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The Aerojet facility is still there, just west of Homestead, Florida. It has become a hotspot for urban explorers. At one point, I ran into two other groups of people exploring it even though it is several miles walk down a road after the locked gate. Fish and Wildlife has torn down buildings there whenever they had extra cash to burn through. They placed a bunch of highway K-rails over the pit where the engines were tested. I heard cops hang out and arrest kids who go exploring there now. Its an easy job away from the dangers of real crime.
Maybe that's a test or assembly facility. AeroJet is actually manufacturered in Sacramento, California. There's stories about roaring rockets in the suburb Rancho Cordova. Sacto is a rocket town.
@@Ganiscol No, there is not propellant in it. As someone who had legal access to that area I also have a couple of items from there. It is a shame that Aerojet didn't get the contract but politics came into play. The drawbridge over Aerojet Canal has been replaced so no barges will be going up it. The SFWMD has also built a permanent water control structure downstream of the bridge which also blocks the canal.
~13:30 "... to give longer burn time..." The 5 segment SLS boosters do not burn any longer than the 4 segment shuttle boosters. This makes sense when you consider that the surface of the solid fuel inside the booster is all burning at the same time. As the boosters are the same diameter, just longer, what the 5 segments instead of 4 does is increases the pressure inside the booster - more burning, more pressure, and thus more thrust. /Somewhat simplified, I know
Tbf the burn rate can be controlled by the filling and fuel composition, so its not quite a given that they burn the same time. Especially if the nozzle has the same diameter. Not disagreeing ofc, just as a sidenote^^
They're also not recovered because staging is done at a higher altitude and faster velocity compared to Shuttle, there would be no point as they come down damaged after experiencing higher reentry stresses. Similar goes with the whole SLS core, it's a sustainer core of a high energy optimized launcher, meaning it cuts off basically at orbital velocity and subsequently reenters with an orbital velocity, upper stage barely uses its performance to finish the job of reaching a stable orbit, most of its performance is spent for high energy insertions like interplanetary transfers or TLI which is why SLS has the best high energy performance of any launcher by far and will have even better one with uprated variants. This architecture design is incompatible with any kind of recovery and reuse except maybe trying to jettison and recover the engine section like ULA is planning with Vulcan, so it's completely disingenuous to compare it with LEO optimized architectures compatible with recovery and reuse like Falcon or Starship that have their boosters or cores stage at 70-80 km and nowhere near orbital velocity at around a quarter way to it, especially Starship which is an extremely LEO optimized one. So many people don't know these basic principles when they should know better than to fall victim of techbro propaganda nonsense.
Another excellent presentation, but one small correction. "Specific Impulse" (Isp) does not describe how quickly a rocket motor burns its propellants, but is rather a measure of efficiency. It describes how much impulse (the amount of thrust times how long it burns) is delivered for each unit of propellant. In metric units, this is Newton-seconds per kilogram, but in the English system it's lb.-sec/lb. Since the pounds cancel in that formula, the units of Isp in English are "seconds." This has led to the false idea that Isp has something to do with burn time. That's not entirely wrong since you can think of it as how many seconds one pound of propellant will generate one pound of thrust, but the rate doesn't matter when it comes to efficiency. Whether it's a fast-burning high thrust motor, or a long-burning low thrust motor, the total impulse will theoretically be the same, although in practice things like grain shape and nozzle design will influence it one way or another.
The pounds don't cancel because they are two different things that are both called pounds. One is force, one is mass. If you actually do this right what you're left with is a measure of velocity, which makes sense. Efficiency is proportional to how fast matter is being tossed out the back. Hint: expand your N-s/kg and see what's left. Now do the same thing with the English units, knowing that 1 pound force = 1 pound mass being accelerated at 32.2 ft/second square re ed.
@@pgramsey1 - Yes, I understand that. In fact that was the whole reason I gave the units in metric first (to show that the units don't really cancel to only time). I guess I didn't explain it very well. I've been doing rocketry (professionally and as a hobby) for half a century and even teach it to high school students. I use Isp as an example of the "gotcha's" you sometimes run into in the field.
The AJ-260 motors weren't lowered into the pit for testing. They were cast in the pit, then test fired in place. As to the starter motor, in a production motor they wouldn't have used a second motor that would be ejected as was used as a sort of quick demonstration for the tests of the AJ-260. They would have used a normal starter configuration with something like a small rocket motor with an initiator in the forward dome of the motor. To start burning, the propellant grain needs to be held at a specific range of pressure and temperature for a certain period of time. The start cartridge is designed to create those conditions inside the motor. This is a safety feature that keeps these large motors from igniting off of any random source of ignition. Also, technology developed in the 1980s and 1990s allows solids to do everything that liquids can. Liquids are still more useful in a lot of cases, but solids can be throttled, turned off, and vectored effectively even without nozzle vectoring. Look up BATES and Super BATES on thrust vectoring. To stop a motor, the internal pressure can be dropped below the pressure necessary to sustain ignition, and there are various techniques for throttling. Liquids are still more responsive in most cases, and are still a better choice for many applications, but solids can do far more than they're given credit for. Former Aerojet employee, in both the solid and liquid rocket development laboratories.
The reason the 260 inch solid rocket motors were never developed was Thrust Oscillation. All solid rocket motors have thrust oscillation, but it's amplitude and strength increases as the rocket engine gets larger. Thrust Oscillation was the death nail of the Aries I program, that was canceled in 2010. I highly doubt there will ever be a solid rocket booster engine larger than the 156 inch SRB.
Is it length ( pointy bit to flamey bit) or diameter ( how fat the flamey bit is) that is the problem? I thought they made an extended version of the shuttle SRB.
@@petert3355 It has nothing to do with physical dimensions and everything to do with thrust and the mass flow rate of the exhaust--the more propellant is burnt per second, the higher the thrust--and the oscillations--become.
