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Successful First Launch of Aerospike Engine
ScottKin writes "CSULB announced that on September 21st they achieved a milestone in aerospace engineering when they successfully launched their 'Prospector 2' rocket powered by an 'Aerospike' engine. What makes this remarkable is that even NASA had trouble with testing their incarnation of an Aerospike engine - but the Linear Aerospike Engine is quite a different beast. More info on this definitely-newsworthy even can be found at the California Space Authority website."
... out of respect for the family of the just deceased web-server, no slashdotting jokes please.
NASA just gets in the way. Hidebound bureaucracy never solved a thing.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The sea level thrust of this engince (204,420 lbf) is equivalent to 900,404 Newtons.
In comparison, the Space Shuttle engines produce 2,174,286 Newtons at sea level.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
It isn't clear what they did differently from the others who have tried this. Yes, I understand theirs is not a linear engine like Lockheed's. But I doubt the older versions that are discussed in the article were linear. Is there something else that is different? New materials? Some other breakthrough?
but shouldn't money be spent on the space elevator?
Am I wrong? Is there a need for both the space elevator and cheap and efficient rockets?
here ;)
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Thanks Chris
If you're not a rocket scientist, here's a very readable introduction to aerospike engines.
Caution: It is rocket science, and a little bit of maths is required to appreciate even this introduction.
http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/coe/ae/rockets/aeros pike/ft-1/flight-1.htm
I guess that's a form of success. But there's probably a reason why everyone else is still doing ground tests.
Haxalot, how did you sneak/find a picture of goatse in the URL? That's scary!
I for one invite our off-topic moderating overlords!
Sounds like though the engine worked as planned, everything else that had anything to do with the rocket, it's payload, camera, and rescue chute were fucked...
This is Slashdot for fsck's sake, let's hear about it in terms of elephants, swallows carrying coconuts, the size of San Francisco or SCO licences.
The rationality that is creeping into Slashdot is disturbing.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
... we hear that Nigeria has blasted a satellite into orbit. No comments have been made about a purported increased need for broadband satellite internet access...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Great.
Though the benefit of a aerospike nozzle is effective only in a flight through which the back pressure varies (i.e. sealevel to very high, like SSTO), at now, the aerospike-nozzle-powered flight itself is important.
Besides, this rocket was made by students. What kind of other space engine development are there in the world?
The motor worked except that, well actually it went badly wrong very soon after launch. Combustion gases went the wrong way and caused the engine to malfunction.
Result: crash. Destruction of payload.
I guess the definition of success came from the people who defined "interception" of Scuds by Patriots in Gulf war 1 as meaning more or less that both missiles were in the air at the same time.
Meanwhile, relatively primitive Russian rockets continue very reliable and Ariane just put up another two comms satellites last night, plus the European moon mission which is aiming for some sort of record as the slowest trip to the Moon ever. Far from being an endorsement of private research versus NASA, it suggests that caution and extensive testing remains the norm in anything to do with rocketry. Even if the next flight is successful, I guess a huge amount of further work would be needed before anyone would risk a real commercial payload on a rocket using this nozzle technology.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If you are not a rocket scientist, that translates to much zoom per pound mass.
Does the "California Space Authority" bother anyone else besides me? What's next, Arnold calling himself "big chief" of independent California and wearing feathers on his head?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"The government plans to use the $13 million satellite to monitor water resources, soil erosion, deforestation and natural or man-made disasters, space agency spokesman Solomon Olaniyi told The Associated Press.
It will be used to surveil military facilities and the country's crude oil pipelines and infrastructure. Nigeria is one of the world's largest exporters of oil, but thieves siphon off hundreds of thousands of barrels daily."
Of course, both ABCNEWS and Nigeria have their own share of idiots, who can't pu two and two together and discover satellite is a (possibly very efficient) way to enrich the nation:
"On Earth, however, Nigeria is struggling to provide 132 million citizens with clean water, basic health services and education.
Most villages outside state capitals have no running water or electricity, 70 percent of the country's roads are dirt tracks, and over 30 percent of the population is illiterate. Only nine in every 1,000 residents has a telephone, only six in 1,000 a computer, according to the World Bank. Annual per capital income is about $290.
