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NASA test fires hybrid rocket motor
akey writes "According to this CNN article, NASA engineers test fired a new hybrid rocket motor. It's not as combustible on its own as conventional solid-fuel motors, and much less expensive than liquid engines, and allegedly produces fewer noxious emissions than solid-fuel motors. An added bonus is that for the motor to burn, an oxidizing agent must be continuously injected -- unlike other solid-fuel motors, it can be turned off after ignition if necessary. It won't be ready for use on a scale for the Space Shuttle for a few years yet, but it's showing promise. "
poor rocket motor :( they always get fired. why not lay off some slackers elsewhere in the company instead??
Thad (a.k.a. Izaak)
While this hybrid motor may be a new thing for NASA, it's been around in hobby rocketry for years. People have played with it because it's functionality is closer to liquid engines without the danger or enormous cost. (almost all hobby rocketry uses solid-fuel engines.)
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This link shows just how simple they can be:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rene/w
It always struck me as being a fairly nifty idea, but then I'm not a propulsion or laser guy, so maybe it was all foolish to begin with . . .
"Paving the way to space and laughing all the way" is the motto of HAL5, a chapter of the National Space Society. They're trying to be the first amatuer group to get a rocket in orbit. The motto comes from their hybrid rocket -- it uses asfault and laughing gas for the propellant and oxidizer. It really works! They've been at it for a few years.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
Some of the big opponents of the space program claim that the shuttle's engines kill the ozone layer. I don't know whether this is due to the solid rocket boosters or not, but this new technology certainly won't hurt.
When we can get the gov't to privatize NASA, so its inherant conservatism is based on the engineering rather than beaureaucratic hoop jumping we all may just get to see our childrens children living in space. As it stands now, sadly, progress can be compared to a fast moving glacier. This is not a new technology. It's just sad that it takes forever to get anything 'new' approved for testing even...
use Signature::Witty;
This and linear aerospike engines are the hottest thing to come down the pike for NASA. While these have been around a while, I have a brother on the Lockheed development team. Pity all of the folks stuck with getting their news from CNN.
At last a post which doesn't have a single thing to do with paranoia.
But from what I understand the payload is still pretty low so for all the big stuff we'll still be using the good old fasion fuel.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
Ancient technology. A private company (American Rocket Co?) was doing this stuff ten years ago and might well have made orbit by now if the CEO (George Koopman) hadn't managed to get killed in an auto accident.
And sport rocketry hobbyists have been doing hybrids on a smaller scale for a few years now too.
NASA, particularly the rocket folks, have become as hidebound and fossilized as any other government bureaucracy. They innovate about as well as Microsoft.
-- Alastair
Too bad the article didn't mention AMROC, the American Rocket Company, that invented hybrid solid rockets years ago. I remember hearing about these back in the late 80's.
- Necron69
I can see it now: All it is able to lift is a little toy. Basically useless. Too much power, not enough punch. If power ever becomes infinite and cost is negligable, then maybe.
My buddy Nick Delchev holds the patent for a hybrid rocket motor that he developed about 20 years ago. Nick's motor runs on a solution of sucrose in H2O2 which is burned in a fluidized bed of MnO2. It screams! Lockheed used it to build a prototype "instant takeoff" helicopter some time back. It's so simple you could build it at your coffee table while watching The Simpson's. You can do a patent search on Nedelko Delchev if you care to see it.
What's left of AMROC has been sold (or licensed) to SpaceDev, see http://www.spacedev.com/HRD/HRD_home.htm
Apparently you can even observe test firings, if you happen to find yourself in the middle of Mississippi nowhere with nothing better to do.
http://www.ssc.nasa.gov/lines/propulsion/
The die-hard "environuts" see space travel as a symbol of . . . well, something they're dead-set against. If RTGs, non-LOX/LH2 motors, toxic materials of all sorts and white male astronauts were all done away with, there'd still be people whining about NASA on Pacifica Network call-in shows. On the other hand, every bit helps.
The loss of George Koopman was a tremendous blow, but the failure of their Single Engine Test vehicle on 10/5/89 was not a consequence of his accident. Decisions and circumstances unrelated to the engine technology pretty much doomed the proof of concept vehicle. Of course, we didn't recognize that until after the thing burned up like a stack of tires on the pad and sent a thick cloud of black smoke over Santa Maria, CA. (At least we proved the safety of hybrids - a solid or liquid rocket would have exploded spectacularly.)
