How are SpaceX rockets powered?
Merlin. Merlin is a family of rocket engines developed by SpaceX for use on its Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. Merlin engines use a rocket grade kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen as rocket propellants in a gas-generator power cycle. The Merlin engine was originally designed for recovery and reuse.
How is Falcon 9 powered?
Falcon 9 is a partially reusable two-stage-to-orbit medium-lift launch vehicle designed and manufactured by SpaceX in the United States. Both the first and second stages are powered by SpaceX Merlin engines, using cryogenic liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1) as propellants.
How does a Falcon rocket work?
The power behind the Falcon 9 is the Merlin engine, which is built in-house by SpaceX. These engines burn a combination of rocket-grade kerosene called Rocket Propellant 1 and liquid oxygen. On a typical Falcon 9 launch, the first stage engines burn for 162 seconds, and the second stage engine burns for 397 seconds.
What tech stack does SpaceX use?
Company Tech Stack by G2 Stack SpaceX uses 14 technology products and services including HTML5 , Google Analytics , and jQuery , according to G2 Stack.
What do they use for rocket fuel?
The petroleum used as rocket fuel is a type of highly refined kerosene, called RP-1 in the United States. Petroleum fuels are usually used in combination with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer.
What is the Falcon 9 mission?
Falcon 9’s typical missions include cargo delivery and crewed flights to the International Space Station (ISS) with the Dragon and Dragon 2 capsules, launch of communications satellites and Earth observation satellites to geostationary transfer orbits (GTO), and low Earth orbits (LEO), some of them at a polar …
What computers do SpaceX engineers use?
SpaceX uses an Actor-Judge system to provide triple redundancy to its rockets and spacecraft. The Falcon 9 has 3 dual core x86 processors running an instance of linux on each core. The flight software is written in C/C++ and runs in the x86 environment.