NASA Considers Apollo-Era F1 Engine For Space Launch System 197
MarkWhittington writes "A company named Dynetics, in partnership with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, will perform a study contract for NASA to explore whether a modern version of the Saturn V F1 booster (PDF) could be used on the Space Launch System. These would be the basis for a liquid fueled rocket that would enhance the SLS to make it capable of launching 130 metric tons to low Earth orbit, thus making it capable of supporting deep space exploration missions in the 2020s."
Oh man... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would LOVE to see the F1 back in action. Few things have inspired such awe in me as the launch of a Saturn V rocket and the five tremendous columns of fire atop which it strode.
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
Same here. When I was a kid, my bet friend's dad was on the design team. He brought a rolled up, full size drawing of the Saturn V rocket (not just the booster) and laid it out on the athletic field at school. It is also the second loudest device ever created by man. The first being the hydrogen bomb!
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of "Valley Gurl" legend, but it was also the place the RocketDyne tested their engines. At the northwest end of the valley during the 60s, it would be a quiet summer day and them the silence would be split by a deafening roar coming from the Santa Susanna mountains. If we were up in the hills at one of the local parks, we might even catch a glimpse of a column of smoke. Pretty amazing times. Pretty awesome machine.
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Informative)
What's left of the test area is a toxic and radioactive waste site, as well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
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That is it, I drive by this every day going to and from work in Warner Center to the south.
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up in Canoga Park and West Hills.... I got to see the Santa Susanna mountains light up when they ran tests when I was a kid in the '60s... then I got lucky:
I worked at Rocketdyne during the 80s... programming 3 and 4 axis Coordinate Measuring Machines, writing data evaluation and utility programs, and Inspection procedures in the "Precision Measuring Room" for the SSME QA organization... there were only about six of us that did that as the technical staff that over saw about 40 Machine Parts Inspectors [A 3 shift operation during the height of SSME]... We touched the hardware for everyone of the shuttle engines... As far as I was concerned workin' at "The Rocket Factory" was my ideal job...
We had a mixed batch of stuff to work with: Zeiss CMMs [applications to drive the machine and write "measuring routines" was written in HPL on 9000 series "calculators"], an Italian CMM made by DEA with a DEC pdp-11 with 16k of 12 bit core [A C64 had more computing power]... [the measuring app was loaded via paper tape and output was either via DECWriter and/or punch tape]. I got to write an app to read data punch tapes on a Model 43 Teletype Paper tape reader and convert them to an ASCII txt file on a IBM-PC XT
In the mid 80's they upgraded the DEA to use an HP computer that ran HP Rocky Mountain Basic... we did not have anything networked-- it was all sneaker net so I had to write an app for that HP to do a matrix coordinate rotation [from raw coordinate system to measured coordinate system] on the recorded measurements and then output them as a text file to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. The disk was walked over to the IBM PC-XT which then read the HP sector formatted disk using a commercial app and written to the IBM's "massive" 10 Mb disk. We then either plotted the data or wrote it to a floppy and delivered it to the Stress engineers... As I understand it that app lasted 9 years without a revision [long after I left]. I also wrote a plotter app that drove an 8 pen HP IEEE-488 Bus Plotter
Languages? MS / IBM compiled basic, HPL, early on we had a time-share plotter app written for us in Fortran, Turbo Pascal [which is what I used to write most of the utility apps for PC because it was cheap and fast]. We also delved into HP calculator programs [HP11 and HP-67].
I once got to go up to the Hill for a static firing of a set of Atlas engines [three engine set] at 3/4 of a mile away the engines sonic waves prevented me from catching a breath while the engines were firing...an F-1 has about 10 mtimes the thrust as an Atlas Set.
Oh the stories...The memories...
Re:Oh man... (Score:4, Funny)
It is also the second loudest device ever created by man. The first being the hydrogen bomb!
hmm, this doesnt pass the smell test.
methinks a standard multi-kiloton fission bomb would be louder than the Saturn V. Quieter than a thermonuclear bomb, but louder than the Saturn.
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Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would LOVE to see the F1 back in action. Few things have inspired such awe in me as the launch of a Saturn V rocket and the five tremendous columns of fire atop which it strode.