AMROC spent a lot of effort optimizing their 75,000-lb thrust hybrid engine. I'm still bound by an NDA, but I can tell you that instabilities and resonances in the combustion flow occupied most of their attention. (The early ones would sputter and rumble and drone and even pop the casing or spew chunks of flaming rubber - it wasn't pretty.) I'm curious as to how this is affecting the current development of the 250,000lbf engine (the press releases mention nothing). Interestingly, SpaceDev of San Diego acquired AMROC's intellectual property last year, and they are not a member of the Hybrid Propulsion Demonstration Program consortium. Some of the AMROC principals helped establish the hybrid division at HMX, and they aren't involved, either. (It's hard not to jump to the conclusion that Lockheed and co. didn't intentionally ignore AMROC's legacy.)
But yes, AMROC went out of business just a few years ago. It was an amazing company to work for: the President, George A. Koopman, was ex-CIA, ex-Hollywood, and co-author of Neuropolitique with Timothy Leary. James Bennet, VP and later president, penned seminal commercial space policy, and acquired for AMROC one of the first commercial launch licenses. Investors in AMROC in the late 80's included the Belushi family, Robby Kreiger, the Leary estate, and many other counterculture and fringe culture venture capitalists.
Oh, yeah - and once Koopman once gave me the most awesome buds I have ever tasted in my life! George was extremely charismatic, terrific at drumming up investment money, and an inspiration to everyone who worked for him. Aside from demolishing our morale, his death effectively marked the end of investment money for AMROC...
Most of the officers and technical gurus at AMROC came from Bennet's and Koopman's earlier hybrid company: Starstruck. Starstruck, based in the SF Bay Area, launched a hybrid demonstrator in 1984, called the Dolphin. It was a sea launch concept, implemented >10 years before Boeing's Sea Launch. The vehicle was towed out to sea, buoyed only by collars of balloons. Before launch, the aft balloons were purged, the vehicle righted itself, the torch was lit, and it leapt out of the ocean. Regrettably, there's very little info available on the web regarding Starstruck.
I can see the fnords!
Where you're wrong is in thinking that the "environuts" will stop. Take the Cassini "controversy" as an example. The nutcakes were trying to get the Earth flyby banned on the minuscule chance that the probe could hit us and spill plutonium and poison people. They maintain this paranoid scenario despite confirmed facts:
- The probe would have to have been at least 600 miles off-course to hit Earth, and JPL's guidance capabilities are such that they can hit a 1-mile wide window at Saturn (literally a billion miles away).
- Any guidance error big enough to hit Earth would be many times larger than the error which would put the probe on an track which would never get to Saturn; we'd lose the mission long before it could possibly hit Earth.
- RTG's have hit Earth before (Apollo 13's LEM carried two), and we never detected any plutonium from them. As far as we can tell they are sitting on the bottom of the Pacific, containment shells intact.
- Above-ground testing in the 40's and 50's released tons of Pu-239 into the atmosphere (half-life: 24,000 years). Cassini carries about 70 pounds of Pu-238 (half-life: 89 years). Even if it did get loose, could anyone tell?
So no, the environuts will always be squawking about something. They'll keep squawking until the news media stop irresponsibly "reporting" their BS without rebuttal, and start providing analysis and facts which show the difference between their FUD and the truth. That requires reporters and editors with an education in science and willing to put truth before controversy. And we all know how likely that is, don't we?Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
jpl i working on it. they recently within the past 8-9 months succeded in preliminary work of ground based lazer propulsion. its interesting because in the novel footfall by larry niven they had used the system. damn snouts!!!
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You will not find them at your local hobby store. Blister-pack motors run about 1/4 A through D ratings. (Each letter designation is twice the total impulse of the one before; a B motor is equivalent to two A motors, a C to two Bs, etc.). The Hypertek is a J (about 64 times as powerful as a D), and is only sold to people with membership in the appropriate high-power rocket groups.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You've obviously been away from 'hobby' engines for awhile. Both Aerotech and Hypertech make hybrid rocket engines and many kit manufacturers make kits designed specifically for them. Current designs are for large ('I' and up) engines, but some people are working on smaller hybrids.
They're all cool and aren't regulated by the BATF like large solid engines.
some links:
Rocketry Online -- excellent rocketry site
Aerotech -- Motor (solid & hybrid) manuf.
