DailyDirt: Rocket Engines, Old And New
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Rockets capable of sending payloads into orbit aren’t too common. Not surprisingly, a vehicle that has to control an enormous explosion and direct the thrust in a specified direction isn’t easy to make reliable. So when rocket scientists have created a design that works, it doesn’t make that much sense to radically change the design without good reasons. Here are just a few examples of rocket engines that are gradually evolving and improving as the demands of space launches grow.
- NASA’s younger rocket scientists needed to reverse engineer the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rockets and took astronauts to the moon. The lesson helped create the F-1B engine that will produce 1.8 million pounds of thrust — and use more modern manufacturing techniques to build it. [url]
- Blue Origin (another young aerospace company owned by a billionaire: Jeff Bezos, not Elon Musk) will partner with the United Launch Alliance to create the BE-4 engine. The BE-4 engine will replace the use of Russian rocket engines and give NASA another domestic option for launching stuff into space. [url]
- Orbital Sciences Corp is considering a replacement engine for the AJ-26 engines it currently uses — which are based on Soviet-era NK-33 engines developed in the 1960s. ATK could supply a solid rocket engine suitable for the first stage of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket which has successfully sent re-supply payloads to the International Space Station. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: aj-26 engine, antares, be-4 engine, f-1 engine, iss, manned missions, nk-33 engine, rockets, saturn v, space, space exploration
Companies: blue origin, nasa, orbital sciences corp, united launch alliance
Comments on “DailyDirt: Rocket Engines, Old And New”
WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
Chemical rockets don’t “explode”. It’s just “combustion”. An explosion involves a shockwave, which triggers further uncontrolled combustion in a runaway process. Regular old burning does not.
Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
Depends on the rocket.
“Old bang-bang” does involve explosions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Re: Re: "Old bang-bang" does involve explosions
Notwithstanding I was careful to say “chemical rockets”, I’m still not sure Project Orion counts as a “rocket”. The only thing it has in common with “rockets” is they both rely on Newton’s Third Law.
Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
“Chemical rockets don’t explode”.
It’s possible that the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger might not agree with that assessment.
We could say that there are essentially two types of “explosions” — deflagration and detonation, the latter of which produces an intense supersonic shock wave.
Re: Re: the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger might not agree with that assessment.
Yes they would, as would the experts who investigated the disaster.
Challenger broke up from severely mismatched thrust forces, it did not detonate.
Re: Re: Re: the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger might not agree with that assessment.
Your facts are interfering with the troll parade.
Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
I’m not so sure I entirely agree with your definition of “explosion”. An explosion doesn’t even necessarily involve combustion — it is simply a rapid increase in volume that releases a lot of energy very rapidly. If you inflate a balloon too far, you get an explosion.
Chemical explosives are, at heart, just materials that rapidly combust. Slower combustibles, such as gunpowder or rocket fuel, need to be contained in a pressure vessel to explode. High explosives are just materials that combust so rapidly that they don’t need a pressure vessel to cause an explosion.
Chemical rockets absolutely can explode, in essentially the same manner that a firecracker explodes.
Re: Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
I never heard balloons that you overinflate described as “exploding”, only as “bursting”.
I agree there might be an ambiguity over the meaning of “explosion”, as meaning any kind of catastrophic structural failure that scatters pieces outwards (contrast an implosion). So the more specific term for what I’ve been describing here is “detonation”.
Regardless, “explosion” cannot be used to describe the behaviour of a chemical rocket under normal operation, contrary to what was stated in the article.
Re: Re: Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
““explosion” cannot be used to describe the behaviour of a chemical rocket under normal operation”
This is mostly true, although it’s not terribly inaccurate to say that a chemical rocket is a slow, controlled “explosion”, that is well within the gray area (like a popping balloon) that is technically an explosion but not of the type that normal people mean when they use the term.
I don’t really fault the article for this usage. It’s a sensationalistic way of putting it, but it’s not technically wrong.
Re: Re: Re:2 WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
When you pop a balloon, do bits of balloon go everywhere?
No, they don’t. When a balloon bursts, it simply tears into ribbons. Most of the ribbons still stay joined together. No explosion at all.
This is terrible news for the US taxpayer, as it would have been orders of magnitude less expensive to just keep using those dirt-cheap Russian rocket engines for the forseeable future.
I recently heard a talk by the main SpaceX rocket scientist.
The SpaceX engine is the most efficient engine since the Russian one was designed.
The SpaceX engine was designed to take humans to Mars & home. That’s why its fuel is something that can be manufactured on Mars.
SpaceX is dead serious about going to Mars.
Explode
There is a difference in the term explosion, regarding on type and release of the explosion. Every one that has unwrapped a firecracker and set it off knows of that effect. It is therefore called a controlled explosion. Or a burn off. But if something interrupts the flow of propellents, or the shockwave enters the combustion chamber, all bets are off. It’s the blocking of the chamber, that overpresurizes the chamber, degrading the performance, overheating the pot, usually the failure to deliver enough fuel, in the proper form that causes the problem.
totally true, there a lot of explosion types
what is it with rocket names?
regex [A-Z][A-Z]?-[1-9]?[0-9]