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New Rocket Engine Successfully Tested
inetsee writes "XCOR Aerospace announced that their new methane-oxygen rocket engine has been tested successfully. This is reported to be the first successful test of an engine using the combination of methane and oxygen as fuel. The fuel has higher specific impulse than kerosene and oxygen, but until now has been thought to have too much 'technology risk'."
but until now has been thought to have too much 'technology risk
Whats the risk the smell?
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I actually have a crapload of methane to donate, whom do I contact?
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Is there more to NASA's side of the story or is this a further sign of their incompetence?
The article paints a picture where anyone would be an idiot to skip research into this type of engine and then says NASA was doing so because of "risk". I doubt that's the whole side of the story but if even a smidgin of it's true that's yet another major flaw exhibited by NASA. Why are we trying to save the shuttle again?
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There hasn't been much use, because rocket design has been on a different track than XCOR. Kerosine engines are primarily used for their high thrust to weight ratios, which help get a rocket off the ground. Once the rocket is in flight, the first stage is usually dropped in favor of a more powerful engine, such as Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen engines. LHOx has the highest specific impulse of any fuel deployed to date; even more efficient than the methane-oxygen engines they're proposing.
The problem is that XCOR is working on a different track than NASA and the large rocket manufacturers. They're focusing on winged takeoff and landing, where high thrust to weight ratios aren't as important, and can be sacrificed for greater efficiency. (For comparison, the kerosine F-1 engines on the Saturn V produced 1.5 million lbf compared to the 7,500 lbf targetted by this engine.) So the methane-oxy engine development has less to do with politics, and more to do with the practical matters of meeting the targetted design goals.
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By far the most critical aspect of this for me is its practicality for use in Mars exploration or, more to the point, colonization. While it's obviously too soon to colonize anything at a reasonable price (and real colonization will only occur when we can get some prospect of a return commensurate to the colossal investment) but the sooner the requisite technologies enter wide use, the sooner their price starts to drop, the more hospitable the cost/benefit balance sheet begins to look. Little things like this could make ten years worth of difference.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
...as in the completely undefined "technology risk".
(I mean, as in, let me go combine hydrogen with carbon and oxygen, and see what happens......)
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...and the cow jumped (?) over the moon...
Methane gas is utterly renewable. You can make it from shit, literally, and without any special equipment. The only special thing you need is a way to compress it to store it... say 200 psi tops? The only thing I can't find is a small compressor suitable for this purpose on a household scale. You can actually just run your waste into the bottom of a pond along with a steady flow of water, tent it, and capture methane - you bubble it through water to purify it. The compressing is the only issue left...
Side note: While searching for goodies I found this url which attempted to root my computer. No idea how successful it was, I'm off to go run defender and spybot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Guess the price of Methane will be going up now... We've got 2 factors agast us getting reliable, cheap methan fuel cells: NASA is going to use truly massive amounts of it, and Bison are starting to replace cows as a reliable meat source (fyi, bison make as little as 10% of the methane that cows do, a more greenhouse friendly meat source, and it also tastes better too).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
So the methane-oxy engine development has less to do with politics, and more to do with the practical matters of meeting the targetted design goals.
No, it has more to do with the subcontract they have with ATK to do research for NASA LINK. This pays the bills while they play with their winged rocket-plane.
For comparison, the kerosine F-1 engines on the Saturn V produced 1.5 million lbf compared to the 7,500 lbf targetted by this engine.
They were also pumping a lot more fuel and oxidizer per second (much larger m_dot). This is a small engine mounted to the back of a trailer. You could (almost) wrap your hands around it. The F-1's chamber is quite a bit bigger.
Is it just me, or do those images look like CG?
Having one organization, with one budget (NASA) works fine when you've got a big enough budget. However, politics and manpower constraints limit the number of avenues you can explore. Like with computers, having a monolithic space technology architecture can lead to a single point of failure.
What if a component is outlawed, or becomes extraordinarily expensive to produce? You end up with mountains of unusable applied technology.
This test demonstrates that the practical science behind space flight is getting diversified, and that can only be a good thing for ensuring the future of space flight.
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Armadillo Aerospace is considering exactly the same fuel. Some of the advantages are relatively high ISP (lower that LH2, but with a much smaller volume) and the fuel and the oxidizer (LOX) have more or less the same volume which can be a very good thing, depending on your vehicle configuration.
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Will this be rated in cowpower?
I can see it now - "Where do you stupid bovines think you're going? The mooooooooooon?"
Any combination of fuel and liquid oxygen carries great risk. What makes cryogenic methane more hazardous than, say, cryogenic hydrogen, or noncryogenic kerosene?
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'risk' isn't quite what people are making it out to be. Risk is the fact that a methane engine hasn't been built and operated before. By building and operating a methane engine, and improving its design (making it regeneratively cooled, using cryogenic methane as a fuel, passing x-thousand lights without incident, etc) reduces its relative risk.