R.A.T.T. Works -- Smaller Hybrids
Public Missiles -- Kit manuf.
NAR -- National Association of Rocketry
Kind of off-topic, but I remember this guy made this Aero rocket or something. He took gasoline and spun in with epoxy and bubbled oxygen into it. Came out as a solid piece of fuel with bubbles of oxygen in it. Apparently Nasa had some interest in it. Nestle sponsored a launch I think. Anyone know about this?
If Goldin and NASA were really interested in applying "Better, faster, cheaper" to the basic business of earth-to-LEO transport, they would have continued the DC-1 development effort. The atmospheric test vehicle, the DC-X, was a phenomenal success. It proved that all the required low-speed maneuvers, including a reversal in flight and a powered landing, could be done with current technology. And it was all done on a shoestring budget.
Unfortunately for the US taxpayer, the DC-X was built by SDIO, not NASA. SDIO is not in the transport business, so the DC-X was transferred to NASA. On the final flight of the test series, a landing-gear unlock hose was left disconnected. As a result one gear leg did not deploy, the craft fell over after landing, and it caught fire and burned. The pre-flight checklists did not call for the line to be checked before takeoff; now whose fault is that, do you think?
After DC-X's destruction, the DC-1 program (which was slated to have a full-scale transport in operation around now) was shelved. Instead, Goldin announced the VentureStar program (with its fancy linear aerospike engine). VentureStar will take billions in development contracts and will not replace the Shuttle (and its standing army of maintenance people) for many years. The aerospace development lobby's stream of money was protected.
Not a very good deal for us, I think.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Or, that turns out not to be the case.
Rubber (polybutyldiene, IIRC) is used in most large solid fuel rockets as well as the hybrids. The worst thing that can happen in a solid (or hybrid) is for the grain to crack, increasing burn surface area (thus pressure, etc, in a positive feedback loop that usually ends with spectacular bang), so rubber compounds are used to add resilience to the grain.
Further, in e.g. hybrids, the rubber is being burned in e.g. a pure O2 (injected LOX) environment, which makes for very efficient burning. Burning tires just plain do not burn well (and the rubber is mixed with all kinds of other stuff), and it's the incomplete combustion that makes tire fires so bad.
You may be right about the lower efficiency, but hybrids have advantages to counter this: lower cost to manufacture than liquid engines, and greater control than solids. (You can't stop and restart a solid, and any throttling has to be designed into the shape of the grain. Hybrids can be throttled, stopped, and restarted by controlling the oxidizer flow).
-- Alastair
When we can get the gov't to privatize NASA, so its inherant conservatism is based on the engineering rather than beaureaucratic hoop jumping we all may just get to see our childrens children living in space.
NASA should be doing stuff like this -- studying advanced or experimental rocket technologies, the same way they study advanced flight technology. The difference is that in space, NASA is also expected to actually do the job, but for flight, the airplane industry does it.
NASA needs to get out of the spaceflight business entirely (and that is happening, sorta) and concentrate on a) research, b) planetary exploration, and c) satellite science. But this ACE delivery service stuff is well past the point where we should let private industry take over. Hopefully, some of the companies at the cusp of doing this, like Rotary Rocket or the Pioneer Pathfinder folks, will succeed in the next couple of years, and pick up where NASA left off.
This still leaves NASA with responsibility for stuff like Chandra or Cassini -- but getting "us" living in space shouldn't be a government program, just for the reasons you mention.
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{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Why can't ground based systems be used for the initial acceleration of space vehicles?
I'm thinking of a mag-lev train going up the side of a mountain with a shuttle mounted in a cradle on top. The train accelerates to 200mph then maintains the speed up the mountain. Just as it reaches the top, the rocket motors ignite and lift the shuttle from its cradle. The train decelerates in a long circle that brings it back to it's starting point where another shuttle is loaded.
Or how about a deep hole where steam would force the shuttle mounted on a platform upward? Just as the top is reached, the candle is lit and off it goes, already boosted a mile up.
Why isn't there any investigation into these types of launch systems?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
CNN is only a couple of years behind on this. I saw a story about NASA developing this a couple of years ago on Discovery Channel. Cool stuff though.
--- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Moderators....
Their first (and last) sounding rocket test firing had the worst possible failure - the oxygen valve stuck open at 10% - too little thrust to lift off, so it slowly burned up on the pad.