"The satellite is a waste of money," said 21-year-old Gabriel Mordi, selling mobile phone cards on a dusty street in Lagos, a city that seen from above is a colossal sprawl of millions of rusting tin-roof shacks and palm trees."
Better make this AC.
>What kind of other space engine development are there in the world?
What kind of other space engine development by students are there in the world?
At last, we're one step closer to the X302. Now, if only we can get the Goa'uld hyperdrive to work, we're in business.
I was wondering how long before a Spike plug engine would fly.
Altho it terminated after a couple hundred feet, we know one thing. It can lift off. The hardest part of any flight.
All you nay-sayers, go fly a god damn kite.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
A plug nozzle is a tapering nozzle; ideally tapering down to infinity, you always chop it off short for obvious reasons.
An aerospike nozzle is a plug nozzle but it gets its name because you're supposed to inject gas in the base to provide extra pressure - that gas is the 'air' spike. And the main advantages come about because you dynamically adjust the pressure of the base dependent on the vehicle speed to optimise the shape of the aerospike and give maximum possible thrust. (Basically the air spike pushes on the exhaust gases which in turn push on the ambient air, the result is that the nozzle can compensate for the atmospheric pressure changes over the flight envelope better than a conventional 'bell nozzle').
Now this nozzle had no base gas injection, so is in fact just a plug nozzle. Plug nozzles aren't bad, but aren't necessarily anything like as good as an aerospike.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Do you think MSBs were created out of thin air?
:-)
No, I don't think Most Significant Bytes were created out of thin air. On very very thin silicon wafers, yes - but not out of air.
Now if you can track them back to the V2 engine - good for you!
I do however think they can have some problems getting internation acceptance using those colonial (or imperial, who keeps track of who made what a colony) units though...
Can you back that up? From what I read, the aerospike tests went fine. A friend, one of the Shuttle engine designers and who was in contact with the linear aerospike group at Rocketdyne, said he heard that the aerospike delivered the expected thrust during its ground tests. So what troubles are you referring to?
I often wondered if NASA didn't screw up cancelling the X-33. The only major failure that I know of in that project was the fuel tank and given that it was the one of the only two they ever made, it seemed like giving up cooking because your first few tries end up tasting lousy. When the X-33 tried to recover from the tank failure by testing the craft with temporary aluminum replacement tanks, NASA pulled the plug because the extra weight of the temporary tanks would compromise the test rocket's performance. Seemed short sighted at the time and I've never seen anything since that indicated it was the right thing to do.
Real innovation in this engine is the use of ablative shielding inside the chamber. But that makes it even harder to overcome the original problem of this type of engine; having steady and stable burn/gas flow (ie. equal thrust) around the annulus. Linear aerospike engine does this by replacing one large chamber with numerous small ones which are easier to control.
...Nigeria entered back to stone age.
This has some of the exact same quotes from above so it might be a mirror.
I talked with one of the x-33 project managers in 96 before the tanks came apart and he told me then that they were underfunded. There was very little room in the budget for faliures along the way.
Your comment about politics made me wonder if Goldwin's cheaper-better-faster mantra not working out on X-33 had anything to do with NASA getting cold feet.
Further, the Patriot 2 system in the 2nd Gulf War (also known as the Liberation of New Texas) has saved the lives of several coalition servicemen on multiple occasions. This is not counting the British pilot that was wrongly identified as an incoming threat (that'll teach them to leave their transponders off).
With the launches of Al Hussein SCUDs, which were a violation of the UN agreements with Iraq, it sure is a good thing they got the successes they did.
If you really want to talk success stories from the world of BMD Star Wars, go look up the THEL system in regular use in Israel. I think Raytheon makes it. Now if only we could get a launch system powerful enough to put the SBL into orbit.
Is it me, or were the students at Cal State Long Beach a bit ambitous to put payloads into an untested rocket system? I can't wait for Iraq to join the ol' space race in 15 years. It would be a real triumph of the free people there to step forward in technologies besides WMD.