NASA uses a scale called Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) which you can read about if you like. Operating this device and documenting it can help raise the TRL of methane engines.
Additionally, it is a 'risk reduction' effort because it could be a replacement for the engine of the CEV which right now is (I think) kerosene+LOX. If that falls through for some reason (what, I don't know...) there is a second option on the table. Again, reducing risk.
And yes, according to Zubrin, we can manufacture methane on Mars where the CEV will be headed in 15-20 years, so an adaptation of this might be a retrofit to the CEV someday. (but please, be critical thinkers when you read Zubrin...)
That is all.
"What's not to like?"
Patents.
'Cows' make milk. At the end of their useful milk-producing life they're WAY over the 30-month limit for sending them to slaughter. The animals used to make beef are almost exclusively bulls because you only need one, (or possibly two for genetic diversity) on your farm (as they're only use is getting the cows pregnant) and you send the rest of them off to become burgers (again, before they're 30 months old) so they don't get to produce much methane anyway.
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If we develop methane engine technology, could it possibly be used to return a space mission from planets with an abundance of frozen methane?
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NASA is paying for the research through a contract with ATK. XCOR is a subcontractor.
See, XCOR can't make money flying their rocket-planes around so they have to have government contracts to foot the bills. It was like this before the X-prize and will remain to be.
Now the X-prize itself and the X-cup? Yes, cool. But credit where credit is due. This is NASA research, not X-Prize stuff.
Bison are starting to replace cows as a reliable meat source
.019% of the global market. I wouldn't worry about methane production.: for every bison being raised for meat, there are 5,200 cattle.
I'm sure they are, for small-scale organic ranchers catering to prestige restaurants. For the other 99.98% of the market, cattle are still king. Compare the numbers: roughly 1.3 billion head of cattle worldwide (100m in the US), compared to only 350,000 bison remaining in the world, with 250,00 being raised for meat.
That means that bison have about
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Could you mix LOX and liquid methane in the correct proportion in the same fuel/oxidizer tank and eliminate 1/2 of the pumps/plumbing, etc?
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Another chemical engine. Been there, done that. Where are all those cool nuclear and ion engines I've been reading/hearing about for the last 30 years? You know the ones that promised us that mars was a couple weeks away and Jupiter was just a couple of months?
We tried out that ion engine a few years ago. If I remember it worked perfectly. Why haven't we put that in to service. The last probe we launch, pluto express, still used the tried and true brute force approach. It will take it about 20 years to get there. Where if we had strapped a nuclear powered plasma rocked they have been testing for the last 20 years I could already be bitch'n about how dull pluto is.
Come on guy's you've had the plasma rocket in a bottle for 10 years. Lets take it up, strap it to something, and see what the bitch can do.
Yes, I know nuclear plasma and ion can't get us off the ground so we'll still need chemical for that, for now. And I know you have to crawl before you can walk, but we've been crawling for 60 years now. Hell, we are still using the same basic technology that the nazi's where lobbing into London.
Let's get off the can and do something new for once.
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Here's a link to an old plan for Mars operations leveraging the ease of obtaining methane and oxygen on Mars.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Great! Now we can apply the Trans-Linear Vector Principle! And the fuel is so... fitting.
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It's goes by a standard organic chemistry nomenclature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkane
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Now, is "crapload" the metric unit?
"So this is why UFO's come to earth and probe our cattle..."
Lucky cattle.
Most of those places that have methane also have water in the form of ice. Heat it up a bit and you can not only use it to drink, but also electrolyze it for fuel. The advantage of methane over hydrogen in this case is that it doesn't require energy-intensive storage methods.
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With apologies to Graeme Edge and the Moody Blues:
Black thing, billowing, bursting forth with the power of 10 Billion butterfly farts, man with his flaming fire...Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It's like lighting a fart, but on a massive scale.
I, for one, welcome our Fart Drive space rockets.
Anyone know why the various images shows a kind of banding, almost as if the thrust had vertebrae? I'd expect to see one, but it's an interesting pattern that repeats all the way down.
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That appeared to me to be a nice illustration of "shock diamonds".
:)
You can get some really interesting designs out of high-speed flows, especially when you throw in some bright combustion.
I am partial to US technology in most matters but South Korea successfully tested a 20,000lb thrust methane engine last year. I believe that Japanese have something similar.
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Great info! I just want to add, because people tend to forget, that Isp and Thrust are related but separate quantities. Heavy hydrocarbons and polymers are good first-stage propellants because they give high thrust (F=ma). They use the big thrust to get up off the pad, then drop those stages for the higher-Isp propellants.
Like, oh, say ClF5 (chlorine pentafluoride). It's a nice oxidizer: dense, liquid at room temperature (given a bit of pressure), and highly energetic. Of course, there's the issue of it being hypergolic with human flesh (and nearly everything else -- asbestos burns in ClF5), but really, it's got a lot of things going for it. Use it with a little hydrazine (N2H4) for full effect. Of course, hydrazine has its own problems (it becomes explosive under pressure, and is carcinogenic if you live through handling it ;), but that doesn't seem to affect its popularity.