Another problem for any solid rocket booster - which is a much bigger problem for any booster which forms part of a human-rated launch vehicle - is that both the thrust and the thrust-to-weight ratio increase considerably as the fuel is consumed. This increases the acceleration the whole launch vehicle experiences and hence the g-forces - and the need to keep human astronauts alive during the launch imposes an upper limit on this. Liquid fuelled rockets are also subject to increasing thrust-to-weight ratio, even if the thrust itself remains fairly constant throughout the burn period. A good example being the first stage of the Apollo Saturn V: At liftoff, the acceleration is noticeably slow - because the thrust of the 5 F1 rocket engines is not a great deal more than the weight of the entire launch vehicle. However, since more than 90% of the weight of that first stage is propellants, and the engines are burning through those at several tons per second, that thrust-to-weight ratio is going to increase rapidly, as will the acceleration of the whole vehicle. This is in fact so extreme that the centre engine is deliberately shut down before the propellants are all expended, in order to limit the g-forces from acceleration to a level the astronauts on board can survive. Even so, the acceleration in the last few seconds with just 4 engines is still the highest during any part of the first stage burn. Of course this same lightening of the vehicle as the rocket burns through the fuel load happens with solid rocket motors too. But there is an extra effect with solid rockets, which depends on the shape of the solid fuel contained within them. If you have only ever used firework rockets or those little "estes" brand model rocket motors, you might think that all solid rockets burn from the bottom upwards, like these do. However, the larger and more powerful versions used for spaceflight achieve their insanely high thrust by having a hollow cavity running up inside the entire length. The space shuttle SRBs are a good example of this - the igniter is actually at the top. When triggered, it rapidly causes the fuel to burn down the whole length of the booster - so it actually burns from the inside out, not from the bottom to the top. The extra thrust-increasing effect is precisely because of this fuel geometry: As the fuel is consumed from the cavity in the middle, the diameter of that cavity increases. As such the surface area available for combustion also rapidly increases, which has the effect of "throttling up" the SRBs continuously as the fuel inside them is consumed. So while all rockets increase their thrust-to-weight ratio continuously just as a result of the fuel being consumed, solid rockets with a fuel geometry as described above magnify this effect greatly by this inherent throttling-up as the fuel burns. This means that adding an extra segment to this design doesn't just increase the burn time - it also increases the burn rate, adding to the thrust as well.
thought the bigger problem with the Ares 1 was that if they tried to escape it either would require so much g-forces it would kill the crew or they would be melted by burning propellent afterwards
@@ghost307 Solid rocket tech in the early 60s was not ready for prime time yet. The SRBs, especially after the Challenger accident redesign, were among the most reliable pieces of equipment used in manned spaceflight. The early shuttle astronauts were far more afraid of the RS-25 engine blowing the tail of the orbiter off than they were of the SRBs, due to them witnessing an RS-25 blow up a test stand in the late 70s.
@@RCAvhstape Horse shit. An SRB blew up an entire Shuttle much later than the 70s. The RS-25s only blew up in testing. Same with the F1 engines for the Saturn V.
@@RCAvhstape Bull. An SRB blew up an entire Shuttle much later than the 70s. The RS-25s only blew up in testing. Same with the F1 engines for the Saturn V.
"So solid rocket motors have a bright future here on earth in the military." Well, that's encouraging. Be a dam shame if we stopped pointing them at each other, right?
They burn bright because of all the aluminum in the prop mixture. But yeah it'd be great if the only solid rocket motors still in use were made by companies such as Estes for toy/model rockets. And maybe for fireworks displays.
@@robertpatrick3350No one talks about war of 1812, and I grew up in New England. It was like a tiiiiiny chapter in my history books, and my High School Class was 2004. So unless it has changed then it is very insignificant as far as history on a war goes. Same with the war against the Spanish. Basically both were footnotes. Even though I am a history nerd I dont mind. I would rather them focus on more important history anyway. For example when did we go from arch enemies to allies with the British.
I have closely followed the space conquest since the Redstone-Mercury days, and I consider myself quite knowleageble in all technical matters of the subject, but i had never known of such huge SRBs like the AJ-260. Thank you very much and congratulations!
I thought the most powerful rocket was that ungodly rocket using flourine, hydrogen, and lithium. It was so dangerous even the military during the COLD WAR when they were legitimately insane said nope to it. So dangerous that we'd rather go nuclear hah. Anywho so this video is interesting too. Why is this overlooked. Solid propellants always were cool to me. I always wondered why we couldn't just turn the fuel into a fine powder for throttle control. Like my friend said when I first smoked weed from a bowl. "You don't gotta burn it all."
Scott Manley just recently released a video about some companies using stage 1 and 2 air breathing solid rocket engines. Also, we know that throttlable rockets exist in air forces to provide better range without carrying oxidizer and allowing for controlled cruise phases where engines are likely operating in the "sustain" mode to preserve fuel consumption. We know Meteor does this and it's likely the AIM-260 will as well.
Very cool, learned a lot, thanks. My Dad worked on this in the 60s. He didn't talk about it much, I've only learned bits and pieces as an older adult. Thanks for filling in some more detail!
As I learned from The Vintage Space, solid motors were part of getting to the moon. The capsule escape system was solid motors. Also, the ullage motors that would make the stack slow slightly and make the liquid fuels slosh towards earth and be able to be pumped and start the next stage after stage separation.
Solid rockets can also have a very precise burn characteristic, which is why they are so good for a last stage. The ones you use for model rockets, not so precise, but really fun! And they don't cost a billion dollars and won't leave your astronauts stranded.
A dear family friend was a quality control chemist on this project. He’s such an incredible storyteller. I really think you’d find him an interesting interview.
When you spoke of the size of the Shuttle solid rockets it stirred a memory from my childhood. The size was restricted due to a train tunnel they had to pass through on their way to the cape. James Burke's "Connections" covered this very piece of history and traced the size of the Shuttle Solid Rockets back to the Romans and the ultimately the width of a horse's ass.
@@danieldoherty8101 And that State was Utah, home of Morton Thiokol (I believe it’s now Grumman). Because of the length of the SRBs, they were restricted as to which rail lines they could use. The rail line they used had a tunnel built for trains. If I remember the “connection” after all these years… and I know I’m missing a step or two…. Train gauge was based on wagon tracks and wagon wheel spacing was based on a team or multiple teams, which went back to Roman days and the Roman team was two horses side by side with tongue or pole between them.
@@Predator42ID Only if you compare at the same thrust: an engine with twice the thrust that burns fuel twice as fast is the same efficiency, since each bit of fuel is doing the same amount of pushing
The last manned mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, took place in 1972. After that, interest in lunar missions waned due to budget constraints and shifting priorities in space exploration. The F-1 engine was not needed for future missions, and the focus shifted to reusable spacecraft and shuttle technology, which used different engines like the RS-25.
@@SimonBauer7. I believe the Ares 1x was a bridge between STS and SLS in both time and segments. Ares was intended to have 5, but the boilerplate test launch used a dummy 5th segment, ie: a shuttle configuration
@@RCAvhstape Well, if crew could actually survive the thrust oscillations from the booster. Springs between the crew compartment and the rocket were proposed so they wouldn't just die. The space shuttle got away with it because the forward beam holding the solid rocket boosters could flex a bit, and that got transmitted to the external tank and only then to the shuttle. But sticking it under a capsule had much more direct dynamics.
I grew up in Northridge and Reseda Ca. many of my memories include the roar of the Rocketdyne engine tests! Incidently the Santa Susana Nuclear Salt reactor accident was located in the same general neighborhood. History!
A bigshout out to curious droid for so many great videos. My favorite ones are alkways about aircraft propulsion units. The rolls royce merlin is way worth wstching . Go wztch that one next youll definitely like it.
