better than SLS

+Joseph Groves Angara is the ultimate monument to laziness and corruption. They've basically held military and space hostage and presented the end result with "deal with it" attitude. Not saying SLS is better, but it at least had some potential. Angara is an insult.

TheArklyte yeah. Angara was used rather than Energia due to political reasons: a lot was manufactured in Ukraine not Russia. :(

Good one.

An even better comparison would be having 4 exhausts

Or perhaps four wheel drive...

I disagree with this sentiment. All of that plumbing is just a really fancy fuel pump. If you hooked four car engines together to a single fuel pump you wouldn't suddenly have only a single engine.

I really do have 4 engines in my car :P

Thrust is a vector quantity. Your definition doesn't account for that. It's the difference between vibration and translation. One goes somewhere , the other is just confusion.

Without JointReinforcer?

That would have been a nice clickbait title.

4 times more powerful than a vector

Clysdale Is stronker by numbers of nozzles less =better Except most boosters

isn't mainsall better?

@@DanielDornekDorda no

Daniel Dorda mainsail has better sea level thrust, but Rhino exceeds it in space.

As the description of the mammoth tells the Mammoth is 4 Vectors stuck together. So, no, because they have separate pumps. It’s like the SLS

SpaceX Raptor is currently the most powerful and efficient engine

That's Salesforce Park - on top of the newly opened Transbay Terminal in SF

I bet you'll be hanging around there quite a bit now eh Mike ;)

eh scott's famous enough to have his own fangirls i feel XD

AND there is still a rocket inside! (but capped off by the gov and big ditch/trench filled with water to keep curious droids and scott at a distance :P

@@ZILLION4EVER The fishing there is totally sweet.

I totally disagree with you, I would compare the R170 to a car with four combustion engines that transmit the driving force of that force to the 2 wheels of the car. Therefore, the R170 and the 4 combustion chambers are the 4 piston engines of the car. and the car’s wheels are equivalent to a nozzle or bell on the R170. summarizing the reasoning about the R170, there are four that explain its buoyancy force through a single TUBE OR BELL, as well as the 4-engine car puts all the power on the 2 wheels that would be equal to 1 bell or nozzle of the R170 and remembering that the R170 came after the failure of the N1, WHERE Apollo 11 had already reached the moon, the R170 was a technology after the 70s, where F1 was extinguished by Nixon without a chance to improve them, nixon destroyed F1 without continuing to update them

@@carloskarbat ain't nobody running 4 engined cars, wtf

@@carloskarbat dissagre on what? This is talking about the biggest SRB ever built, not the r170

@@ZacLowing ima just say drag tractors

tryhard fpv well i can't really say but i think something from ~4,5 MN to 100GN.

That can be computed easily by multiplying the mass of the spacecraft with the acceleration created by the drive. Would have to look it up, but it would vary based on which version you were talking about. The smallest design was a 10-meter diameter pusher plate vehicle designed to be lofted on a Saturn V class launcher and used for Mars missions; the largest was the size of a small city that was designed as an interstellar generation ship firing fusion bombs out the tail. That would undoubtedly be the most powerful thruster ever built, insane mega-engineering at it's finest.

Helium Road Wait, Orion actually designed their systems to be fired at a safe distance from Earth? All the previous mentions I encountered suggested they were crazy enough to use this inside the atmosphere, and that's why there got canceled.

Read George Dyson's book about it, it's fascinating stuff. If you can't use them at a distance from the Earth than what's the point?

@@johnfrancisdoe1563 Well for the big ones that could go to other solar systems there is still today no other way to get them into orbit. Now the smarter way is with orbital construction using material from the moon, but that itself is a tall order today and thought impossible at the time. As it stands the ideas those crazy bastards dreamt up are still our only Earth-based way of getting humans to another habitable planet if the need arose to abandon Earth.

I think about this every day. What if the time of the enlightenment also brought forth international cooperation that transcends national borders and political convictions and superficial differences between people? We could have had orbital shipyards by now.

Yes, but the wouldn't have the incentive to progress the technology, se what happened after with the ISS. Not very much advancements until private companies started to appear.

They actually are working together

@@handsomecat2465 well yes now they are, but at what rate do they progress, from 1950 to 1969 the did much more than now, Soviets still use the Soyuz and NASA doesn't even have a vehicle. At least now private is going big and advancing some things.

What would have happened was the Americans would have wanted everything their own way, as they always do, and progress world have been hampered rather than helped. See Breton woods for an example of this.