Glad to hear something is left of 'em. (Anyone know if Jim Bennett is still there?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Let's work backwards from the thrust requirements. Pushing 1000 pounds at 2 G's would get it to 20,000 feet (fighting 1 G of gravity) in 35.2 seconds (not 4 minutes). If the propulsion system had an impulse of 5000 seconds, it would consume 0.4 lbm propellant/sec to produce those 2000 pounds of thrust. The minimal energy requirements are thus (0.4 lbm/sec / 2.205 lbm/kg ) * (5000 * 9.81)^2 / 2 = 218 megawatts. If the propulsion loses 50% of the laser pulse and the laser is 10% efficient, the power requirement is 4.36 GW. This is about 1/10000 of the number we get from Rift's figures. At $.10/KWH, consuming 4.36 GW for 4 minutes costs about $29,000. It would take somewhat longer (or greater acceleration) to put that load into orbit, but that's not bad for flying half a ton, eh?
Building a system to lift 20 pound payloads instead of half-ton payloads cuts the numbers by a factor of 50, to about 90 megawatts electric. 20 pounds is a bunch of MRE's, a day's worth of fresh water, or enough H2/O2 to launch more than its mass from LEO to the moon. It's not much of a spacecraft, but 20 pounds could easily be the extrusion dies to make the aluminum frame from pellets (also shipped 20 pounds at a time) or an entire module of the ship's electronics.
Space Shuttle is a Conestoga wagon; HELL is a pipeline. Guess which is cheaper for moving real quantitites of anything?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
much kewler and theyre SSTO as well..check out the roton rocket website.
1) NASA did an 'about face' and started 'helping' AMROC (supplying a little bit of hydrogen peroxide if memory serves me correctly).
2) George Koopman was killed in a single car accident on the way to the test site.
Now, I'm not saying there was any foul play here -- I did bother to check with the Sheriff who had the wrecked car in his possession, and Koopman was known for his engineering of the massive car wreck scene at the end of the Blues Brothers movie (a production which had the the largest cocaine budget in the history of the motion picture business). But I think it is instructive that a man who was as marginal as Koopman, was left tending such a highly valuable technology discarded by NASA in the 1960s, and then was most probably being driven by stress and a possible coke habit to the point that he self-destructed -- possibly taking the company down with him. (Believe it or not, the infamous "frozen LOX valve" problem caused AMROC's first test firing to fail -- this just isn't something that could happen to a rationally run rocket company subsequent to Gary Hudson's frozen-LOX-valve failure with the Conestoga.)
In any case, this wasn't the end of NASA's subterfuge that I was 'privileged' to witness first hand.
Once I testified before the House subcommittee on Space (July 31, 1991) in the wake of the passage of the LSPA (and promoting launch vouchers which also got passed the next year), I went around helping a few companies commercialize space technology. One of them was Norris Communications, which wanted to put up the first Ka-band satellite. There hadn't ever been a Ka-band satellite licensed before (Iridium and Teledesic hadn't yet even made it to the drawing board) and the FCC didn't want to help some Lancaster County Dutch Amish guy who had made his fortune reselling satellite bandwidth for evangelical broadcasters. I did a bit of work with my congressional contacts and some other guys who wanted to launch the Norstar satellite pulled some of their strings, and after an actual physical chase after an FCC bureaucrat who was trying to avoid capture by those she was supposed to be serving. Finally the FCC issued the license.
Then when I was working with E'Prime Aerospace, which was trying to get the Peacekeeper production lines back into operation making commercial launchers, and which had helped get the first Ka-band license issued, I received an invitation from NASA, along with the rest of the E'Prime crew. We were supposed to sit in the VIP stand and watch a Shuttle launch a satellite that, by the very legislation I had helped draft and get passed into law, should have been launched on a commercial vehicle. Oh, but it gets better:
The satellite was the Advanced Communication Technology Satellite built by the government to demonstrate Ka-band broadcast!
The message was clear:
We own space -- you can watch.
Seastead this.
It would be very, very expensive.
Launch facilities are expensive enough without building a train up the side of a mile-high mountain that can throw the shuttle straight up at 200 mph.
And 200 mph is not a huge fraction of escape velocity, nor is a mile up a huge fraction of the distance to orbit.
Most air-lift launches have the primary purpose of being able to use nice cheap (or at least pre-existing) airports to launch rockets, instead of having to make a big launch platform et c., not so much to gain the speed and altitude that the carrier plane provides.