You could see these from my house in Ft. Lauderdale. They must not have been the 260" versions though because the one I saw was in the early 70's, maybe a smaller one, but it lit up the sky.
There's all kinds of neat stuff in the glades. Old Nike missile sites. The Zion Coptic stilt House. The old areojet canal bridge at 288th. The golden gate landing strips used by smugglers. The old glider port. If you have a dirt bike, a high intake air box and don't mind a wet slog, you can find all kinds of abandoned stuff out there.
It must be a long time since you went out to SW 288th and C-111. The bridge there has been gone for a long time. Same applies to the US-1 drawbridge on the same Canal.
4:20 after the Challenger explosion, the company that made the fuel (Pepcon) stored massive amounts of Ammonium Perchlorate that they then had no buyer for. This set the scene for the Pepcon Disaster, an explosion about the scale of a tactical nuke just outside Las Vegas.
Thank you, Paul for this fascinating report on Solid fueled rockets. No mention of the modern Chinese efforts with multiple SRB rockets, but you are probably correct that we will not see anything as big as the Aerojet 260.
Thank you CD! One question that doesn't make obvious sense to me is the nozzle control on the "Z" axis. 12:39 What effect would that produce in the control of the rocket motor if the nozzle dimensions are not changed?
Rockets are technically a type of jet engine. Sir Frank Whittle made the very first air breathing liquid fueled jet engine, the radial flow gas turbine engine. The Germans developed an axial flow gas turbine, the axial flow has dominated the aviation industry because of the higher performance compared to radial flow gas turbine engines. That is, until liquid fueled rocket engines really began to be devloped. The RS-25 is like 2 turbochargers, radial flow gas turbines, with the absolutely meanest afterburner strapped to the back of them. The RS-25, and closed cycle liquid fueled rockets, are one heck of a comeback for radial flow gas turbine engines.
FWIW: I am originally from St. Petersburg, Florida, and I lived in Dade County, Florida from 1988 to 1995. However, it was not until OVER A DECADE LATER -- when I was living {and still live} in North Carolina -- that I first heard about this research site in Florida Everglades. I *_WISH_* I had known about the place where I lived in South Florida.
Absolutely loving the use of an AI image to show a battle involving ancient Mongolia, with some guy holding a rifle with a magazine. I can't decide if it's funnier to include that on purpose or accidentally
Well, the thing with "artificial intelligence" is that the operative here is "artificial", while this "intelligence" part is more of "sales pitch" or "tongue in cheek" slap-on, can't say which one is more prevalent though... ;-)
I hate it. Historically correct artist renderings or art from the time period would be much preferred. Imagine a future where history books are littered with nonsensical imagery. Educational youtube creators should stay away from generational AI for source material as it is complete fantasy and destroys credibility.
@@perlguiman _"Educational youtube creators should stay away from generational AI for csource material"_ - or just instruct this "AI bot/ module/ GKW" to include ONLY period-correct equipment - or, at the VERY LEAST, check these images for that BEFORE publishing them.
@@perlguiman Well, I can see your comment there, no problemo - but this YT "comments thingy", from functionality standpoint, is kind of a poor joke, I'd say.
You're speaking of the Henderson, Nevada -- that was Pacific Engineering and Production Company (PEPCON), the producer of the Ammonium Perchlorate used as oxidizer in the SRBs.
When shuttle launches got paused PEPCON couldn't scale back because they were under contract to produce xxx tons of AP each week, month or whatever. They also build the plant on top of a high pressure gas main. The shock wave rolling across the desert is something to see.
For the Brits it was a distraction, if they wanted to win it they could have but Napoleon was our main concern at that time....Sorry about the Whitehouse thing!...😉
I'd love to see you do a video on the Soyuz family of rockets. The greatest family of rockets ever, so far. The US still has a lot of catching up to do the best the Russians at their own game, even with the benefit of hindsight.💙
Hey Droid, was it some old Bowie lyrics which said '...and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear...' Yeah. Nice shirts you always wear! I'm an old Yank that just needs to die off - can you dig!? If only I was cool looking(!)
I grew up within earshot (12 miles) of the National Space Technology Laboratories (NSTL), now known as the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. In the late 1970s, we'd hear them test-firing the solid rocket boosters (SRBs).
Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters were never test fired at Stennis. Only the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) were tested at Stennis during the Space Shuttle days. I worked at Stennis from 1983 to 1994, before I transferred back to Kennedy.
The test facility still exists on the outskirts of Everglades national Park near Miami if I'm not mistaken. You can see the canals which were intended to carry away the heavy gear leading to it. They've become a local hotspot for bass!
It is near Florida City or Homestead. Downtown Miami is 30 miles away. This is why I hate the people of this county that decided to change the name to Miami-Dade. It isn't the only city in the whole county. Miami want to claim almost everything. But not to be my worry much longer as I will be leaving this overcrowded area soon after being here for 62 years. Homestead used to be a nice small farming town. Now it has a population of 60,000+ and more moving in all the time.
" I'm just going to check the inside of the rocket motor" "ok, but put your cigarette out first..." One wonders how careful you'd have to be with spark suppression (bronze tools etc) whist assembling them.
It always amuses me to no end when "freedom units" people convert them to metric ones - "volcanic ash cloud has risen to 55 thousand feet" , which is clearly an APPROXIMATE altitude, since such cloud doesn't have any clearly defined "edges", so it's "55K ft, give or take few hundreds" - yet, and quite "amusingly" this approximate level becomes an EXACT "16 764 metres" when it gets converted (and never mind metric lot would rather express in kilometres - after rounding it up, i.e. 16.8 km). Here something "visible for OVER 80 miles" (again, clearly an approximation! - it's NOT "EIGHTY, PERIOD!" - but "OVER eighty") becomes an EXACT distance of 132 kilometres (and never mind it's actually incorrect, as 80 mi is 128.75 km for LAND miles - and just tad over 148 km for nautical miles - conversely, 132 km = 71.3 n. mi and 82 "land" ones). Why not just say "over 130 km" - or "about 150 km" (in case of nautical miles)? Me no understand... ;-) PS: Seem that for some obscure reasons "pounds" did not enjoy the grace of being converted bestowed upon them - the thrust was "5 million pounds" (and all of ya metric lot get lost, por favore) - that'd be 2268 thousands kG (kg = unit of mass, kG, aka "kilogram-force" is the unit of force, - equal to the force exerted by "kg" at sea level, AFAIR), or, better still, 22.24 kN (kilonewtons), as thrust is usually expressed in this "true" SI unit.