And yet there are no Soviet flags on the moon 🤔. US systems engineering FTW

The Russians truly are terrific engineers. Just a shame they never get the right economic support.

You're right. American engineering does have its merits, because the might of the US economy allowed their engineers a lot more "wiggle room" to design the machine exactly to specifications. Presumably this is where the "America, land of opportunity" quote applies. However with the Soviets/Russians, they don't have the economic might of the US and therefore when designing and engineering new machines, they simplify the engineering where they can without compromising too much of the end product functionality, and often this decreased complexity increases reliability and predictability of the product. While the Americans have amazing scientists and engineers at R&D to attack problems head on, I admire soviet engineering for their "work around" approach to problems, because it's necessary with their lesser economic backing and the solutions are often simple and straightforward. Take the F1 and RD-170 for example. Combustion instability was an issue for both sides trying to develop an insanely powerful rocket motor. The American approach attacked the problem head on, and eventually solved the problem. The Soviets took a step back, and asked themselves, "who says a turbopump can only have one combustion chamber?", and ended up not having to encounter the problem in the first place. The Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 bomber is another example. At the time of its conception jet engines were still notoriously unreliable and inefficient. The soviets took a step back and realised why they needed jet engines in the first place, when they can pump out similar performance with contra-rotating propellors. The result is a turboprop strategic bomber that rivals the B-52 in payload, range and speed, but ended up being TWICE as fuel efficient. I know my profile picture is of an American X-43A, but that's because I admire engineering ethos from all countries, but I had to make a point here because Soviet engineering often under appreciated. Thanks for reading and have a good day Jugganaut! TL;DR The lack of such a powerful economic backing forces Soviet engineers to come up with creative workarounds to problems that equivalent US engineers could tackle head on by phat stax into R&D.

@gacekky1 ouch, neverless good point

In the Tu-95 they also made an aircraft so loud that it could be tracked by hydrophone networks designed to track submarines...

All booster first stage followed by like 8 aspargus stages. I can go anywhere with that shit.

Yea that footage is marvelous. Theres a video floating around with one of the engineers breaking it all down for like 10 minutes. Amazing stuff.

I totally disagree with you, I would compare the R170 to a car with four combustion engines that transmit the driving force of that force to the 2 wheels of the car. Therefore, the R170 and the 4 combustion chambers are the 4 piston engines of the car. and the car’s wheels are equivalent to a nozzle or bell on the R170. summarizing the reasoning about the R170, there are four that explain its buoyancy force through a single TUBE OR BELL, as well as the 4-engine car puts all the power on the 2 wheels that would be equal to 1 bell or nozzle of the R170 and remembering that the R170 came after the failure of the N1, WHERE Apollo 11 had already reached the moon, the R170 was a technology after the 70s, where F1 was extinguished by Nixon without a chance to improve them, nixon destroyed F1 without continuing to update them

The RD-180 has significant efficiency advantages against even the Merlin. That's not a put down of the Merlin - not in any way - it's just that the RD-180 is such a brilliant rocket motor.

@@thethirdman225 That, and Merlin wasn't designed to be the most powerful or most efficient engine. It was designed to be the best engine that would meet a whole lot of conditions that were - and years later, still are - unique to SpaceX operations. The RD-1xx designers didn't need to worry about things like throttle control for landing, or ease of post-flight servicing... they just had to build the best single-use engine they could.

@@simongeard4824 Well… the RD-180 was designed in the early 1980s and the Merlin about ten years ago. They RD-180 was designed on a completely different principle and yes, on a completely different design brief. The Merlin is basically a modern version of a V2 engine. The RD-180 is the muse for the Raptor engine.

It's amazing how the Soviets could build rocket engines that are being compared to modern engines and STILL remain superior

@@dataman6744 Not that amazing, considering that until SpaceX developed Merlin, most of the "modern" engines are actually of similar vintage to the Soviet designs. Look at SLS, for example... Shuttle-era engines and solids dating to the 1970s. And the RS-68 engines on Delta IV were a bit newer, but still far from modern.