I've been saying for years that we should simply build an updated Saturn rocket. The primary argument that people threw at me on this was cost: that it would simply cost too much to replace the outdated components in the design. I said that was mush then, and I'll say it now. We (meaning modern countries) continually build updated versions of older designs all the time. It's not that big an obstacle, or that costly either. Not only do we continually update old hardware for current and future use... the B-52 will famously roll along in service for another 25 years, with Boeing sticking new electronics in it... the Russians went one better and simply put their old Tu-95 Bear bombers back into production in the 90's... an aircraft that first flew in 1953. Several Russian rockets are nothing but dressed up old designs, and they work fairly well.
So don't throw the "too costly/too complex" argument at me. Would an updated Saturn would really cost more than the Ares rockets planned for the Constellation program? I really doubt that. We're way too prone to reinvent the wheel on things like these, with an erroneous belief that "new" always equals "better".
Re:Oh man... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the early 90s there was a study done on the feasibility of returning the F-1 into production relative to developing a single use version of the SSME (Space shuttle main engine), and back then it would have been cheaper even after you include the start up costs to go with the F-1.
The reason for this is that back when the F-1 was pulled from production a massive effort to secure the institutional knowledge of how to build the engines was undertaken. Thousands of hours of recorded conversions with everyone from the designers to the engineers to the guys on the shop floor on how the engines were built, what problems were encountered, and how the problems were solved.
As a side note, the Soviets kept the Bear in production for most of the 60's, 70's and 80's which is why they were able to keep building them. The B-52 production stopped in the first half of the 60's, and because the forge that was used to make the single-piece main spar wasn't in use any more, it was scrapped.
Now, you could redesign the wing to use a multiple piece main spar like modern airliners, but then you wouldn't have the B-52 any more, you'd have something else.
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I won't. You've abundantly demonstrated that you're clueless enough not to comprehend it.
Total n00b here (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines? Of course (maybe?) we could use modern tools to help improve efficiency but is there anything to gain by starting from scratch?
I really wish I understood more about rocketry and satellites :/
Re:Total n00b here (Score:5, Interesting)
Who is hauling all of our astronauts back and forth to the ISS right now? How old is their design?
There is a lot to be said for refining stable designs instead of starting over with a clean sheet of paper, back at the bottom of the learning curve.
I really wish I understood more about rocketry and satellites :/
This is true in many other fields as well. I really wish NASA understood more about rocketry and satellites.
About the "age" of things... (Score:2)
I just realized the Intel microprocessor is almost as old as the F1 rocket engine.
Not quite sure what to make of that realization.
I did have my hands on a F1. If you want to see my photo, google "VolCo360". or click this link. http://www.volco360.com/2012/07/the-engine-that-could.html [volco360.com]
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Re:Total n00b here (Score:4, Insightful)
Lastly, why couldn't they build a huge engine and de rate it to obtain reliability?
ppanon's answer is mostly correct, but the main problem is the relationship between reliability and performance is strongly non-linear. Dropping performance by 50% might only increase safety by 0.1%.
Very crude example using made up numbers is you drop turbopump RPMs by half and run the mixture ridiculously rich so it looks like a candle flame and drop chamber pressure to half what it was. On one side you just zapped maybe 90% of performance, easily meeting that goal. The problem is the turbopump is only about 0.001% more reliable because its still spinning at 50K RPM, the lower chamber pressure and impaired mixture means lower combustion temp means its only dull red instead of bright red, etc.
A crude /. car analogy is flooring an engine and dyno testing it is pretty hard on the engine, even if you intentionally detune the engine a bit. It fact if you detune it to the point of backfiring and pinging its much worse for it.
Another issue that no one likes to discuss is the chamber and nozzle acoustic model is designed for a certain set of conditions and flow rate. You kinda have to start over again if you derate. You can run over a wide range if you're willing to trade efficiency, but... You don't want to crank down the injection pressure, resulting in a lower delta p across the injectors, resulting in a screamer or chugger blowing the thing to pieces.
Then another thing is your exhaust "bell" part of the nozzle is designed for a certain flow rate delta p and exhaust pressure. Drop the pressure enough and you can supposedly get the nozzle to collapse in on itself. Also where the flow separates inside the nozzle has pretty serious thermal and mechanical problems.
So you need a new set of acoustic tests and probably chamber fixes, and a new injector design, and a new nozzle, probably new turbopumps... So you get to keep ... I donno ... the chamber and mounting arms I guess. It seems a lot faster simpler and cheaper if you have a 100 Kpound thrust engine and you need a 10 Kpound thrust engine to simply sell the 100K for whatever you can get and buy an off the shelf 10K design.