I would hope that some point, the whole issue could be revisited: as long as the engine design has been proven, the tank design/manufacture could always be improved.
It's about damned time someone designed a propulsion system based upon the female reproductive anatomy.
"Today, we unveil the future of jet propulsion, the key to the successful design and implementation of reusable low-orbit passenger aircraft, the vaginal hyperorifice dri... uh... I mean, Linear Aerospike Thruster".
Uh I have to call you on that.
M P_ Budget_Previous.html
NASA gets POTS AND POTS of money. BILLIONS. They've just been WASTING it.
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/
Think of it - a glider, a hydrogen fueled rocket and two solid state boosters all stuck together.
Compare that with the 3 stage rocket that sent astronauts to the moon.
The glider and crap is supposed to be cheaper due to reusability but is it? So far the figures show it isn't.
It'll make sense if NASA were spending billions getting to Mars since that's new territory. But having to spend billions to get stuff into low earth orbit??
It'll also make sense if they had spent billions and produced a manned space craft with a few yawning people in the command centre and no crowd of people clapping hands and cheering after a typical take off or landing.
Low earth orbit is not cutting edge. 1960s was manned low earth orbit. 1970s humans to moon and back. 1980s was the shuttle (ok fine it proved you could do the fancy glider thing and you got fancy materials like aerogel), 1990s was the shuttle going bang during take off. 2000s = shuttle going bang during landing. Oh yeah there was the private space tourist thing, which was a milestone, but the Russians did that.
Public doesn't give a crap about space exploration? Maybe. But I can bet the public isn't impressed about spending billions to repeat what was done in the 1960s. Especially after the achievements of the 1970s.
Show me where the NASA innovation is from so far and I bet you can drop the bleeding red ink shuttle and you won't be missing the innovation. They might be able to afford real innovative stuff after that. Stuff that might renew public interest.
Time to drop the shuttle. And the people who refuse to let it go.
No. Not in my opinion.
1) The fail scenarios of space elevators are not very good. Think about the possible fail scenarios from the various areas: political, military, natural disaster, engineering. Consider the impacts and probabilities.
2) Space elevators only get you up to geostationary (and maybe 2X), they don't get you much further than that.
3) From the perspective of the Solar System, they are a very expensive form of navel gazing.
From a longer term perspective it is better to spend the resources on finding cheaper ways to get to geostationary and to other planets. And maybe even other systems.
Once we reach the technological level to do all that cheaply, THEN we can consider building the space elevator - because it'll be a piece of cake by then. Have all the tech to make it viable.
Just because you think you've figured out how to make the concrete doesn't mean you should start building a skyscraper. Don't try to build skyscrapers before you develop cranes and the rest of the tech and systems.
Dear Friend,
I am Dr Joseph Akinyede, Director of the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency. I have an urgent and very confidential business proposition for you.
[confidential stuff snipped]
If you are interested, please reply immediately via the private email address below. Upon your response, I shall then provide you with more details and relevant documents that will help you understand the transaction.
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require your assistance to invest my share in your country.
Would you classify that as a launch problem, or a design problem?
To adress the most obvious errors in your arguments, as first off space elevators can get you to other planets via slingshotting and as such doesn't limit you to geostationary and lower, forinstance the proposed 100.000 kilometer space elevator could at the least slingshot you to as far as jupiter.
Secondly space elevators are very cheap in operation, looking at other modes of getting into geostationary is fine, but if we want to stay realistic, a space elevator will cut prices likely by over a hundred fold. That's more cutting of costs then any other solution proposed yet. As for fail scenarios, I don't quite see what the problems are in that field. Enviromentally seen they don't seem to form much of a problem not even with reentry burn up. You just can't make all to toxic stuff with the proposed builiding materials. Engineering wise there certaintly isn't a problem for the space elevator.
So to place your analogy with concrete in a proper context, we already have all the systems needed for supporting a space elevator construction except a proper concrete production plant. (as in we don't have a mass produced way for making nanotubes)
As such building a space elevator will be a piece of cake once the nanotubes can be produced.
