Tom Mueller interview

Now the long since deleted interview from the New York University Astronomy Society. You might think it strange to hear so many female voices in an interview about rocket engines, but it was an astronomy meeting, not an engineering meeting. Nothing has changed in the female preference for basic sciences that lead to teaching careers, even 20 years after the lion kingdom witnessed the same dynamic.

Tom Mueller interview (52 min 16 sec)

Tom Mueller is probably just as important to the Falcon 9's development as Musk. Musk consulted him on at least 1 idea & it makes one wonder who originally started the discussion about propulsive landing. It's hard to imagine coming up with the idea of a staged shutdown to reduce the number of valves on the engine. He said it was done on smaller engines but never scaled up. There are no goog search results on what a staged shutdown is.


There were a few other nuggets of information, like how something as small as the injector was a big factor in the engine's total efficiency & how they got the injector efficiency as high as possible. You would think blowing up hardware on the test stand is only what NASA & Blue Origin do, but for the 1st time, Muell revealed SpaceX blew up a lot of hardware in getting staged shutdown to work. We can infer combustion is still too complicated for even the latest advancements in computer modeling to simulate.


There was also the nugget about Goog proposing satellites for internet back haul. The reason is the latency is too long for user interfaces, but mirroring large amounts of data for a data center wouldn't need short latency & it's still faster to mail very large amounts of data than send it through the ground.


https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comm...e_call_02_may/