Absolute top non-economy vehicle...
Ran across an interesting article on people reverse-engineering the Saturn V engines: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life | Ars Technica Interesting quotes:
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I thought the nasa space shuttle crawler had the top spot in worse fuel economy challenge?
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I'm trying to wrap my mind around 60 gigawatts.
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I am sure there was a misplaced decimal as well as only an 80% efficiency when converting one source of energy to another. :thumbup:
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NASA people are simply genius as far the talent for mechanics and electronics is concerned. So doing this must not have been a great deal for them.
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Granted, it took five motors to do that. Still: dang. [edit] Whoops, OP already pointed this tidbit out. Ah well. It bears repeating in my opinion. Pulse and glide: heh. Skylab was lofted by a Saturn V and covered approximately 900,000,000 miles during its lifetime. That is, shall we say, one hell of a glide. Skylab was a modified S-IVb stage, so it launched atop a S-I and S-II for a combined fuel consumption of (guessing wildly with a little reference help) about 2,500,000 kilos. 560km per kilo of fuel is pretty good. |
starting here: 560km per kilo
Kerosene has about 0.93 times as much energy by weight as gasoline gas weighs 6 lbs/gallon energy wise 1kg Kerosene=1/0.93=1.08 kg of gas 1.08kg of gas = 2.38 lb of gas volume wise 2.38 lb of gas /6 = 0.4 gallons 560km=347miles. so 347mi/0.4 gal = 867 MPG FTW!!! :D EDIT: fixed missing kg to lb conversion DOH: the rocket in question uses Kerosene, not hydrogen! |
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You probably need to also factor the weight of Skylab into the equation... how many Buicks to a Skylab? :D
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OK
-mort |
fixed :/ 867 mpg in that case.
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Skylab launch weight, according to NASA: "about 100 tons." Thanks for the precision, NASA. Some of us non-eggheads are pretty smart, go ahead and hit us with hard data, we can take it.
That said, it's hard to find curb weights for 40-year-old cars, so the weight I'm using is for a Buick Skylark, since it's from the bread and butter "intermediate" size range and I could find a weight for it: 3491lbs. 100 t= 200,000 / 3491 = 57.29 Buicks. Call it 57, and a horse blanket in the trunk of each one. Gonna need insulation, it can get cold/hot in space. 57 Buicks x 867mpg = 49,419 miles per gallon per Buick. That's pretty good, no matter how you slice it. But if Heavy Metal has taught us anything, we're actually going to need Corvettes if we want to land safely. |
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