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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'."
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.
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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?
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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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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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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Someone I know refers to it a "cow-milker" :-P
I think it is interesting, huge weight savings over a pressure fed with none of the high-speed parts of a turbopump. Flowmetrics wasn't the first to come up with the idea although they were the first to put it on a rocket and have patented several ideas relating to it. I'd like to see it running in a bigger concept than the SDSU rocket though. (Steve and Carl, faculty advisors for the projects work at Flowmetrics)
(They were pumping martinis at the Joint Propulsion Conference 2 years ago... very nice... and yummy)
Different kind of risk.
The risk being talked about here is program risk... ie... the risk that using unproven technology will result in cost and schedule impacts to the project due to unforeseen problems. Not the risk of things going boom (although that can impact cost and schedule too... XD) Using proven, well-understood technologies reduces risk.
Think of it this way... if you're given a task to develop a program for $C dollars inside of Y months, are you going to use a well-established programming language or are you going to go with some new half-developed (but really nifty) one where you're playing debug the compiler as you work on your project?