Re:Total n00b here (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines? Of course (maybe?) we could use modern tools to help improve efficiency but is there anything to gain by starting from scratch?
Unless you have some new form of rocket fuel or someone discovers a radical new design for an engine that improves efficiency, not really. Rockets are a pretty well established field: starting from scratch doesn't really happen. Not only would it add a ton of testing and design time (which costs quite a lot of money), but you aren't really even sure it would work any better. Rockets are, well, rockets. Ignite propellant, make sure it heads out the back. Thats a gross oversimplification, of course, but they aren't like jets that have a ton of thrust-creating parts you can redesign and recreate in different ways (turbojet, ramjet, scramjet, etc.)
Re:Total n00b here (Score:5, Informative)
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If NASA wants to break out the most powerful liquid fuel engines ever built, they need to go to Russia with their checkbooks again. At the end of the cold war, the Soviets ended up way ahead in liquid engine design - which c
Lack of innovation (Score:3)
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines?
Even considering going back to a 40+ year-old design is an admission of failure - pretty typical for government funded projects, when compared to the private sector. Compare that with all the innovation (admittedly, spurred on by an almost constant state of war) in the 'plane industry. 60 years stood between wooden biplanes and the Jumbo Jet and the US government is now saying that the best way to resurrect their space programme is to start making the rocketry equivalent of a DC-3, again.
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Even considering going back to a 40+ year-old design is an admission of failure - pretty typical for government funded projects, when compared to the private sector.
The 747 is still being made, 43 years after its first flight in 1969, the year of the first Moon rocket. The 737 is still being made, first flight, 1967. Sure, they're different now, but the fundamental design is still there. They're still competitive with much newer designs, otherwise they wouldn't be offered anymore.
I'm not sure where the DC-3 comparison comes in, is there a new regime of rocket engine that compares with going from rotary piston prop to jet engine? Even SpaceX's home-built Merlin engi
Rocket engines (Score:5, Informative)
This is what I like about rocket engines. A rocket engine designed for a specific load in the 60s and today would have nearly the same design. A modernized F1 is entirely logical.
And before people complain about rocket engines not advancing at the same rate as microprocessors, let me note that the cost of a rocket is primarily determined by its complexity, not the cost of fuel or the size of the engines. A simple rocket engine (like the F1) that burns kerosene and oxygen is often cheaper than super advanced rocket engines like those on the Space Shuttle.
Re:Rocket engines (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what I like about rocket engines. A rocket engine designed for a specific load in the 60s and today would have nearly the same design. A modernized F1 is entirely logical.
There have been plenty of advances since the 60s, especially in the materials sciences,
it's just that no one but NASA would spend the money on R&D.
Even the private space companies of today are building their engines using cast-offs from the NASA programs of old.
They look for parts in a California junkyard called Norton Sales, where used NASA parts go to die.
You're not going to find cheap rocket grade titanium turbopumps anywhere else in the world.
Heck, even NASA has had to go scrounging through that junkyard,
because they've destroyed the blueprints for so many old pieces of equipment,
that the only way to rebuild them is to find an original and reverse engineer it.
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You are talking two different things here with this "junk yard" called Norton Sales.
First, there are hobby rocket builders who scrounge through that junk yard for parts because they are building one-off specialized rockets on an extreme budget and are largely garage tinkerers anyway. I know guys who have done that for automobiles, tractors, and other kinds of equipment too for largely the same reason.
As for NASA going through that place to dig up parts, they are either looking for engineering samples to ac
Re:Rocket engines (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceX does not use second-hand parts from Norton.
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/25/science/sci-junkyard25 [latimes.com]
Norton has supplied parts to most of the new space rocketeers, including Burt Rutan's Mojave, Calif.-based Scaled Composites, which built the first privately funded manned craft to reach the edge of space, and Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. [aka SpaceX] in El Segundo, which launched the first privately funded craft to reach low-Earth orbit this month, though it malfunctioned after half an orbit.
These private companies can build their 'cheap' rockets because they're bootstrapping with the results of hundreds of millions in 60s NASA cast offs.
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These private companies can build their 'cheap' rockets because they're bootstrapping with the results of hundreds of millions in 60s NASA cast offs.
Not "cast offs", but where you're right is that SpaceX in particular leveraged the research done in the 60's to settle on a kerosene+LOX design.
