Fun Fact

My signature has changed a lot over the years.  It was much more legible yeas ago now, though still unique you could barely know what my name is from it.

Fun fact: During the initial acceleration after liftoff, the turbo pumps in the SpaceX Raptor rocket engine pumps 823 kg, every second, of methane and oxygen into the combustion chamber, against a pressure of 350 bar. Someone want to calculate the hp of that?

Errata:  Actually, that is wrong.  That calculation relied on combining different engine data that weren't concurrent.  The actual mass flow of propellant at max, is somewhat less: 741.36 kg.


Fun fact:  I did try to calculate hp for that, 741kg, and arrived at 41 702 hp , for the Raptor 3's turbopumps.


Fun fact:  I then calculated the hp of the Raptor 3's exhaust nozzle , and arrived at 6 306 298 hp.


Fun fact:  Nozzles and turbopumps combined, and total for all 33 engines of the Heavy Booster, add up to 209 484 000 hp.   ... Or 4.731 GW.

209.5 million hp, roll that around for awhile.

Fun Fact: In USA alone, mindless NPCs who think fountain pens are obsolete, throw away more than 1,6 billion ballpoint pens every years.
(I certainly understand why they throw them away, what I don't get is why they buy them.)

Fun Fact: Of all the world's species of mushrooms, only 0.143% contain hallucinogens, only 2.143% are edible (poor odds for a random found mushroom), and 97.8% are toxic to various degrees.

- I sure hope so!  

Once at least.

Everybody else is, AFAICS, very far from where SpaceX is.   There is at least Blue Origin, who seem to have understood early that they need to reuse rockets.  But from what I can estimate, their engines are maybe too heavy.  They will need boosters for the first stage.  Those boosters will not be easy to recover or reuse.

If there ever was any engineer at ULA, Roscosmos, ESA or Nasa, that suggested they should build a two stage rocket optimized for payload to LEO, and land the first stage vertically on a raft in the ocean. he seems to have been laughed out of the room?  With Musk, it's more like, if we can't do it this way, then there's no point in doing it at all.
Everybody else have spent their time and money developing modular rocket systems, like Vulcan and Angara.  The idea is that the required rocket should be as small as possible for the mission, three stage, and assembled from a set of common modules, which hopefully would become cheap through series production.  Vulcan and Angara do have some unlikely schemes to recover the main engines.  But since those serve the second stage to very high energies and long distances, I very much doubt it will ever become a reality.

These rockets will never be even close to challenge the economy of SpaceX to LEO.  But they will be financed and contracted by the governments, same with ESA and Ariane, and China's Long March of course.  I don't think you have to worry about SpaceX achieving monopoly.  That will not happen.  If anything the threat is the opposite.  There are a lot of politicians, activists, lobbyists and administrators who want to 'take down' SpaceX and Elon Musk.  I don't know what fantasies about the world is in their heads, for them to want that, but there you are.

But anyway, European governments will launch as much as possible with their own rockets, no matter how much it costs.  China and Russia will depend solely on their own rockets.  USA, finally, have already awarded the lion share of government and defense launch contracts to ULA for many years into the future.  SpaceX mainly get the launches when the others can't deliver.  The "free market" is only respected by the commercial customers, not the governments.  It's only tax payer money, and there's more where that came from.

SpaceX competitors need to not only figure out the control dynamics of landing the rockets, but they also need to develop new rockets from scratch (except maybe Blue Origin).  Since their rockets are disposable, they are designed to throw away as little as possible, which makes them all into what is effectively three stage rockets.
If you want to know what differs and why, with SpaceX rockets, I'll write another post, because this is long enough now, I feel.

Fun Fact: Theres' a drug that could help my failing right eye, but side effects include blindness. Oh, the irony.