Hands down one of the coolest shots I’ve ever seen!
I thought it was a render when I first saw it and had to double take. I love how you can see the thrust increasing at the start and then the mach diamonds eventually appear
You can see how the three outer vacuum engines are greatly over expanded giving you a collapse of their exhaust after exiting the bell and then the Mach diamonds.
Where the inner sea level engines are a much closer expansion match and don’t really form visible Mach diamonds in view of the camera.(Edit: you can faintly see them. But the compression rebound that forms the visible diamond is much less)
It’s quite interesting that they can light and run those vacuum engines on the ground, usually the combustion instability from an over expanded exhaust at sea level results in a hard start.
I suspect they have so much thrust that the sea level pressure simply is irrelevant.
The bell is scaled to match thrust though. If you get too much expansion the flow peels away from the inside of the bell and you get turbulence, pressure variations and then usually a big kerboom, especially on startup as you’re trying to ramp up to steady state conditions. I’m guessing the bell is more high-altitude optimised than true vacuum optimised.
Amazing shot, and really cinematic with the ice chips in the exhaust plume.
Also, thanks for posting, and welcome to Lemmy :)
Thanks! Twitter refugee, so joined Mastodon. Now I’ve experienced the Fediverse I’m branching out here as a second step
