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NASA Successfully Test Fires J-2X Engine.
tetrahedrassface writes "NASA successfully test fired the J-2X engine Wednesday for 500 seconds at Stennis Space Center. The J2-X is derived from the J2 engine from the Apollo Era, and will power the upper stage of the SLS. From the article: 'We have 500 seconds of good data, and the first look is that everything went great. The J-2X engine team and the SLS program as a whole are extremely happy that we accomplished a good, safe and successful test today,' said Mike Kynard, Space Launch System Engines Element Manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. 'This engine test firing gives us critical data to move forward in the engine's development.'"
so they rebuilt 1960's technology and it worked...so lets find those old engineers who designed stuff that actually worked and pat them on the back.
Send it up into orbit, stat. The Russians could use a shove.
They quite clearly said it was 499.97 seconds runtime!
That's the best smoke machine I've ever seen.
so they rebuilt 1960's technology and it worked...so lets find those old engineers who designed stuff that actually worked and pat them on the back.
If I remember correctly, the J-2X is a substantially improved version of the engine with a few hundred changes over the original J-2, but, yeah, this story would be more interesting if SLS was ever going to fly.
With some improvement... nothing much original ...
Ah, looks like I was thinking of the J-2S, which was apparently also called J-2X early in its development.
If the space race had continued with the vigour that it did instead of petering out after barely a decade, what could have been achieved and what would have already been achieved by now? Instead we reached the moon, gave a high five then twiddled our thumbs in LEO for the next few decades.
It seems to me like it was a lost opportunity not to maintain the speed of exploration.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
But I expected a large afterburner like exhaust.
It looked like a giant smoke machine.
Roughly 3 million taxpayer dollars a second for basically nothing?
It didn't make your intarwebs faster or your graphics resolution on WoW better, so you can safely go back to sleep and just ignore it.
Hey, that's my dad you're talking about! Dad worked on what was then called the J-2X (a different program from the current J-2X) during the Saturn program, and is still working for NASA on the new vehicles.
Uhmm, wasn't the Space Shuttle main engine also a J2 derivative? The J2 has been redesigned many times over the decades. It likely doesn't look much like the original drawings anymore...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The article says the J2-X uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as fuel. Does that imply the byproduct of the J2-X is water vapor? The old Apollo rockets used kerosene. I know NASA used a lot of water to control heat and vibration for shuttle launches and other rocket tests (which is likely what you see in the video)... but is that also the exhaust gas here?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
So much for the space commute to the orbital ball bearing factory and the weekends on Mars, eh?
Hasn't the general consensus been that Russian approach of having numerous cheap launchers better than one big powerful one? Why is money still being wasted on designing a huge launcher that won't be ready for years? Can't NASA just man rate some existing Delta or Atlas launchers, or give SpaceX a little more cash?
If the planet weren't busy with squabbling with each other and getting fat with short-term greed, we'd have at least a habitable station on the moon by now.
I wonder if it's a tribute to the anime?
Saber Marionette J2X
Funny series, by the way. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When burning stuff in air you get various nasty nitrogen oxides that turn into nitric acid once they hit the fluid in your lungs. That's with the cleanest flame you can get and that's a major reason why power stations have scrubbers. There's other stuff like a fuel the Russians used to use that is far nastier and even the unburnt liquid will make you sick if it gets on your skin.
"For early flights SLS has an 8.4-meter diameter core with three RS-25D/E engines, 8.4-meter upper stage with a J-2X engine, and two 5-segment solid rocket boosters." [wikipedia]
In other words, this is Direct's Jupiter J231, which they could have launched in 2012 instead of 2020.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
bullshit. Agricultural technology is insufficient today for Mars. Restriction enzymes weren't even discovered until the late 1970s. Look at the fungus on Mir and how it attacked with windows. How about the discovery last year that staying in microgravity for months might be permanently bad for eyesight.
The tech simply is not ready. Mir should have kept in orbit, and the human guinea pigs should have been kept in orbit for longer periods of time. Biosphere 2. That should have been done by, or used by NASA more aggressively. It was financed by a billionare.
I'd argue manned spaceflight in America is pork. pork. pork. pork. Look at the SLS's protectors in Congress. Thank god America has Burt Rutan, John Carmack, Bezos, and Elon Musk.
1310kN (thrust) / 448s (specific impulse) = 298kg/s exhaust mass flow rate
298kg/s * 1/9 = 33kg/s hydrogen mass flow rate * $5.50/kg = $181.50/s
298kg/s * 8/9 = 265kg/s oxygen mass flow rate * $3/kg = $795/s
$181.50/s + $795.00/s = $976.50/s
In other words, you're looking at under a thousand dollars per second to run the rocket motor, and about half a million for the total burn. Fuel is cheap, the real cost is in the vehicles themselves. That was the whole reason the Shuttle was supposed to be reusable. Had the Shuttle worked as intended, we would be looking at payload costs on the order of $2000/kg rather than the $20000+/kg it saw in practice. The problem with the Shuttle was the costly inspection and refurbishment after each flight.
Or are they also not buying into the bullshit cost savings served up by our friend Elon Musk?
The Space Launch System HLV (Heavy Lift Vehicle) as currently designed is fine. However, NASA's human spaceflight program needs a mission.