I mean there were proposed engines that shot nuclear bombs out the back for propulsion

TBH I seriously doubt the Sea Dragon could have gotten away with one gigantic single-chamber engine. Same reason it took so many tries to get the F-1 to not explode, combustion instability. Also problems with just hooking to an aircraft carrier's power grid for providing power to electrolyse seawater, I mean it's not like uninsulated tanks are going to hold that LH2 for long enough to fill the rocket up, it'll boil off as fast or faster than you're able to make it unless you're using literal gigawatts of power solely for electrolysis and liquefaction of propellants, and an aircraft carrier of that period didn't have gigawatts of power for anything. Bottom line is there were a lot of problems with Sea Dragon that would have driven up costs, and I'm not entirely sure that the whole BDB concept is viable. Still useful if you've gotta put a lot of stuff into space in one go, maybe use the first stage of Sea Dragon to launch a spacecraft with a Project Orion propulsion system (nuclear bombs shot out the back).

Fenchurch Marie What's meant is probably length. It didn't serve that long, compared to other engines.

RD-170 and variants have been used longer than F-1.

nagantm441 It's the variants which have the long career. The RD170 itself only flew on the Energia, which itself only flew twice.

@@ShadowFalcon rd-171 flew on zenit for many years. It is an rd-170 gimballed so that it could maneuver a rocket alone.

nagantm441 Yes, but that's the RD171, not the RD170. Again, it's the variants which have the long career.

I'm wondering if they measured how much Earth's orbit changed :)

A little over 3 F-1 engines.

@@massimookissed1023 by nothing. The fumes probably didn't left earths sphere of influence

through you vibrating teeth ten miles away i would guess

Headbutt a brick wall as hard as you can, it's about 18,000,000 times the thunk if you really give it socks.

The newly opened transbay terminal in San Francisco. His office is right next to it, opposite my work building.

@@TheRealMartin Well I guess when we find Scott stabbed to death with office products we know where to look :D

Late to this party, but it’s Salesforce Park.

its not a rocket engine if it didn't fly

I Know earth is huge and the aj260 is small compared but always wondered how many would be needed to effect earths orbit.

Earth is roughly 6 x 10^24 kg. The force of the last test (according to the video) was 24 x 10^6 N. A Newton is (kg - m)/s^2. Force/mass equals the acceleration of the mass due to that force (F/m = a). So a = 4 x 10^-18 m/s^2 I doubt such a tiny acceleration would be noticed. Even perturbations due to tectonic plates shifting in earthquakes are barely noticeable (The magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile shortened the Earth's day by 1.26 millionths of a second.)

@@jamesowens7176 I mean, the gasses don't even leave the atmosphere so would it change at all?

@@CrossWindsPat The thrust doesn't push against the atmosphere. But if a rocket is locked down, all of it's thrust is transferred to the planet.

it did but by a very very very etc small amount

Yay I was right

Oh I was wrong

Exactly the reaction I expected.

Ha HA! Fooled by more sciencey things!

Scott Manley Twitter works better than the youtube notifications...

And yet those are both weak compared to SRBs

Scott Manley yeah they seem like a powerful fart compared to that srb...

Wayyy better Isp though

I think i need to build one in KSP. With M-1 upper stage, F-1 lower stage surrounded with 4 RD-171 wich is surrounded with 2-3 AJ-260 each. I hope 300 tonnes to LEO in RSS can be easily acheved.

+ManWithAGun As a personal preference, I wouldn't mix similar complex technologies (F1 vs RD-17x) on the same stage. Solids are no big deal/don't really matter, you light them, they go, entirely self-contained. Unless you screw up with O-rings. Liquids are far more fussy, and more things can go wrong. A F1 or RD171 is far more complex, and if you mix them both, you'll run into subtle differences that are more difficult to handle. Even something as simple if the Russian "RG1" fuel isn't quite perfectly equivalent to RP-1. Or vibration harmonics. Or thrust curve. Or pumping/plumbing requirements etc. Use the same liquid fuel engines. There is also a problem with overpowering the lower stage relative to the upper and payload. Rockets of this type simply don't like traveling thru low altitude atmosphere at high mach numbers. Nor would the astronauts. Efficiency/success relies on a bit more than just spitballing the first stage to be high enough power to lift 500 tons upper/payload to Mach 10 by 1000'. You'd squash the astronauts just before the structure tore itself apart.

The thrust generated from taco bell is greater

Dawid Dziedziak Milko with tyropita. May not be a powerful fart producer, but the trust can break the throne

That's why you never hear about the AJ 260

Nobody cares if it's Russian. The simple truth is that it is 4 enines clustered together with shared plumbing. The chamber defines the engine, not the pumps.

The while assembly defines the engine, meaning, the pumps and plumbing. Example: If you put a V8 in your car do you have one engine or eight?

