November 11, 2010 Third part of the 2010 Hawthorne tour: Musk walks through Merlin engine production — nozzles and chamber liners, the vacuum and sea-level versions, Falcon 9 propellant lines, the tube-bending area and the machine shop.
Third part of the 2010 Hawthorne tour: Musk walks through Merlin engine production — nozzles and chamber liners, the vacuum and sea-level versions, Falcon 9 propellant lines, the tube-bending area and the machine shop.
This area is used for the engine components or the major engine components. So you can see there's a nozzle or various nozzles at various stages of completion. And then you can also see the copper things are the chamber liners. You can see the difference between that. That's a Merlin vacuum configuration which has got a more spread out nozzle section. And that's the sea level configuration which has got a sort of short copper nozz. Propellant supply lines for Falcon 9, so they've got a single tank that manifolds out to nine engines and then you've got full and drain lines. So there's a total of 10 sets of 5 inch diameter lines that manifold out to the various engines. So it's kind of like having like a nine cylinder engine car or something like that. This is our tube bending area. So there's a lot of tubes on a rocket and we have a couple of automated tube benders that once you program a particular type of tube, can be a very complicated tube that looks like a crazy pretzel. And this machine can make that exact same tube every time perfectly. Alright, so here we are in the SpaceX machine shop. We have about 30 different machines of all sizes and shapes. We have wire EDM machines, which is electric discharge machining. We've got lathes, mills. There's just an enormous amount of metal sculpting that takes place to create the vehicle. What a lot of people don't realize is that SpaceX makes about 80% of the vehicle by value in house. So for the engine, raw metal comes in and out comes an engine. So it's on these machines that the metal is taken from its raw form and into the final machine part form. So a part like this will come in as a forging and then it'll get turned and milled and cut and eventually end up as an engine chamber liner. This is a new machine that just arrived. It's just being tested and put through its paces before we start machining on it there. We're actually cutting the grooves on a chamber and drilling the holes that are necessary for cooling. These are engine manifolds that connect the nozzle and the chamber. These are just various rocket parts, parts for the stages, parts for the engines. Those are some sumps, that's a tube for the main oxygen supply line to Falcon 9. Some more nozzle parts here. Nozzle part, nozzle part. That's our machine shop. I haven't gone through everything. There's a lot of detail here and some of it's proprietary, but gives you a sense for what's capable. We've actually got a lot of off site machining that we do as well. We have a very high engine production rate here at SpaceX. This year alone, SpaceX will make more rocket engines than the rest of us production combined. And next year we'll make more rocket engines than any country in the world. So that's a lot of rocket engines that all have to go through and be made very efficiently and made very accurately. And that's what all these machines are for. What we're looking at Here is a Merlin 1C, fully regeneratively cooled engine. It's getting ready to ship out to our test site in Texas to be part of the nine engine firing. This is actually the ninth and final engine to be shipped out for that. And when we do that firing, it's going to be quite spectacular. Falcon 9 is the most powerful single core vehicle in the American fleet. And when Falcon 9 Heavy debuts in about two to three years, that will be the most powerful vehicle in the world world. Because the shuttle will have retired by that point. So that's really quite significant. It's the royal equivalent of say an Airbus A380 or A747. This thing is the turbo pump, this is the chamber, the nozzle, and then there's all the supporting structure in there with the avionics and control valves. And here you can see the difference with the Falcon 1 configuration. So it's a sealed pyramid. The stage valving is contained inside that pyramid. But other than that, it's substantially the same with a turbo pump and the cham nozzle. Very little difference really between the Falcon 1 configuration, the Falcon 9 configuration.