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SVTPerformance's Chain of Restaurants
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Snover and other geeks in here...Rocket Engine cooling
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<blockquote data-quote="James Snover" data-source="post: 16881518" data-attributes="member: 67454"><p>Here's a neat idea for the use of a rocket engine. And a few limited protoypes have been built and tested. It's crazy, but it works.</p><p></p><p>On re-entry, the capsule, orbiter, whatever, builds up very high temperatures. The Apollo capsules all had heat shields. The space shuttle was covered entirely in ceramic composite tiles. The Apollo capsule's heat shield was ablative. As it burned away, it took the heat with it. The Space Shuttle was an example of using materials that can withstand the heat. But it had a huge cost in design, construction, maintenance, etc.</p><p></p><p>Some clever boy or girl had an idea: why not make a small rocket, built into the nose of the shuttle, that faced directly forward. Then, when you re-enter the atmosphere, you ignite the forward facing rocket. But not to slow down! The rocket is way to small to have any effect on the shuttle's speed. But what it does do is bathe the whole body of the shuttle in a relatively cool 3,500-degree gas. As the speed of it's passage strips the gas off the body of the shuttle, it also takes the atmospheric heating with it. And the constantly firing rocket keeps producing more "cool" gas to replenish what is stripped away.</p><p></p><p>Neat idea, but it had a bunch of issues, not least of which: how to you ignite a rocket with a Mach-25 tailwind blowing up inside it? What do you use for fuel? You'd want something smoky, like RP-1 (which is basically ultra-refined, ultra-pure kerosene), but you'd need a certain volume of liquid oxygen to feed it. If it's a solid rocket motor, that's fine, but there is no turning it off, no throttling it, etc. And you'd have to have all the additional plumbing, monitoring, telemetry wiring, control circuit, etc, etc, etc.</p><p></p><p>In the end, it was an idea that didn't work out. But it seems to me with modern materials maybe this idea ought to be looked at, again.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James Snover, post: 16881518, member: 67454"] Here's a neat idea for the use of a rocket engine. And a few limited protoypes have been built and tested. It's crazy, but it works. On re-entry, the capsule, orbiter, whatever, builds up very high temperatures. The Apollo capsules all had heat shields. The space shuttle was covered entirely in ceramic composite tiles. The Apollo capsule's heat shield was ablative. As it burned away, it took the heat with it. The Space Shuttle was an example of using materials that can withstand the heat. But it had a huge cost in design, construction, maintenance, etc. Some clever boy or girl had an idea: why not make a small rocket, built into the nose of the shuttle, that faced directly forward. Then, when you re-enter the atmosphere, you ignite the forward facing rocket. But not to slow down! The rocket is way to small to have any effect on the shuttle's speed. But what it does do is bathe the whole body of the shuttle in a relatively cool 3,500-degree gas. As the speed of it's passage strips the gas off the body of the shuttle, it also takes the atmospheric heating with it. And the constantly firing rocket keeps producing more "cool" gas to replenish what is stripped away. Neat idea, but it had a bunch of issues, not least of which: how to you ignite a rocket with a Mach-25 tailwind blowing up inside it? What do you use for fuel? You'd want something smoky, like RP-1 (which is basically ultra-refined, ultra-pure kerosene), but you'd need a certain volume of liquid oxygen to feed it. If it's a solid rocket motor, that's fine, but there is no turning it off, no throttling it, etc. And you'd have to have all the additional plumbing, monitoring, telemetry wiring, control circuit, etc, etc, etc. In the end, it was an idea that didn't work out. But it seems to me with modern materials maybe this idea ought to be looked at, again. [/QUOTE]
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