
Rocket Engine Pulled from the Ocean Definitely Belonged to Apollo 11 - gullyfur
https://www.wired.com/2013/07/bezos-apollo-11/
======
avmich
F-1 is still the biggest chamber, by thrust. We decided to go with smaller,
even though much more advanced engines; even Starship is going to use Raptors
of smaller thrust per chamber. Were the questions of how to develop first
stage engine answered differently in 1960-s than now? Starship is decidedly
not Sea Dragon regarding first stage engine solution; will we come to bigger
thrust chambers again or we see why we won't need them?

~~~
cbanek
These are just my personal thoughts, but my guess would be that we don't go
back to having big chambers. Having more chambers and engines theoretically
provides more fault tolerance. I think one of the things that has really
improved since the 1960s is how much smaller and faster a control system can
be since we've got much more powerful computing.

~~~
avmich
There are good arguments for big chambers as well, so we need to consider both
sides. Cooling of bigger chamber is easier, as we have the law of cubes-
squares (volume growth against area growth with growth of the size). We have
less parts, so less things to fail. Also potentially better mass efficiency
(thrust to mass), as some elements can't be scaled proportionally to smaller
sizes.

For big rockets, where such chambers would be appropriate, we don't need
particularly fast control system. Saturn-V could even be flown with manual
control, and astronauts were trained to do that.

Of course there are advantages with smaller chambers and smaller engines too.

------
basementcat
Note that this is from 2013.