It's great for some college kids, but it's not bleeding edge like some think. Lots of spin,not many facts (but hey, thats why the marketing guys make the big bucks and we get to try to make what they say work!)
Linear aerospike rocket engines have been around for more than 30 years. They were created by Air Forc in the early 1960s, Rocketdyne developed the technology for both linear and annular aerospike engines during the mid-1960s, ground testing various designs into the 1970s.Aerospike engines were proposed for use on the Space Shuttle, but the engine was turned down because the technology was considered too immature at the time. Since then, Rocketdyne has accomplished 73 laboratory and ground-test firings, with over 4,000 seconds of operation of this type engine. (the kids flew for FOUR seconds, 3 orders of magnitude LESS)
The RS-68 Rocketdyne aerospike LIQUID Fueled engine was planned for the X-33 SSTO (cancelled) but linear aerospike engines of up to 430,000 lbs thrust (XRS22200) have been sucessfully tested.
In other words who ever wrote the press release for the University didn't do the research. The kids are back when the Nazi's were in the 1940s.
Caveman discovers that holding small end of club and bashing skulls with the big end results in fewer required blows.
One day, strapping a giant firecracker to your ass as a means of escaping the bounds of Earth's gravity will seem as primative as bashing skulls with clubs. Most of the fuel in a rocket is consumed to propel the gigantic mass of fuel.
Creating a more efficient rocket engine nozzle does nothing but prolong the amount of time we rely on rocket engines. Does it really make much difference whether you use 20 bazillion pounds of fuel to put a satellite in orbit compared to 21 bazillion? Just think how much fuel they would have saved if they hadn't launched the rocket at all.
While the X-33 spacecraft itself never got off the ground, ground tests of the X-33's linear aerospike engine were quite successful. The reason the project was canceled dealt with the repeated failures of the composite fuel tanks.
but i find space an amazing field of study what would i have to do to get a job writing code for nasa or another space authority and what systems would i have to study i know nasa runs on solaris and other unix. thanks
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
we should actually forget mars for now develop a space station on the moon use that for our launches cuz the gravity is less we'll need less power aka less money to launch from there and it'll give us a bigger place to perform experiments*the moon that is* forget these orbiting space stations they are stupid the moon owns.
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Exactly right. I was thinking the same thing when I saw the pictures.
;-)
Two other advantages of the aerospike over the plug: an aerdynamic spike is much lighter than a material one, and the blunter base of an aerospike can stand up to reentry heating on a tail-first reentry much better than a material spike. Oh, and you don't have to worry about asymmetric heating and erosion with an aerospike. Um, the three other advantages...
-- Alastair
From the site provided in another link:
The graphite outer ring (blue) was not perfectly sealed with the bottom of the chamber (grey) and moved downward very slightly. This opened several gas paths between the ring and the ablative material (beige) which then melted the back of the chamber and led to thrust vectoring. This phenomenon did not occur during the static fire test.
So it looks like the test did ultimately fail due to a problem with the engine. Nevertheless, the rocket did fly.
__
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist.
Even though the motor failed in flight, this was still a 'successful' test that 'met its objectives". In the process of destroying the vehicle, the flight demonstrated nothing not already demonstrated on the test stand.
These guys have been learning PR from NASA and Microsoft.
Probably any intelligent person could figure out this convoluted explanation of aerospike engines. But few will bother, because it is convoluted. Perhaps you need all the history and technical background to understand the fine detail. But a good writer would start out with some kind of superficial explanation, so the reader can get some sense of why this material is important and acquire some kind of mental handle before plunging into the hard stuff.
The links in the ScottKin's original submission are even less impressive. Garvey just issues a press release talking about how cool their aerospike engine is, without the tiniest hint as to WTF an aerospike engine is. (Yeah, that will make people take notice!) The "California Space Authority" (someone's read too much Jerry Pournelle) site tries to explain, but utterly fails. And the Boeing site is most pathetic of all, with its pound-feet and square inches. I mean, I can understand that its politically impossible to metricize the U.S. consumer. But these guys are supposed to be the world's leading aerospace engineers! Yet decades after the rest of the world has gone metric, and after screwup after screwup after screwup in metric-English conversion, these "rocket scientists" refuse to modernize their measurements. Is it any wonder the rest of the world thinks we're a bunch of arrogant assholes?
