MarsBlog.net

Sorta… Lee Hutchison at Ars Technica has two new articles on efforts to resurrect and/or evolve the F-1 engine:

New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

The former details the efforts by Pratt & Whitney and Dynetics to evolve the F-1/F-1A designs into the F-1B: a new engine derived from the old, using modern manufacturing methods and control systems where beneficial. It’s especially interesting because I’ve long thought calls by laypeople and Congressmen and the like to bring the Saturn V into production would (if heeded) lead to exactly this…by the time you take advantage of the cost-saving technological improvements (and the loss of certain outmoded manufacturing capabilities) since 1960, you may end up with a machine that looks and performs much as the original, but shares only a partial pedigree with it. The temptation/opportunity to make it better is too great, and one would be foolish not to do so. Efforts on the F-1B are an impressive example of this.

The latter is an example of something I think we need a lot more of: hands-on experience for younger engineers. Building something new or reverse-engineering something old, doesn’t matter, it’s a great opportunity for learning that simply making CAD models and PowerPoints of “paper rockets” will never get you.

And check out those welds – wow.

Posted on April 15th, 2013 under Moon-Mars Plan, Orion, Rocket Science, Science & Engineering, Space Technology. Tags: Dynetics, Engine, F-1, Pratt & Whitney, Pyrios, Rocketdyne, saturn, SLS. Comments Off

This is one of the coolest space videos I have ever seen:

Posted on March 18th, 2012 under Entertainment, Rocket Science, Space Technology. Comments: 2

UPDATE: added NASA’s coverage of the launch, from liftoff through (I’m guessing) max-Q.

Congratulations to SpaceX on a successful first launch of the Falcon 9. With any luck, they just drove a 180-foot-long aluminum stake through the heart of Ares-I. Heh.

It’s amusing, though, that a company founded by a dot-com millionaire can’t seem to get a webcast video to work properly. But I suppose there were other, more important concerns this morning.

Oddly enough, the launch was originally scheduled (the aborted attempt) at the same time as the biweekly all-hands teleconference with the LM Orion management team — otherwise known as the “everything is fine, don’t panic” meeting.  I missed the first part of the meeting, but the portion I sat in on was dominated by voices sounding like relatives of Milton from “Office Space”, asking tediously detailed and irritatingly petulant questions about layoff notices, benefit rollovers, job transfers and other HR matters “for when the time comes”. A very strange juxtaposition.

One of the good things about the Falcon 9 success is that it will help still some of the critical voices speaking out against commercial crew and cargo, and newspace in general. Or if not still them, at least force them to find something else to complain about regarding newspace, much as successful missile defense intercepts forced critics who claimed it was physically impossible to pull off an intercept to find some other rationalization for their opposition. Had the launch failed, it would have been much more difficult to establish credibility for newspace — with this success, however, the industry can probably tolerate a few less than successful follow-on launches before losing the credibility established by SpaceX.

Posted on June 4th, 2010 under Rocket Science, Space Commerce, Space Technology. Tags: commercial, COTS, dragon, elon musk, falcon 9, launch, newspace, private, spacex. Comments Off

Still no public pics of the LAS “lawn dart”, but there’s lots of fun eye candy in this video, especially the beautiful slow-motion footage at the beginning of the motor ignition:

A few interesting things to note:

• The impressively crisp black and white footage of the reorientation and jettison
• The docking-hatch-view of the forward bay cover jettison and chute deployment
• The amusing (but very brief) cameo appearance of the jettisoned LAS in the background of one of the chute deployment cuts, weathervaning into a point-down attitude
• The firing of the attitude control motor, which appears as eight skinny flames near the tip of the LAS stack
• The fact that there is NO visible plume damage on the capsule or the LAS adapter cone (especially surprising given the incinerated appearance of the cone after impact with the desert floor)

Posted on May 11th, 2010 under Constellation, Orion, Rocket Science. Tags: Constellation, las, lockheed martin, nasa, orbital, Orion, pa-1, pad abort 1, white sands. Comments: 2

A little bit behind schedule (it was supposed to launch before the 2008 Presidential election), the Pad Abort 1 test launched at White Sands yesterday — and would have subjected any astronauts inside to 16 gees. Oops.