Fun facts to know and tell here.
Just junk food for thought...
Does anybody have any idea what this guy's talking about?
...in space, no one can hear you... fart...
Actually most places use artificial insemination and keep no bulls around. At least around here.
Bulls are kept at specialized facilities. They produce semen which then gets processed and cooled.
People who look to improve the performance of their livestock can choose the proper bull from a catalog and order the semen.
Pretty nice actually.
Bulls aren't much fun to work with anyway...
... and the power for this electrolysis process will come from where?
oh, I don't know... maybe a small onboard nuclear reactor or radio-isotope thermal generator?
Here's why.
Isp relates pretty directly to exhaust velocity. The difference is a unit conversion and some small correction factors.
Speed and force are separate ideas. Thrust is proportional to Isp *times the mass flow rate*. Throwing something heavy out the exhaust gives you more kick, but lifting and carrying something heavy is inefficient.
Ion drives show the tradeoff really well. They have spectacular Isp but the mass flow rate is a trickle. They have tiny amounts of thrust, but great fuel efficiency.
Specific impulse is what you need for efficient deep space travel. Thrust is what you need in order to correct the mistake of being on a planetary surface.
casing head drip, not just a bootleg replacement for gasoline anymore.
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Small nuclear reactors, similar to the kind the Navy has been using for years in submarines. They could also run something to generate a magnetic field that deflects cosmic rays and the worst of solar flares.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
And considering that cattle produce about 500 liters of methane per day, that's 650 billion liters of methane per day available (considering you capture all of it, which would probably be impossible.)
I just think it would be funny to drive around and see all these weather balloon's sticking out of the ass end of cows.
Have you thought about putting the compressor in a freezer? If the methane ran through a coil of copper tubing, you could make it more dense by cooling it prior to compression. When the compressed methane bottle is brought to room temp, it will be under higher pressure. The colder the freezer, the higher the compression
\not sure how much pressure could be gained this way, would have to crank the numbers
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The bottom line is that NASA has rocket engines that can do everything they want. The relevant point is, different rocket engines do some tasks better than others. Methane has its selling points, which the article notes, but it doesn't simply put all other fuels to shame or anything like that.
NASA has wanted to have a methane engine option for quite a while, but since they have other functional options, they haven't been willing to take money away from other projects to develop it. It's a risk in the sense that it's not a proven design (see my final two paragraphs). As such, they haven't made a commitment to it for any particular project. Now they've finally funded ATK (who sub-contracted X-Cor) to develop the engine, I believe with funding from the Constellation program.
The first studies that NASA did for the Orion CEV had it using a methane/oxygen engine for the extra performance. However, because of the timeline involved and the challenge in getting reliable performance from a non-hypergolic engine in deep space, they chose the safer and cheaper route from an engineering perspective of using a proven hydrazine fueled engine (from the Boeing Delta 2 upper stage) like the shuttle and apollo craft. It sounds like a methane engine may still be used for the new Lunar Surface Access Module (lander), which is on a slower development timeline than the Orion, and as an upgrade to the CEV.
I want to note that almost all flight-restartable rocket engines (off-hand, the only exception I know of is the old Saturn V J-2 second stage engine) use hypergolic fuels. Hypergolics are fuels which spontaneously ignite when combined. The shuttle uses methyl-hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which has a performance not far below kerosene and oxygen, the major drawback being its instability and toxicity.
The reason for accepting the drawbacks of hypergolics is they ignite with incomparable reliability. Before NASA is willing to commit to having a manned mission 150,000 miles from earth depend entirely on a non-hypergolic engine, they have to be absolutely sure that when they pour frigid oxygen and methane together together in the cold of space and throw a spark that it will ignite reliably and controllably. You can't just send an astronaut back there with a Zippo and a can of carb cleaner and hope for the best.
Shouldn't we be trying to utilize fuels that have a higher energy density than hydrogen? It's pretty cool that they got it to work with methane, so what about other, more energy-dense fuels like butane or even possibly kerosene or diesel? It would be alot cheaper to use commonly available fuels, instead of goind through the trouble of fractioning, distilling, cooling, and transporting liquid hydrogen, especially in the volumes that rockets require.
If I recall correctly, didn't Robert Goddard use liquid oxygen in gasoline in his early rockets?
Keep in mind, I am not a rocket scientist. I do build rockets, but they fail after launch more often than return.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
My father could make a killing as a NASA supplier if he just admitted to it instead of blamimg it on the dog.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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I got that reference faster than Skip Carmichael's corvette.
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Let's see what happens when Bush announces the US is developing nuclear engines for peaceful space exploration.
Clear, Dark Skies
This is all well and good, but chemical rockets will only take us to the near reaches of the solar system. Alternatives still have to be developed. Researchers have known this since the 1950s. http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5868-en.html
Maybe the new methane rockets could be used to lift nuclear rockets out of the atmosphere.