Wow! I can't believe you didn't mention Conrad Haas... Conrad Haas, a 16th-century Austrian military engineer, is credited with designing and writing about multistage rockets, centuries before the modern era of rocketry. His work, discovered in 1961, includes detailed illustrations and technical descriptions of rocket construction, propulsion, and stabilization. Key Features of Haas’ Rocket Designs Multistage rockets with cylindrical thrust chambers filled with powdered fuel and conical combustion chambers Delta-shaped fins for stabilization Bell-shaped nozzles for efficient exhaust gas expansion Staged combustion design, where each stage is ignited in sequence to provide continuous thrust
I heard about it. You heard about that water rocket? I guess somebody is pumping glycol at high pressure, heating it up with a lithium battery powered heater, then realeasing the steam to push a rocket. There's some cool rockets out there.
The comments say sodium perchlorate is a current oxidizer in solid fuel rockets. More energy per kilogram would be obtained from lithium perchlorate (deliquescent) and ammonium perchlorate, the latter having the extra advantage of producing nitrogen gas which increases thrust. These two perchlorates are only marginally more expensive. Has tetramethylammonium perchlorate been tried ?
Not only could the plume be seen miles away, it also could be felt anywhere in Homestead like an earthquake. If you have a good view, you can watch the rocket launches from the Cape in Homestead also. I was at work 10 miles N of Homestead and watched as the Challenger blew up. I see the SpaceX launches all the time.
Was quality control while casting the propellant a factor? without modern imaging techniques an undetected flaw in the casting would be catastrophic and would be undetected until the major malfunction occurred.
Partially - mainly that in segmented boosters like the Shuttle ones, it is easier to catch the flaw early on, and you only need to recycle the affected segment
One unaddressed factor is cost: A rocket is 90% or more by weight fuel, and large rockets use thousands of tons of fuel. Liquid oxygen, aviation grade kerosene and methane are all mass-produced on an industrial scale at minimum cost; they're a very mature technology. Solid rocket motors use a rubber-like plastic compound as fuel and a solid perchlorate chemical as a mixed-in oxidizer. This is just plain more expensive per ton. One thing solid rocket motors can't do is be inexpensive; on the scale of rockets like the Saturn V, the Shuttle, the Space Launch System or SpaceX's Starship, they simply would be too expensive to be the entire rocket. How they got their start in space launch was in the 1960s when the USA was struggling to upgrade their comparatively small military rockets to be able to launch larger payloads soon, without having to go back to the drawing board and build larger rockets from scratch and wait years in the meantime. Rockets like the Titan 2 and Thor got solid boosters strapped on to increase their throw weight. If the USA had decided to continue exploring the Moon it would have used an upgraded Saturn V with solid boosters added for more payload. This could be done quickly if not cheaply. When the Shuttle was developed, solid rocket boosters were seen as the fastest and easiest way to make the boosters recoverable, even if not as desirable from a technical standpoint. The SLS is intended to recycle the technology used to build the Shuttle; without them the SLS core components would have to be largely redesigned. SpaceX's "gas up and go" plan for Starship means that liquid fuel rockets will hopefully be cheaper and even faster than a solid rocket alternative.
Thiokol was bought in 2001 by ATK, then again in 2018 by Northrup Grumman. they still make perchlorate, and boosters in Utah. lots of smaller missile parts for various navy and air force freedom gluzzies. And the big booster, I believe for United launch Alliance.
Methane is a good choice if you want to build a re-usable stack and you want to use the same propellent for all stages of that stack. It's not the *best* choice by most measures, but it's one that makes a lot of sense for a certain set of design constraints...it's cheap and burns cleanly, it offers a better ISP than solids or kerosene, a better energy density than hydrogen, and it pairs well with oxygen in terms of compatible temperatures. That said, it's not an automatic winner. Take Vulcan, for example... ULA picked the BE-4 engine so methalox was part of the package, but if they'd had a better engine candidate, it probably would have made more sense for them to stick to kerosene for the higher energy density. They're building an expendable vehicle with a low flight rate, so they don't benefit much from a cheap non-coking fuel, and they're already using hydrogen for the upper stage, so they don't get any benefit from commonality across the stack. So they're mostly getting the downsides of methane (cryogenic, lower density) and none of the upsides.
@@simongeard4824 Yes, different situations call for different fuels. Even hypergolic fuels made a lot of sense at one time, for certain situations. I can see why the Soviets would make a moon rocket booster using them. It made some things much easier. Alas, they had to learn the downsides the hard way. So have we. Some people in Damascus AR could tell you all about it. As for trends, yes, with re-use being more and more of interest, methalox is going to be ascendant. It certainly looks that way. If you want maximum ISP above all else, then LH2+LOX is probably the choice. Once out in space, ion drive is going to be bigger and bigger. OTOH I think solid fuels have peaked, for most purposes. Again, it depends. A launch escape tower is probably a solid fuel situation. It's great that we have so many choices now.
This was a very interesting video because it is the first time I've ever heard of 'stopping and restarting' a SOLID ROCKET motor/engine(did not know that was possible, hashtag/notarocketscientist)
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Please, As an American, I have heard enough of this election nonsense.
Thank you Paul....🇺🇸
Pinned comments weren't made for advertising
@@Petertronic Then support the channel so he doesn't need ads.
It didn't work because you are supposed to point the flamy end down.
Dang it, I knew we had it pointing the wrong way....
What are you? An EXPERT? 😂
but let's say if we consider earth as a space ship...
@@fakestory1753 They'll make us crash into the moon! You maniacs!!
@@fakestory1753 Still blowing into the atmosphere. May as well walk by pushing your feet off each other.
The Aerojet facility is still there, just west of Homestead, Florida. It has become a hotspot for urban explorers. At one point, I ran into two other groups of people exploring it even though it is several miles walk down a road after the locked gate. Fish and Wildlife has torn down buildings there whenever they had extra cash to burn through. They placed a bunch of highway K-rails over the pit where the engines were tested. I heard cops hang out and arrest kids who go exploring there now. Its an easy job away from the dangers of real crime.
side note I had no clue highway dividers had a name other than Jersey barrier.
There is still a SRM in that pit. Despite claims it has propellant in it, its unclear if that is true.
Maybe that's a test or assembly facility. AeroJet is actually manufacturered in Sacramento, California. There's stories about roaring rockets in the suburb Rancho Cordova. Sacto is a rocket town.
@@Ganiscol No, there is not propellant in it. As someone who had legal access to that area I also have a couple of items from there. It is a shame that Aerojet didn't get the contract but politics came into play. The drawbridge over Aerojet Canal has been replaced so no barges will be going up it. The SFWMD has also built a permanent water control structure downstream of the bridge which also blocks the canal.
@@filanfyretrackerI didn't know they were called either of those things! Now I've learned two more facts today 😁
~13:30
"... to give longer burn time..."