That simply made sense, as opposed to, say, solid boosters. A lot more environmentally friendly as well.
My opinion is that NASA needs to largely get out of the spacecraft design business, they're far too inefficient. Let them supply "big picture" design goals, then let efficient, innovative, hungry companies like SpaceX compete to satisfy them.
I can't wait to see th
Minor nitpick. (Score:5, Informative)
The F-1 wasn't a booster, it was an engine. The booster stage using the F-1 was the S-1C.
Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:3, Insightful)
The F1 was designed on blackboards and drafting tables. A "modern" F1 is only going to be similar in size - it'd have to be a clean sheet design, the facilities that built the F1 are long gone at this point. Why even study redesigning the F1? This seems like a tremendous waste. Of course it's going to be a clean sheet, computer drafted design.
Money for a study on a stone age rocket design* seems like a federal handout, nothing more.
*although the Saturn V's anti-oscillation system is pretty inspired... for it's time
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Insightful)
The F1 is a perfect example of a big dumb booster [wikipedia.org]. It is cheap, especially so if you mass produce it. The Space Shuttle Main Engines are examples of non-stone age rocket design that uses advanced materials and tries to be reusable. Guess which one is cheaper to operate?
Here's a hint: the Russians like big dumb boosters for a reason.
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Insightful)
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By knowing what has failed in the past we can avoid those traps in the future and by knowing what has worked we can have a firm foundation upon which to improve.
Except we know Saturn V failed as an economical method of launching things into space... yet NASA are building a modern version with the same problems (too big, not reusable, no customer other than NASA, too low a flight rate, etc, etc).
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Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO with the exception of Skylab. False comparison.
One supposes that it might be economical if it's properly mass produced and not required to be man-rated.
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Politics and NASA say hello. 'Economical' will not play a role in this project.
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:4, Interesting)
Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO with the exception of Skylab. False comparison.
Uh, what do you think an Apollo mission was?
One supposes that it might be economical if it's properly mass produced and not required to be man-rated.
Yes. Now perhaps you can explain where all these 150 ton payloads are that need a mass-produced heavy lifter that will, at least initially, cost billions of dollars per flight?
Hint: they don't exist. There's no budgeted payload for this launcher.
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Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO with the exception of Skylab. False comparison.
Uh, what do you think an Apollo mission was?
To the Moon, Alice! to the Moon!
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:4, Informative)
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One supposes that it might be economical if it's properly mass produced and not required to be man-rated.
It's safe to say that like all the other parts of the SLS, it will not be properly mass produced.
Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LE (Score:2)
Apollo 9 says hello.
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Insightful)
On a lunar mission, the Saturn V would put the Command and Service Module, the Lunar Module, and a booster with enough fuel to put them both on a lunar trajectory, into LEO. That's a pretty damn large payload, the largest payload to LEO of any single vehicle ever produced. The fact that the payload eventually boosted itself the rest of the way to the moon isn't relevant to the vehicle's ability to put mass into LEO.
It is the nature of rocketry that any small mass in a high orbit will tend to get there by going through a period in which it is a large mass in a lower orbit. In a staged rocket, it is useful to think of each stage as its own vehicle, with all of the stages above it as its payload which it is capable of delivering to a certain point.
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We do not know that. It was never tried.
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Informative)
The Saturn V was the most cost efficient heavy lift launch vehicle to fly. The cost per lb to LEO is only $9,915 which is cheaper than the Atlas V or the Ariane V. The Falcon 9 does beat it but then you have the other metric.
Saturn V 118,000 kg to LEO
Falcon 9 10,450 kg to LEO
Falcon Heavy 53,000 kg to LEO
And that was with 1960s support systems. NASA was working on an improved Saturn 5 and tested F-1a engines that where ligher, had more thrust, and a higher specific impulse than the ones flown in the Saturn 5. Take the F-1a and add modern electronics for control and build the stage using modern methods and materials and you could drop the costs.
What I fear is this is just a tactic to do nothing. If you keep studying the new launch system and changing it you will never have to build it. If you do not build it can never fail so you can never be blamed. As a politico it works well you can spend a ton of money doing studies to save money by finding a better way and when you have spent a lot you can kill the project because "they" have wasted all this money and have not built a thing.
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The Saturn V was the most cost efficient heavy lift launch vehicle to fly.
That's like saying the new Ferrari will be the most cost-efficient Ferrari ever built. It's still expensive.
