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]
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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
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WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
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Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
"Old bang-bang" does involve explosions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
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Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
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.
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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.
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Re: the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger might not agree with that assessment.
Challenger broke up from severely mismatched thrust forces, it did not detonate.
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Re: WHAT “Enormous 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.
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Explode
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Re: Re: the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger might not agree with that assessment.
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what is it with rocket names?
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Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
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.
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Re: Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
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.
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Re: "Old bang-bang" does involve explosions
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Re: WHAT “Enormous Explosion”?
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.
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