NASA's proposed SLS-HLV budget of $3 billion per year is much higher than is actually needed to fund an HLV, and appears to be an effort to spend the former Shuttle program funds for political purposes.
NASA needs a deep space mission. From the mission comes the plan; from the plan comes the things necessary for its implementation. NASA needs to fund missions, not things. The mission comes first.
This is exactly right. Apollo was successful because it started with a goal, to land a man on the moon. Kennedy didn't say "Let's build a big Saturn V booster and see what we can do with it later". If he had, it would've almost certainly led to program cancellation later by a Congress asking "What the hell are we spending all this money for?"
The SLS program as it stands now is guaranteed to be cancelled. (but not before many billions are funneled to the well-connected)
NASA today is not the young NASA of the 60's. It's become a bloated bureaucracy.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
Burt Rutan:
NASA's become a jobs program.
Thats a nice mist machine! I wanna go dance in front of it! :)
Back to the Future !
How about sticking an Ion jet on the payload only ? BooYah Focus ground based Frickin' Lasers ?
In terms of aviation, there have been substantial improvements in many related technologies that can be applied to commercial aircraft since the original 747 made its first test flight. Indeed the 747 itself has changed many times and what is coming off the production line today in some ways doesn't even resemble the aircraft that was originally produced.
To pull this argument completely to pieces, Boeing even has plans to replace the 747 due to some of the changes in aviation technology that essentially require a complete clean-sheet redesign of the aircraft. There have been improvements in the technology, and sometimes when you have a wide swath of technological improvements it can be a good time to look at something new.
This said, as was the case for the 747 and the original J-2 engine, what is being expected out of these devices is precisely what was wanted when they were original built in the 1960's. It shouldn't be surprising that something very similar is able to perform the very same task. I use a toaster to warm my bread with a device that looks very similar to what my grandmother had when I was a little child.
The article says the rocket costs $10 billion.
The whole Large Hadron Collider cost $9 billion.
How can a single rocket, a tube filled with fuel, cost $10 billion? Please explain.
Eliminate squabbling and you have rule by consensus. There is no way rule by consensus would produce a moon base.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If it's in space you don't fucking care about the emissions anyway because nobody is there to breath the stuff. What is it about this increasingly common trend here of deliberately pretending to be dumb to "win" an argument after a mistake has been made? Is it due to some bad example from politics or something?
Look at a photo of a rocket in action. Notice that great big flame coming out. Since the test was in an atmosphere you would get some NOx from that flame burning in air which is one reason to have water available to stop it being a problem.
This is all pointless anyway because you do not seem to be understanding (or more likely pretending not to understand) the difference between discussing things in general and not specifics. I was pointing out something about combustion in air that you did not appear to be aware of.
Yes, but the shape, function and performance hasn't changed to the degree that it's ten thousand times faster, lighter, stronger, etc. It doesn't scale to space. Our technology doesn't, and it won't. Ever. Deal with it. Our "advances" are really about trying to squeeze every last Joule from our dwindling fossil fuels, because we have nothing else.
Look at this comment, for example: "If the planet weren't busy with squabbling with each other and getting fat with short-term greed, we'd have at least a habitable station on the moon by now."
What the christ is so important or appealing about a Moon base? Because you saw a movie or read sci-fi? It's never going to work or be practical, you can put as much carbon fiber as you want in a 747, that won't change the basic reality that space is empty, harsh and deadly, and humans are fragile, short-lived and not adapted for space.
Which is it? The article uses it both ways... Is there an editor in the house?!
to bring the project in significantly under budget, then yes, the thing might actually fly someday. Otherwise, it's just another waste of money. In the last 10 years, SpaceX has built up an entire booster family (and attendant infrastructure) for less money than SLS is projected to cost per launch .
In a few more years, when SpaceX is flying astronauts to the ISS, and has an even bigger booster than SLS on the drawing board, then SLS will finally die a long overdue death. It's a shame to waste all that money, but when Congress is owned by corporate interests there's no easy way around that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
In the video there is a gentleman looking through a periscope (1'08") in what I would interpret to be the bunker in case of explosion (with a couple of red covered kill switches?). Then shortly after (1'30"), while the rocket is still burning, it shows a large group of people watching from a relatively short distance away. What gives? Not that I wouldn't mind seeing something like that relatively close!
Not sure if it was a repeat of yesterday's test, but they lit off something big on one of the test stands today at just a bit before 2PM local. Those things rattle the windows where I work on Stennis.
Actually the risk is more one of sounding like you were too lazy to do even the most basic google search and reading about the J-2X.
There were multiple reasons why the J-2 was selected as the base starting point for a secondary stage engine, mainly the existing performance parameters from the original design and the cost savings gained by not starting from scratch.
However, the J-2X actually has a significant amount of R&D that have gone into improvements well beyond the old design.
This is a decent short video on the J-2X re-engineering work.
If communist rule continues in Chine (which I'd personally prefer not to happen), it will be interesting to see what they achieve over the next 20 years or so.
Yes, there is always the benevolent dictator path - though you get the good (like a string of economic growth) with the bad (almost constant rioting and general human rights abuses). Though China is far more complicated than a simple dictatorship - there is actually quite a bit of conflict behind the scenes - it's just that at the end of the day there is only one party.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.