And, I suspect those numbers don't include the development cost, whereas SpaceX actually have to pay for developing their launcher as well as flying it. I did some quick sums based on numbers I found on the web including development costs and got a number closer to $20,000 a pound.
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The Saturn V was the most cost efficient heavy lift launch vehicle to fly.
That's like saying the new Ferrari will be the most cost-efficient Ferrari ever built. It's still expensive.
Think of it like a train. Locomotives are expensive, and they burn a lot of fuel. But they carry huge amounts of freight in those mile long trains. Each pound of freight is shipped incredibly cheaply.
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No it is like saying that X is the most cost-efficient semi-truck ever made and someone saying my Prius gets better mileage. That is all fine and good except that a Prius can not haul a 10,000 kg across country.
The Falcon Heavy has not flown yet so it's dev costs are still unknown. It will probably be cheaper but it can not put 100,000kg in LEO.
And yes modern design, testing, construction methods, and materials well means that a new F-1a should be better than even the F-1a that was tested in the late 60s. A
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Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:4, Informative)
Yes
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The Saturn V was originally designed to be used for a long, long time with production runs numbering in the hundreds if not thousands of copies. The test stand set up along with the part supplier chains were originally told that the Moon landings were only going to be the warm up to a much more aggressive manned spaceflight program. Unfortunately Congress choose not to go that route and instead cut the program altogether in favor of a design which came from another part of NASA. That is what gave us the
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And the space shuttle was designed to carry out military missions as well as civilian which is one reason why it was so large. Some missions could have been done with a smaller vessel and to a lower cost.
The beauty of the shuttle was that it could land as an ordinary aircraft and it therefore allowed for some alternative options while when you have a capsule you will just be a passenger and no control over if you drop down on a cow or a dolphin when you come down.
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Now if you mean it failed economically, as in Congress had other plans with our tax dollars, then maybe.
Reusable? You learned little from Apollo and learned nothing from the Shuttle. If you have discovered a cheaper way to burn kerosine in rockets that deliver maximum payload, you are going to be rich. (they would have built a bigger Saturn V if they
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:4, Interesting)
>Why even study redesigning the F1?
Because it's the largest liquid fueled engine in existence, and it works. Nobody has anything comparable to it, not even the Russians. There's a reason why the Russians use so many smaller engines.
Why design from scratch when you have known working prototypes? Only fools reinvent the wheel. Indeed, going back and redesigning the "shower head" fuel injection plate would be just nuts as it works fabulously.
A lighter, more efficient F-1A would be really, really sweet.
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BMO
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Why let facts get in the way of perfectly good chest thumping, huh ? RD-170, the engine that lifted Polyus and Buran with Energia rocket, and its derivative is powering Zenit rockets today, has higher thrust than F-1 had ( past tense )
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Interesting)
You're forgetting the F-1A.
The F1 was designed in 1959. The F1A is an improved version, which is what we're really talking about.
And the F1A has these stats:
Rocketdyne Lox/Kerosene rocket engine. 9189.6 kN. Study 1968. Designed for booster applications. Gas generator, pump-fed. Isp=310s.
Thrust (sl): 8,003.800 kN (1,799,326 lbf). Thrust (sl): 816,178 kgf. Engine: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb). Chamber Pressure: 70.00 bar. Area Ratio: 16. Propellant Formulation: Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71.
Status: Study 1968.
Unfuelled mass: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb).
Height: 5.48 m (17.97 ft).
Diameter: 3.61 m (11.84 ft).
Thrust: 9,189.60 kN (2,065,904 lbf).
Specific impulse: 310 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 270 s.
Burn time: 158 s.
First Launch: 1967.
Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1a.htm [astronautix.com]
The RD-170 has these stats:
Chambers: 4. Thrust (sl): 7,550.000 kN (1,697,300 lbf). Thrust (sl): 769,876 kgf. Engine: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb). Chamber Pressure: 245.00 bar. Area Ratio: 36.87. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 82.66. Oxidizer to Fuel Ratio: 2.6.
AKA: 11D520.
Status: Development ended 1976.
Unfuelled mass: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb).
Height: 3.78 m (12.40 ft).
Diameter: 4.02 m (13.17 ft).
Thrust: 7,903.00 kN (1,776,665 lbf).
Specific impulse: 337 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 309 s.
Burn time: 150 s.
First Launch: 1981-93.
Number: 12 .
Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd170.htm [astronautix.com]
Chest thumping? I think not.
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BMO
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>BS, it was a study, a never built paper engine.
>first launch: 1967
Yup. Never built.
Even if all it did was sit in the test stand and get tested, it's a real engine.
Get stuffed.
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BMO
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For things that never left the test stand, there were RD-270 and all sorts of other ludicrous attempts.
Again, RD-171 is flying, today, and it is more powerful than anything else ever flown.
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>never built
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timserge/3352770806/ [flickr.com]
Seeya.
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BMO
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Actually, the original building at Cape Canaveral in which the Saturn V was assembled was repurposed for the space shuttle (which took up a fraction of the space.) It can easily be repurposed again.
FTFY. Each stage of the Saturn V was built and tested elsewhere before being shipped to Kennedy for final assembly.
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That would be why it's called the Vehicle Assembly Building. [wikipedia.org]
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The original building at Cape Canaveral (the Vehicle Assembly Building) was designed to house the successor to the Saturn V, which was going to be an even larger rocket. Once the Saturn V was basically proving itself along with things like the original F1 engine being able to produce the desired thrust, plans for that follow up rocket were dropped.
There are a total of four bays in the Vehicle Assembly Building, two of which are currently being refit for the SLS program including the mobile launcher pad tha
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Money for a study on a stone age rocket design* seems like a federal handout, nothing more.
Exactly. NASA's future is paying companies like SpaceX to handle payloads.
This is nothing more than gov't pork expenses.
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The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an odd number! Why was that gauge used? Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads. The first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. The people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that
Re:Seems like a tremendous waste (Score:5, Informative)
What's up, snopes [snopes.com]. Nice tall tale, though.
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Snopes has gradually but comprehensively turned into a horse's ass. They will deny ANY story you give them. In the stupid article you link to, they as much as say, yes, the story is essentially true, we can't verify every excruciating detail 100% so we're going to say something with is essentially an excellent exposition is "FALSE", just because we make it our business to claim EVERYTHING is false.
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Snopes is pretty well abandoned, misleading and pointless.
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Personally, I will trust snopes long before trusting some of the BS around the world.
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We all know that's nothing but an urban legend.
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So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything...
Cymbal crash!
I do like the joke and story for sure. I see the connections as a very cool thing, both a connection and a interesting engineering problem. Similar to the way the 200 inch Hale telescope. Before they settled on the size, they had to measure the available height of every bridge it would have to go under on the way from New York to California. Add that to the railroad car it was mounted on and the casing, and there was the maximum mirror size they could practically make without sending it by oc
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I don't see the OP saying anything about "no computers", just that the F1 engine was designed on blackboards and drafting tables, which appears to be generally accurate. It's a >50-year old design.
Apparently use of IBM computers in rocket design goes back to the 50's and the Redstone rocket [ibm.com]. However I'm not sure what computations were performed during the Redstone or F1 design. Maybe it was to numerically solve some differential equations that were first laid out on a blackboard (to avoid having to use
Apollo-era F1 Engine? (Score:4, Funny)
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The best F1 engines these days are euuopean - Renault, Mercedes and Ferrari
and Formula 1 has a bigger budget than NASA.
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Costs (Score:4, Informative)
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It would be worth watching the progress on Merlin 2, but as far as I can tell, SpaceX isn't publicly releasing their progress on the engine. That's absolutely fine, but it probably don't make sense to design a new rocket around the engine until it either exists, or the company commits to producing it. There have been lots of aerospace ventures that have been canceled for technical or economic reasons after the program started.
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But seeing how Musk operates, he used to talk openly (basically selling them) about everything, but then changed to only talking about
Obligatory XKCD (Score:3, Interesting)
So we're getting the Nazis to build this one too? [xkcd.com]
Air Force General Saying (Score:2)
"A new airplane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new airplane possible".
While this may be the right thing to do, admit your mistake (cough "shuttle" cough), and use a simple cheap design for a big dumb booster, I'm a little sad for possibilities lost.