The 5 segment SLS boosters do not burn any longer than the 4 segment shuttle boosters. This makes sense when you consider that the surface of the solid fuel inside the booster is all burning at the same time. As the boosters are the same diameter, just longer, what the 5 segments instead of 4 does is increases the pressure inside the booster - more burning, more pressure, and thus more thrust.
/Somewhat simplified, I know
There are a lot of small errors in this video
Yes -- I was going to comment the same thing, Overall, though, a great video!
Tbf the burn rate can be controlled by the filling and fuel composition, so its not quite a given that they burn the same time. Especially if the nozzle has the same diameter.
Not disagreeing ofc, just as a sidenote^^
Increased pressure also increases burn rate.
They're also not recovered because staging is done at a higher altitude and faster velocity compared to Shuttle, there would be no point as they come down damaged after experiencing higher reentry stresses. Similar goes with the whole SLS core, it's a sustainer core of a high energy optimized launcher, meaning it cuts off basically at orbital velocity and subsequently reenters with an orbital velocity, upper stage barely uses its performance to finish the job of reaching a stable orbit, most of its performance is spent for high energy insertions like interplanetary transfers or TLI which is why SLS has the best high energy performance of any launcher by far and will have even better one with uprated variants. This architecture design is incompatible with any kind of recovery and reuse except maybe trying to jettison and recover the engine section like ULA is planning with Vulcan, so it's completely disingenuous to compare it with LEO optimized architectures compatible with recovery and reuse like Falcon or Starship that have their boosters or cores stage at 70-80 km and nowhere near orbital velocity at around a quarter way to it, especially Starship which is an extremely LEO optimized one. So many people don't know these basic principles when they should know better than to fall victim of techbro propaganda nonsense.
Another excellent presentation, but one small correction. "Specific Impulse" (Isp) does not describe how quickly a rocket motor burns its propellants, but is rather a measure of efficiency. It describes how much impulse (the amount of thrust times how long it burns) is delivered for each unit of propellant. In metric units, this is Newton-seconds per kilogram, but in the English system it's lb.-sec/lb. Since the pounds cancel in that formula, the units of Isp in English are "seconds." This has led to the false idea that Isp has something to do with burn time. That's not entirely wrong since you can think of it as how many seconds one pound of propellant will generate one pound of thrust, but the rate doesn't matter when it comes to efficiency. Whether it's a fast-burning high thrust motor, or a long-burning low thrust motor, the total impulse will theoretically be the same, although in practice things like grain shape and nozzle design will influence it one way or another.
The pounds don't cancel because they are two different things that are both called pounds. One is force, one is mass. If you actually do this right what you're left with is a measure of velocity, which makes sense. Efficiency is proportional to how fast matter is being tossed out the back.
Hint: expand your N-s/kg and see what's left. Now do the same thing with the English units, knowing that 1 pound force = 1 pound mass being accelerated at 32.2 ft/second square re ed.
@@pgramsey1 - Yes, I understand that. In fact that was the whole reason I gave the units in metric first (to show that the units don't really cancel to only time). I guess I didn't explain it very well.
I've been doing rocketry (professionally and as a hobby) for half a century and even teach it to high school students. I use Isp as an example of the "gotcha's" you sometimes run into in the field.
The AJ-260 motors weren't lowered into the pit for testing. They were cast in the pit, then test fired in place.
As to the starter motor, in a production motor they wouldn't have used a second motor that would be ejected as was used as a sort of quick demonstration for the tests of the AJ-260. They would have used a normal starter configuration with something like a small rocket motor with an initiator in the forward dome of the motor. To start burning, the propellant grain needs to be held at a specific range of pressure and temperature for a certain period of time. The start cartridge is designed to create those conditions inside the motor. This is a safety feature that keeps these large motors from igniting off of any random source of ignition.
Also, technology developed in the 1980s and 1990s allows solids to do everything that liquids can. Liquids are still more useful in a lot of cases, but solids can be throttled, turned off, and vectored effectively even without nozzle vectoring. Look up BATES and Super BATES on thrust vectoring. To stop a motor, the internal pressure can be dropped below the pressure necessary to sustain ignition, and there are various techniques for throttling. Liquids are still more responsive in most cases, and are still a better choice for many applications, but solids can do far more than they're given credit for.
Former Aerojet employee, in both the solid and liquid rocket development laboratories.
The reason the 260 inch solid rocket motors were never developed was Thrust Oscillation.
All solid rocket motors have thrust oscillation, but it's amplitude and strength increases as the rocket engine gets larger.
Thrust Oscillation was the death nail of the Aries I program, that was canceled in 2010.
I highly doubt there will ever be a solid rocket booster engine larger than the 156 inch SRB.
Is it length ( pointy bit to flamey bit) or diameter ( how fat the flamey bit is) that is the problem?
I thought they made an extended version of the shuttle SRB.
@@petert3355 It has nothing to do with physical dimensions and everything to do with thrust and the mass flow rate of the exhaust--the more propellant is burnt per second, the higher the thrust--and the oscillations--become.
Smaller rockets, build bigger things in space.
Another problem for any solid rocket booster - which is a much bigger problem for any booster which forms part of a human-rated launch vehicle - is that both the thrust and the thrust-to-weight ratio increase considerably as the fuel is consumed. This increases the acceleration the whole launch vehicle experiences and hence the g-forces - and the need to keep human astronauts alive during the launch imposes an upper limit on this.
Liquid fuelled rockets are also subject to increasing thrust-to-weight ratio, even if the thrust itself remains fairly constant throughout the burn period. A good example being the first stage of the Apollo Saturn V: At liftoff, the acceleration is noticeably slow - because the thrust of the 5 F1 rocket engines is not a great deal more than the weight of the entire launch vehicle. However, since more than 90% of the weight of that first stage is propellants, and the engines are burning through those at several tons per second, that thrust-to-weight ratio is going to increase rapidly, as will the acceleration of the whole vehicle. This is in fact so extreme that the centre engine is deliberately shut down before the propellants are all expended, in order to limit the g-forces from acceleration to a level the astronauts on board can survive. Even so, the acceleration in the last few seconds with just 4 engines is still the highest during any part of the first stage burn.
Of course this same lightening of the vehicle as the rocket burns through the fuel load happens with solid rocket motors too. But there is an extra effect with solid rockets, which depends on the shape of the solid fuel contained within them. If you have only ever used firework rockets or those little "estes" brand model rocket motors, you might think that all solid rockets burn from the bottom upwards, like these do.
However, the larger and more powerful versions used for spaceflight achieve their insanely high thrust by having a hollow cavity running up inside the entire length. The space shuttle SRBs are a good example of this - the igniter is actually at the top. When triggered, it rapidly causes the fuel to burn down the whole length of the booster - so it actually burns from the inside out, not from the bottom to the top.
