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Successful First Launch of Aerospike Engine

Posted by michael on from the whoosh-bang dept.

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."

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Re:thanks! did you see the foot? by tektrix · · Score: 3, Funny

    Uh . . . I think you're a bit confused here. The aerospike engine tested with the rocked develops 1000 lbf or 1356 Newtons/M, and the shuttle generates 2,174,286. That's 1/1603 the size of the shuttle. I think you were looking at the stats provided for the Boeing angine. All that said, the test vehicle could easily lift several 10's of gerbils. I imagine that the gerbils would hate the part about "transitioning into a ballistic terminal descent"