Too bad the linear aerospike engines never panned out (X-37?) or the hypersonic scramjet hasn't been fully developed. While the F-1 may reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, it'll take some revolutionary new technology to bring it down
The SLS is SUCH a mistake (Score:3)
Instead, a far better solution is to create a COTS-SHLV for 2 Super heavy launch vehicles that are in the range of 150 +- 20 tonnes to LEO. Two American companies would get 5 billion each over 5 years total to design, build and test the rockets which have to have no less than 85% American construction/parts. Upon the successful completion of these, another contest would be held for 2 companies to win a contract of 2 launches a year for 4 years. In addition, who ever is the cheapest would then get a 3rd launch, at the same price as the other 2. The max can only be
With this approach, we could have multiple launch systems that can then be used to back each other up, but also can be used to launch private industry as well as military. And once there are 2 launch systems with cheap prices, and can do 150 tonnes to LEO, you can bet on it that we will see a major build-up of private space.
OTOH, the SLS is PROHIBITED by law from doing private launches. It can only by used by NASA and the DOD. And from the DOD's POV, they would rather have much cheaper prices then 1-3 billion/launch. However, if private space can do a
Skip the F1, how about the M-1 (Score:3)
Hauling large volumes changes slower (Score:2)
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1) Off topic.
2) That was a lot of work just to get a couple of suckers to click on Goatse links.
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2) That was a lot of work just to get a couple of suckers to click on Goatse links.
You make a habit of clicking on spam links?
Re:The Best or Cheapest Option? (Score:5, Informative)
Generally speaking, in rocket design, 'efficient' == 'expensive, temperamental, and hard to reuse'. Fuel is cheap, engines are expensive, so if you can throw more fuel at the problem you're usually better off than getting the last 10% efficiency out of the engine through complex design and materials.
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The problem with that approach is that the stack has to carry more fuel at takeoff which requires more engine power to lift the stack since it's heavier which requires more fuel to provide that power which requires bigger tanks... OTOH more efficient engines mean more payload delivered to orbit for the same amount of fuel and vehicle structure.
There are modern well-tested engines which have better performance than the venerable F-1 motor -- the RD-171 engine in the Zenit launcher has four chambers fed by
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The problem with that approach is that the stack has to carry more fuel at takeoff which requires more engine power to lift the stack since it's heavier which requires more fuel to provide that power which requires bigger tanks... OTOH more efficient engines mean more payload delivered to orbit for the same amount of fuel and vehicle structure.
But at a higher cost. Fuel is cheap, fuel tanks are cheap, engines are expensive.
The F-1 is extremely inefficient compared to the SSME or even the J-2, but was used for the reason you state; an 'efficient' LOX/LH2 first stage would have been so large that it would have been difficult to build and operate using KSC infrastructure. Most of the potentially viable SSTO designs I've seen use LOX/Kerosene engines for similar reasons even though they're far less efficient than LOX/LH2.
Re:The Best or Cheapest Option? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeahbut....we wouldn't be basing the new F-1 type engine on the original F-1, we'd be using the F-1A.
The F-1A has 33 percent more thrust than the F-1.
9,189.60 kN for the F-1A versus 7,887 kN for the RD-171
But here is where the real difference comes in:
Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71. for the F-1A
It's 82 for your Russian motor. Thus the advantage of using one combustion chamber compared to using 4.
Modern materials should lighten the F-1A and modern controls should improve efficiency and thrust even more to improve the thrust to weight ratio.
Why the Russians never use large combustion chambers and why you see 4 of them on the RD-171: They never solved the problem of combustion instability beyond a certain size. We did.
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BMO
Sorry to correct the flag waving, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Von Braun didn't either but instead worked around it, which was possible using several engines instead of relying on continuous output from a single engine. The F-1 bounced around all over the place, but that was known behaviour.
Re:Sorry to correct the flag waving, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to correct you, but the F1 did bounce around all over the place until they found the correct pattern of holes in the injection plate.
This they did by blowing up a lot of engines, and when they did finally find the correct plate, they tested instability by putting an explosive charge and detonating it inside the combustion chamber while the engine was running. The F1 self-stabilized with the correct plate, within 1/10th of a second.
--
BMO
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And don't get me started on the EPA saying we shouldn't be lighting off a few hundred tons of red fuming nitric acid
Re:The Best or Cheapest Option? Best *IS* cheapest (Score:3)
Fuel is cheap, engines are expensive,
You're looking at this all wrong. Fuel is cheap to manufacture but it's incredibly expensive to carry up to orbit. Especially when the only reason for doing so is because your engines are so badly designed that they waste a lot of fuel in the early stages of flight. In that respect, trying to pinch pennies on engine design, materials and production is a false economy - unless your even more precious commodity is development time, as with the "space race".
If you plan to productionise getting to LEO, it's mu
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