The extra thrust-increasing effect is precisely because of this fuel geometry: As the fuel is consumed from the cavity in the middle, the diameter of that cavity increases. As such the surface area available for combustion also rapidly increases, which has the effect of "throttling up" the SRBs continuously as the fuel inside them is consumed.
So while all rockets increase their thrust-to-weight ratio continuously just as a result of the fuel being consumed, solid rockets with a fuel geometry as described above magnify this effect greatly by this inherent throttling-up as the fuel burns. This means that adding an extra segment to this design doesn't just increase the burn time - it also increases the burn rate, adding to the thrust as well.
thought the bigger problem with the Ares 1 was that if they tried to escape it either would require so much g-forces it would kill the crew or they would be melted by burning propellent afterwards
I have trouble with the idea of riding a rocket with no throttle or off switch. They did Wyle E. Coyote no good at all!
I’m surprised the leader of North Korea hasn’t done that to somebody
Exactly why Werner Von Braun and his entire team refused to even consider solid fuel rockets for manned spacecraft.
@@ghost307 Solid rocket tech in the early 60s was not ready for prime time yet. The SRBs, especially after the Challenger accident redesign, were among the most reliable pieces of equipment used in manned spaceflight. The early shuttle astronauts were far more afraid of the RS-25 engine blowing the tail of the orbiter off than they were of the SRBs, due to them witnessing an RS-25 blow up a test stand in the late 70s.
@@RCAvhstape Horse shit. An SRB blew up an entire Shuttle much later than the 70s. The RS-25s only blew up in testing. Same with the F1 engines for the Saturn V.
@@RCAvhstape Bull. An SRB blew up an entire Shuttle much later than the 70s. The RS-25s only blew up in testing. Same with the F1 engines for the Saturn V.
"So solid rocket motors have a bright future here on earth in the military." Well, that's encouraging. Be a dam shame if we stopped pointing them at each other, right?
Yep, the pun is great, but the reality is depressing :(
They burn bright because of all the aluminum in the prop mixture. But yeah it'd be great if the only solid rocket motors still in use were made by companies such as Estes for toy/model rockets. And maybe for fireworks displays.
Good stuff!! My late father was a design engineer who worked for Bell Aerospace during the Apollo project. Keep them coming!! Tom L Buffalo, NY USA
The War of Independence wasn't in 1812. It was in 1776. You are thinking of the (ahem) War of 1812.
Both are poorly covered by the history syllabus’s of most of the world, despite their obvious significance to US citizens.
@@robertpatrick3350 Yes but that error is like saying "WWI began 1945 . . . "
@@robertpatrick3350No one talks about war of 1812, and I grew up in New England.
It was like a tiiiiiny chapter in my history books, and my High School Class was 2004. So unless it has changed then it is very insignificant as far as history on a war goes.
Same with the war against the Spanish. Basically both were footnotes.
Even though I am a history nerd I dont mind. I would rather them focus on more important history anyway. For example when did we go from arch enemies to allies with the British.
@@taliaperkins1389 To be fair, WWII began in 1914.
@@dannyarcher6370I see what you did there.
Believe it or not, they actually looked into motors all the way up to 372" in diameter back in those days. 🤯
Or 9448,8mm.
@@TH-bj1pb2.5 giraffes
@@TH-bj1pbyeah that's for losers
This channel, Eager Space and Scott Manley are among the very best!! Thanks a lot!!
Yeah I a big fan of both of those channels 2.
Yeah
I have closely followed the space conquest since the Redstone-Mercury days, and I consider myself quite knowleageble in all technical matters of the subject, but i had never known of such huge SRBs like the AJ-260. Thank you very much and congratulations!
I thought the most powerful rocket was that ungodly rocket using flourine, hydrogen, and lithium.
It was so dangerous even the military during the COLD WAR when they were legitimately insane said nope to it.
So dangerous that we'd rather go nuclear hah.
Anywho so this video is interesting too. Why is this overlooked. Solid propellants always were cool to me. I always wondered why we couldn't just turn the fuel into a fine powder for throttle control.
Like my friend said when I first smoked weed from a bowl. "You don't gotta burn it all."
Scott Manley just recently released a video about some companies using stage 1 and 2 air breathing solid rocket engines. Also, we know that throttlable rockets exist in air forces to provide better range without carrying oxidizer and allowing for controlled cruise phases where engines are likely operating in the "sustain" mode to preserve fuel consumption. We know Meteor does this and it's likely the AIM-260 will as well.
Very interesting video, Paul! Thanks
Very cool, learned a lot, thanks. My Dad worked on this in the 60s. He didn't talk about it much, I've only learned bits and pieces as an older adult. Thanks for filling in some more detail!
As I learned from The Vintage Space, solid motors were part of getting to the moon. The capsule escape system was solid motors. Also, the ullage motors that would make the stack slow slightly and make the liquid fuels slosh towards earth and be able to be pumped and start the next stage after stage separation.
Simple things Nasa did to nullify pogo oscillation
@@alfredshort3 It took many very complicated things to negate Ares I's thrust oscillation problems. I was deeply involved with Ares I, and killing it.
Yeah, I learn about ullage motors from that hot babe, too. so small, so important, the ullage motors.
I really hope that some of these SRMs have "Ejects showers of sparks" written some where in the operating manual. ;)
With loud report.
Solid rockets can also have a very precise burn characteristic, which is why they are so good for a last stage. The ones you use for model rockets, not so precise, but really fun! And they don't cost a billion dollars and won't leave your astronauts stranded.
Excellent, as usual. Thanks.
At 1:00 I yelled at the screen " 'cause you can't turn them off and on".
These uploads never disappoint
fabulous video, tremendous research and great shirt , as always.
A dear family friend was a quality control chemist on this project.
He’s such an incredible storyteller. I really think you’d find him an interesting interview.
Right on. Thanks for sharing.
A most excellent review.
When you spoke of the size of the Shuttle solid rockets it stirred a memory from my childhood. The size was restricted due to a train tunnel they had to pass through on their way to the cape. James Burke's "Connections" covered this very piece of history and traced the size of the Shuttle Solid Rockets back to the Romans and the ultimately the width of a horse's ass.
The Romans would have said "arse".
Really all rockets were limeted by transportation, because the individual manufacturers were legit all over the country. Logistics.
The size was restricted due to politics, politicians wanted the SRB built in their state to secure re-election
@@dannyarcher6370 Ha! Well actually it would be “equus asinus”
@@danieldoherty8101 And that State was Utah, home of Morton Thiokol (I believe it’s now Grumman). Because of the length of the SRBs, they were restricted as to which rail lines they could use. The rail line they used had a tunnel built for trains. If I remember the “connection” after all these years… and I know I’m missing a step or two…. Train gauge was based on wagon tracks and wagon wheel spacing was based on a team or multiple teams, which went back to Roman days and the Roman team was two horses side by side with tongue or pole between them.