That's a nonsensical analogy. Rocket engines don't have blocks. If we took at a couple of F1 engines, mounted them side by side and fed them from shared pumps, would that magically be one engine? If we took a couple of single cylinder gasoline lawn mower engines and ran them from a single a carburetor, would they then magically be one engine? The simple truth is that because of the different nature of a rocket engine, those clustered chambers can be easily separated and turn into single engines. And they did exactly that. The same is not true of a V8 engine, where in order to make individual single or twin engines from it...it would have to be completely re-designed as entirely new engines.

+RealityIsTheNow Absolute nonsense. RD-170 is ONE FUCKING ENGINE. First time ever I'm seeing someone call it 4 engines! LOL yeah as if downplaying and ridiculing Soviet/Russian technologies is unheard of and never happens. It's exactly because it's Soviet. Like how after Falcon Heavy launch everyone in the media reported it as the second most powerful rocket after Saturn V and completely ignored Energia. How do you explain that? I guess it's because Energia is actually 2 rockets or something?!

@Riddick tonn This difference is generally true of kerosene-burning engines, but with other types it depends on the engine. For example, the hydrogen-burning Space Shuttle Main Engines are of the more efficient closed cycle design (like the Russian engines being discussed), and the RL-10 used in Centaur upper stages are of the expander cycle design and are even more efficient--probably the most efficient liquid-fuel rocket engine of all. And there are new American methane-burning engines that are of the closed cycle design being developed for near-future use. When it comes to kerosene-burning engines, though, the Soviets/Russians long ago put in the risky/costly development work that the Americans, at the time, didn't think was worthwhile. At the time, the Americans were focused on getting to the Moon, and while more advanced kerosene-burning engines for the Saturn V first stage would have been nice, they were unnecessary, especially with the hydrogen -burning engines they chose to use in the upper stages. Note that the Saturn V, even with its primitive first-stage engines, significantly outperformed the Soviet N1 with its more advanced close-cycle engines. The Soviets didn't think it was worthwhile to work with hydrogen at the time, and as a consequence the N1 could only lift half the mass that the Saturn V could for trans-lunar injection despite being a significantly more powerful rocket. It was hydrogen for the win in the race to the Moon. For commercial use in the future, however, the Russians made the more relevant long-term choice. I don't think either necessarily had greater foresight, they were just making decisions based on their opinions regarding technical feasibility.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Xsqe3utT6rs.html

Awesome.

Because there is very little reason to. 1) Most solid rocket motors (SRMs) have relatively short burn duration, which is mostly due to the limits imposed by getting a high efficiency out of the fuel. 2) An engine with the same thrust as a Shuttle SRM would be overpowered for almost every rocket ever flown. Since SRMs are much vastly efficient than liquid-fueled engines, they are generally used as boosters jettisoned early in the launch process, to help get the rocket quickly up to speed to minimise gravity losses, and thus require very high thrusts. 3) Due to how difficult it is to develop large and efficient turbopumps (which is why in 30 years, despite advances in technology that would make building such an engine much easier, it's still the best of it's kind), it's usually much cheaper to build many small engines.

Ross h23 they’re designing new launch vehicles, and iterations of the Soyuz, but, they have slowed down lately. However, I agree the Soyuz is great if you want reliability.

@@ant9944 I didn't know that, is there any info available? Or a name to search?

A lot of names. First it was Angara, then people realized that flop doesn't work to get money anymore and plan to make Phoenix. Meanwhile Proton is getting sabotaged by it's own creators to hide the scale of stolen money by making empty launches and claiming that payload was sadly lost due to accident... They still can make good rockets, but nobody in Russia needs it anymore and nobody will fight the corruption since by now it's impossible.

*Soviets

@@world-traveler880 fine if we are arguing semantics lol

It has an amazing track record, 100% success

I wonder if Chuck Tingle has written anything about rocket science.

That is indeed Polyus

@@sebastiaomendonca1477 An intriguing, little talked about project - a test bed for lasers in orbit (likely for anti-satellite purposes?). If the satellite didn't go in the wrong direction (back towards Earth), it would have been one of the largest objects sent into space all at once, at 80 metric tonnes (beating out the Skylab Cluster of 70 or so metric tonnes). Luckily there was a glitch - if it made orbit, it could have really placed the two Cold War powers on a path of intensifying the Cold War in space at a whole different level ...

Now there's where you're wrong. The definition of a motor is a machine powered by electricity OR internal combustion that supplies motive power for a vehicle.

No, because they pushed equally on the earth surface in one direction and the earth atmosphere in the other, so that the forces cancel each other out.

Yea my jaw was hanging!!