Bureaucracy is not the only problem. Private organisations can be bureaucratic, too. The real problem seems to me to be one of perverse incentives.
1) NASA appears to lack a intentional mission. It's de-facto publically assumed mission is something along lines of "do space stuff". But it has few real "space stuff" goals, because it has no (profit) incentive to go there. Shuttle "science experiments" are ludicrous. The ISS does nothing and goes nowhere, expensively.
In reality, as evidenced by all the politicians' attitudes to NASA (even during their condolence speeches), its real mission is: national self-congratulation, international self-promotion, congressional pork, and a vague continuance of the "sense of progress" of the moon landing years.
Naturally the above is not conducive to good "space stuff".
2) NASA is funded, not invested in. Their budget isn't going away (unless, perversely, they demonstrate they can do more with less, which would lead to them being de-funded). The source of their money is politicians, not commercial profits. Actual success brings them no payback, and failure does them no harm. The incentives this gives are: pocket the budget, don't waste it on any actual space stuff, and beg continually for more funding.
3) For this funding, they are expcted to produce immediate bigness, not gradual affordable advancement. Thus their attitude to problem solution consists of "throwing money at it".
A good analogy here is the architechtural construction techniques of the Egyptian pharaohs. You can build quite big pyramids if you throw a fortune and an army of slaves at the job. But it doesn't scale, it doesn't advance the state of the art, and, crucially, it doesn't get any cheaper when you do it more often. It was the brick-and-mortar commercial construction industry that led via engineering advances to modern skyscraper construction.
When NASA complains of underfunding, it's analogous to the pharaonic architects complaining that their skyscraper plans are hobbled by the shortage of slaves.
Space industry, employee and tourist housing, etc. requires what will ultimately be shipping goods into orbit by the megaton. This means the cheapest possible shipping method. The possibilities are the Space Elevator and very, very large rail guns. The rail gun is probably possible, the Elevator maybe possible depending on developments in carbon nanotube technology. The Elevator is so much cheaper that it must be tried first if possible.
With respect to safety, any method for getting megatons of freight into orbit means that if the payload goes down instead of up, anyone with the misfortune to be on the downside is in a world of hurt. Making the elevator safer is probably easier than making either rail guns or rocket or scramjet vehicles safer.
Finally, I guess you just don't get how the dynamics of space flight change once one gets 22K miles away from Earth's gravity well.
Given space-based facilities, building space vehicles which will not require the penalty weight required to deal with getting into and out of Earth's atmosphere. Space tugs and other kinds of vehicles intended to get from LEO to lunar orbit get real easy. Lunar facilities capable of launching raw material payloads to LEO, perhaps via a Lunar Space Elevator and space tugs become practical.
The bottom line is that planetary exploration vehicles which would take hundreds of billions of dollars built here and launched into orbit might take a few megabucks to build once one has a space infrastructure built via Space Elevator.
IMHO, the best economic justification for a Space Elevator and shipping up infrastructure is a permanent solution to Earth's current and future energy needs via power satellites. The numbers get a lot more interesting if one can mine silica and turn it into zone-refined silicon on the Lunar surface and turn it into crystalline silicon in orbit. Once such an infrastructure to support this project is built, space industrial parks to take advantage of cheap energy and cheap raw materials can piggyback on it and academic and industrial research can be done cheaply as well. An astrophysicist or astronomer might be able to get to an orbital research facility for a year for a cost to her academic institution no worse than a trip to Antarctica today.
So don't look at a Space Elevator as the end of exploration and exploitation of the Solar System. Look at it as the beginning.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I don't know what your problem is fm6, but that was a very well-written site on the aerospike that clearly lays out what it is, how it works, and what makes it worth studying. By contrast, your ill-conceived diatribe against the entire aerospace industry makes you the one who sounds like the "arrogant asshole" around here.