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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

In Tim's interview with Elon Musk, Elon mentioned[1] low combustion efficiency as one of the major disadvantages of aerospike engines compared to the more traditional bell nozzles used on Raptor.

I wonder if Pangea has done anything in an attempt to solve that problem.

[1]: https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=408

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>> Elon mentioned low combustion efficiency as one of the major disadvantages of aerospike engines

If you haven't seen the SpaceX presentation on their combustion CFD software, it's a must see. They have state of the art simulation capability in this area - better than any commercial offerings.

That was 6 years ago, hard to say what remained of that ambitious goal. Also, these guys aren’t with SpaceX anymore.

I don't think they stopped development of that tech just because some people left.

They clearly invested massively in engine development from then on. I don't think they simply stopped.

And Raptor has turned into the best engine ever since then. Likely the used lots of simulation in development.

Raptor has since exceeded its target performance, maybe they ran out of frontiers to explore?

I don’t understand your comment. What does Raptor have to do with CFD method developments? What is the frontier? What does it mean to run out of frontiers? Shouldn’t there be more resources rather than fewer?

Everyone keeps posting this, but there's no update on that video.

They seem kinda busy over there, maybe they have higher priorities?

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