Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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!
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?
Most of the white stuff you see in the video is steam from cooling and sound supression systems. But, in EVERY combustion in air, even if burning pure hydrogen and oxygen, there is some amount of nitrous oxides produced from the nitrogen present in air. This is an inescapable fact of chemistry. But what you're seeing is water vapor.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Mist, actually. Steam, which is water in its gas state, is invisible. The bit that you can see is actually an aerosol of water in its liquid state.
The mixture is often referred to as "wet steam", but it's the wet bit that you can see, not the steam bit.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
Bring forward through time those same engineers with all of today's advancements and they'll stomp all over today's talent.
Bullshit. Give any group of talented engineers a sense of motivation, a nearly unlimited budget, and clear, specific goals, and they can do wonders.
The Manhattan project reached approximately 1% of all federal spending in its peak year. It had one aim: build an atom bomb. It had one main motivation: keep the bad guys (who had launched a sneak attack on us already) from taking over the world.
The Apollo program touched a massive 2.2% of all federal outlays in its peak year. It had three specifications: Man, Moon, Decade. It had one main motivation: keep the bad guys (who had put a satellite in orbit, and a man in space, first) from taking over the world. (Figuratively or literally, depending on your personal level of paranoia.)
NASA today sees about 0.6% of the federal budget: a proportion which has been shrinking steadily since the early 1990s. That funding is divided across a large number of programs and priorities. Not only do they not have clearly stated goals to guide them, they lack the funding to even maintain continuity in the programs (both scientific and engineering) which already exist.
Today's NASA has some superb engineers that I would readily stack up against those from any era in the agency's history. What NASA lacks is funding and leadership. The problem is political, not technical.
~Idarubicin