8:02 Specific Impulse measures the efficiency of an engine, not how quickly the fuel is burned.
That's the same thing. Depending on how quickly the fuel burns also determines the efficiency of the engine.
And what happens if the engine is less efficient? It use the fuel quicker. Simple.
@@Predator42IDUm. No
Specific Impulse is the ratio between fuel consumption and thrust. How long your engine burns is also determined by how much fuel you carry around.
@@Predator42ID Only if you compare at the same thrust: an engine with twice the thrust that burns fuel twice as fast is the same efficiency, since each bit of fuel is doing the same amount of pushing
Thats cool how the two weights stop it spinning,,simple,,
The last manned mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, took place in 1972. After that, interest in lunar missions waned due to budget constraints and shifting priorities in space exploration. The F-1 engine was not needed for future missions, and the focus shifted to reusable spacecraft and shuttle technology, which used different engines like the RS-25.
The 5th segment of the SLS SRBs don't increase the burn time, they increase thrust. That's because all of the segments burn at the same time.
13:20 re: Shuttle SRB reuse: "None came to fruition until the SLS in 2022"
Ares-1X feels neglected.
ares 1x is just a Shuttle Booster. same for the sls
@@SimonBauer7. I believe the Ares 1x was a bridge between STS and SLS in both time and segments. Ares was intended to have 5, but the boilerplate test launch used a dummy 5th segment, ie: a shuttle configuration
Ares-1 could've been a good crew launch vehicle, but in the end it was just money tossed into the ocean for some questionable test data.
Was trying to see if someone beat me to it lol.
@@RCAvhstape Well, if crew could actually survive the thrust oscillations from the booster. Springs between the crew compartment and the rocket were proposed so they wouldn't just die. The space shuttle got away with it because the forward beam holding the solid rocket boosters could flex a bit, and that got transmitted to the external tank and only then to the shuttle. But sticking it under a capsule had much more direct dynamics.
I grew up in Northridge and Reseda Ca. many of my memories include the roar of the Rocketdyne engine tests! Incidently the Santa Susana Nuclear Salt reactor accident was located in the same general neighborhood. History!
Good video about a little known rocket. Would love to hear more about the M-1.
Love learning about what you are putting out there mate. Cheers for the conteeent.
I sang that last bit 😂
A bigshout out to curious droid for so many great videos.
My favorite ones are alkways about aircraft propulsion units.
The rolls royce merlin is way worth wstching .
Go wztch that one next youll definitely like it.
As always, amazing video
And, I hope like hell your health is on the mend :) god bless
You could see these from my house in Ft. Lauderdale. They must not have been the 260" versions though because the one I saw was in the early 70's, maybe a smaller one, but it lit up the sky.
1st class. Thanks for sharing
You should take a look at the various Nova designs proposed as Saturn follow-ons.
There's all kinds of neat stuff in the glades. Old Nike missile sites. The Zion Coptic stilt House. The old areojet canal bridge at 288th. The golden gate landing strips used by smugglers. The old glider port. If you have a dirt bike, a high intake air box and don't mind a wet slog, you can find all kinds of abandoned stuff out there.
It must be a long time since you went out to SW 288th and C-111. The bridge there has been gone for a long time. Same applies to the US-1 drawbridge on the same Canal.
Thanks for this facinating post.
Love your voice and. your video quality and style!!!
thank you for sharing
Gravity-1 made a good job this january and they have another lauch next month. Looking good for solid rockets
Excellent footage. Damn...
No dam, a rocket.
4:20 after the Challenger explosion, the company that made the fuel (Pepcon) stored massive amounts of Ammonium Perchlorate that they then had no buyer for.
This set the scene for the Pepcon Disaster, an explosion about the scale of a tactical nuke just outside Las Vegas.
13:16 Well, the Ares 1-X did fly once in 2009 with a Space Shuttle SRB derived first stage.
The Ares 1-X is painful to look at. People were saved from having nightmares by not mentioning it😂
Thank you, Paul for this fascinating report on Solid fueled rockets. No mention of the modern Chinese efforts with multiple SRB rockets, but you are probably correct that we will not see anything as big as the Aerojet 260.
Thank you CD! One question that doesn't make obvious sense to me is the nozzle control on the "Z" axis. 12:39 What effect would that produce in the control of the rocket motor if the nozzle dimensions are not changed?
The Aerojet AJ 260 still sits in its silo to this day. The state covered the silo opening with concrete blocks to prevent access but it’s still there.
Great video
Rockets are technically a type of jet engine. Sir Frank Whittle made the very first air breathing liquid fueled jet engine, the radial flow gas turbine engine. The Germans developed an axial flow gas turbine, the axial flow has dominated the aviation industry because of the higher performance compared to radial flow gas turbine engines. That is, until liquid fueled rocket engines really began to be devloped. The RS-25 is like 2 turbochargers, radial flow gas turbines, with the absolutely meanest afterburner strapped to the back of them. The RS-25, and closed cycle liquid fueled rockets, are one heck of a comeback for radial flow gas turbine engines.
Get an education and stay away from Ai, it makes you stupid. Wrong in every way.
Would you count the Ares-1 test as a launch of the SRBs before the SLS?
Nice job!
FWIW: I am originally from St. Petersburg, Florida, and I lived in Dade County, Florida from 1988 to 1995.
However, it was not until OVER A DECADE LATER -- when I was living {and still live} in North Carolina -- that I first heard about this research site in Florida Everglades. I *_WISH_* I had known about the place where I lived in South Florida.
Absolutely loving the use of an AI image to show a battle involving ancient Mongolia, with some guy holding a rifle with a magazine. I can't decide if it's funnier to include that on purpose or accidentally
Well, the thing with "artificial intelligence" is that the operative here is "artificial", while this "intelligence" part is more of "sales pitch" or "tongue in cheek" slap-on, can't say which one is more prevalent though... ;-)
I hate it. Historically correct artist renderings or art from the time period would be much preferred. Imagine a future where history books are littered with nonsensical imagery. Educational youtube creators should stay away from generational AI for source material as it is complete fantasy and destroys credibility.
@@perlguiman _"Educational youtube creators should stay away from generational AI for csource material"_ - or just instruct this "AI bot/ module/ GKW" to include ONLY period-correct equipment - or, at the VERY LEAST, check these images for that BEFORE publishing them.
@@MrKotBonifacy Agreed. I think my comment was removed. That's fine. Once I saw that image, I stopped watching anyways.
@@perlguiman Well, I can see your comment there, no problemo - but this YT "comments thingy", from functionality standpoint, is kind of a poor joke, I'd say.
Thicol had a plant go high-order. There is a really interesting video of the boom.
You're speaking of the Henderson, Nevada -- that was Pacific Engineering and Production Company (PEPCON), the producer of the Ammonium Perchlorate used as oxidizer in the SRBs.