The one-minute, 35-second test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., took the capsule higher — 3,886 feet — and farther down range — 6,919 feet — than anticipated.

“That motor was quite a performer,” said Deputy Test Director Jay Estes. “You might not want to be riding in there.”

That’s the truth in more ways than he intended, I’m sure. (And I can’t be the only one who finds it amusing that one of the guys launching a big solid rocket is named “Estes”.)

Were the program to be continued, this excess capability might actually be a good thing to have, given how much the capsule has changed since the PA-1 design was frozen (more to the point: how much more it weighs now).

Landing was gentler than expected, but a heavier capsule would work against that:

The boilerplate capsule floated down to the desert floor under the three red-and-white main chutes, slowed enough by them that the telemetry system continued to operate after impact. Estes said test engineers received all of the data they expected to receive.

“It was a beautiful flight,” he said. “That went like clockwork from what I could see.”

Don Reed, the NASA test director, said the capsule touched down at about 24 feet per second (fps), less than the 33 fps impact velocity predicted at the outset. That sort of data will be helpful as NASA refines its predictive models for future developments.

The best part of the test, though, was that the discarded motor stack turned into an enormous lawn dart. I don’t have permission to share the pics that were floating around the office today, but the shots of the burning adapter cone sticking up out of the desert floor are awesome — since the entire 40-odd-foot-tall tower above it is buried nearly vertically into the ground, along with about 40% of the cone itself, with just a small bulge of dirt humped up around it. It’s such a perfect needle-jab that it’s ridiculous. As for the rest of the hardware, the early reports suggested that, given another LAS, the boilerplate capsule and even the separately-jettisoned forward bay (parachute) cover could have been launched again in short order.

Posted on May 7th, 2010 under Constellation, Orion, Rocket Science, Space Technology. Tags: abort, ares, Constellation, nasa, orbital, Orion, pa-1, pad abort 1, test, white sands, WSMR. Comments Off

…PA-1 is scheduled to launch at 9am EDT  Thursday May 6.

NASA’s Pad Abort 1 will be the first fully integrated flight test of the launch abort system being developed for the Orion crew vehicle. The test is part of an ongoing mission to develop safer vehicles for human spaceflight applications.

Hmm…then again, maybe it won’t be.

Posted on May 3rd, 2010 under Constellation, Moon-Mars Plan, Orion, Rocket Science. Tags: Constellation, las, lockheed martin, nasa, Orion, pa-1, white sands, WSMR. Comments Off

After spending most of last week running a working group tasked with re-configuring the forward (parachute) bay, I really have to wonder how the Apollo guys did it. Especially without the convenience (in a manner of speaking) of CAD models.

I wish I could have seen the Apollo configuration team at work.

Posted on January 17th, 2010 under Constellation, Orion, Rocket Science, Space Technology. Tags: Apollo, configuration, design, engineering, Orion. Comments: 2

Whatever else good eventually comes out of the ISS, demonstrating VASIMR — and then using it to routinely reboost the station — might just be its best sci/tech achievement.

[h/t: Instapundit]

Posted on October 28th, 2009 under Rocket Science, Space Technology, Useful Technology. Tags: ISS, rocket, technology, VASIMR. Comments Off

Dammit.

Now we’ll never be able to move to an EELV.

UPDATE: Here’s video…

Pity they didn’t show the ignition and initial liftoff from the onboard camera – that would have been fun to watch.

But as Rand says: “Another SpaceX could have been founded and another Falcon 9 developed for the cost of that test. Which tells you all you need to know about the cost effectiveness of the NASA jobs program.”

Posted on October 28th, 2009 under Constellation, Orion, Rocket Science, Space Technology. Tags: ares, Constellation, nasa, Orion. Comments Off