@@disorganizedorg My detail was a bit ambiguous but the boom was most impressive,
When shuttle launches got paused PEPCON couldn't scale back because they were under contract to produce xxx tons of AP each week, month or whatever.
They also build the plant on top of a high pressure gas main.
The shock wave rolling across the desert is something to see.
@@jimurrata6785 It was on the Discovery Channel many years ago I think, I remember watching it on one of those disaster shows.
@@RCAvhstape I've seen the raw footage from those two guys up on the TV antenna here on UA-cam
Did you see the Ares I-X? Where they used one 4 segment booster as a first stage?
The War of 1812 was not the War of Independence, but a replay, being the North American phase of the Napoleonic Wars.
For the Brits it was a distraction, if they wanted to win it they could have but Napoleon was our main concern at that time....Sorry about the Whitehouse thing!...😉
@@exsappermadman25055sorry about the white house? We're ecstatic.
@@exsappermadman25055 we’re sorry that your destructive problem child royalty is worse than our useless eater leaders.
@Noneofyourbusiness2000 History much?...
@GWN90 Past tense or?....
Very interesting! 👍
Thanks.
So . . . . where can I buy one for the Fourth of July?
At 2:18 that is quite the rocket powered modern rifle that dude is shooting.
Was hoping you'd mention jack Parsons. Cheers for the video.
The Australian Nulka decoy rocket has a solid propellant.
And it hovers!
I'd love to see you do a video on the Soyuz family of rockets. The greatest family of rockets ever, so far. The US still has a lot of catching up to do the best the Russians at their own game, even with the benefit of hindsight.💙
I need to know where you scored that amazing shirt, looking quite excellent!
Hey Droid, was it some old Bowie lyrics which said '...and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear...' Yeah. Nice shirts you always wear! I'm an old Yank that just needs to die off - can you dig!? If only I was cool looking(!)
Time 724
Resonance rod: What do these do? Are they there to keep the channel open in the fuel?
Could you do a video about the "Sprint" missile ? This missile is mind boggling !
I grew up within earshot (12 miles) of the National Space Technology Laboratories (NSTL), now known as the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. In the late 1970s, we'd hear them test-firing the solid rocket boosters (SRBs).
Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters were never test fired at Stennis. Only the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME) were tested at Stennis during the Space Shuttle days. I worked at Stennis from 1983 to 1994, before I transferred back to Kennedy.
The test facility still exists on the outskirts of Everglades national Park near Miami if I'm not mistaken.
You can see the canals which were intended to carry away the heavy gear leading to it. They've become a local hotspot for bass!
It is near Florida City or Homestead. Downtown Miami is 30 miles away. This is why I hate the people of this county that decided to change the name to Miami-Dade. It isn't the only city in the whole county. Miami want to claim almost everything. But not to be my worry much longer as I will be leaving this overcrowded area soon after being here for 62 years. Homestead used to be a nice small farming town. Now it has a population of 60,000+ and more moving in all the time.
I wish we would see a bit more about Project Gemini and Project Mercury the predecessor to the Apollo program
Awesome
Yes another curious droid video! 😊
I guess if you put "the Moon" in the title of a video it attracts a certain crowd... ahem. Great content as usual. I hope you are doing well sir.
Was this the Aerojet motor that was left to the elements in Florida?
" I'm just going to check the inside of the rocket motor"
"ok, but put your cigarette out first..."
One wonders how careful you'd have to be with spark suppression (bronze tools etc) whist assembling them.
It always amuses me to no end when "freedom units" people convert them to metric ones - "volcanic ash cloud has risen to 55 thousand feet" , which is clearly an APPROXIMATE altitude, since such cloud doesn't have any clearly defined "edges", so it's "55K ft, give or take few hundreds" - yet, and quite "amusingly" this approximate level becomes an EXACT "16 764 metres" when it gets converted (and never mind metric lot would rather express in kilometres - after rounding it up, i.e. 16.8 km).
Here something "visible for OVER 80 miles" (again, clearly an approximation! - it's NOT "EIGHTY, PERIOD!" - but "OVER eighty") becomes an EXACT distance of 132 kilometres (and never mind it's actually incorrect, as 80 mi is 128.75 km for LAND miles - and just tad over 148 km for nautical miles - conversely, 132 km = 71.3 n. mi and 82 "land" ones).
Why not just say "over 130 km" - or "about 150 km" (in case of nautical miles)? Me no understand... ;-)
PS: Seem that for some obscure reasons "pounds" did not enjoy the grace of being converted bestowed upon them - the thrust was "5 million pounds" (and all of ya metric lot get lost, por favore) - that'd be 2268 thousands kG (kg = unit of mass, kG, aka "kilogram-force" is the unit of force, - equal to the force exerted by "kg" at sea level, AFAIR), or, better still, 22.24 kN (kilonewtons), as thrust is usually expressed in this "true" SI unit.
Wow! I can't believe you didn't mention Conrad Haas...
Conrad Haas, a 16th-century Austrian military engineer, is credited with designing and writing about multistage rockets, centuries before the modern era of rocketry. His work, discovered in 1961, includes detailed illustrations and technical descriptions of rocket construction, propulsion, and stabilization.
Key Features of Haas’ Rocket Designs
Multistage rockets with cylindrical thrust chambers filled with powdered fuel and conical combustion chambers
Delta-shaped fins for stabilization
Bell-shaped nozzles for efficient exhaust gas expansion
Staged combustion design, where each stage is ignited in sequence to provide continuous thrust
Wow!! Three stage rockets and bell nozzles in the 1500's?!
The Australians are about to launch a hybrid solid propellant liquid oxidizer rocket. Will be interesting to see how this works out.
I heard about it. You heard about that water rocket? I guess somebody is pumping glycol at high pressure, heating it up with a lithium battery powered heater, then realeasing the steam to push a rocket. There's some cool rockets out there.
I would certainly consider you to be one that would use groundnews.
The comments say sodium perchlorate is a current oxidizer in solid fuel rockets. More energy per kilogram would be obtained from lithium perchlorate (deliquescent) and ammonium perchlorate, the latter having the extra advantage of producing nitrogen gas which increases thrust. These two perchlorates are only marginally more expensive. Has tetramethylammonium perchlorate been tried ?
Can you do a video on the solid rocket engines the indian space program uses please?
Not only could the plume be seen miles away, it also could be felt anywhere in Homestead like an earthquake. If you have a good view, you can watch the rocket launches from the Cape in Homestead also. I was at work 10 miles N of Homestead and watched as the Challenger blew up. I see the SpaceX launches all the time.
Gunpowder rockets would be amazing!
Was quality control while casting the propellant a factor? without modern imaging techniques an undetected flaw in the casting would be catastrophic and would be undetected until the major malfunction occurred.
Partially - mainly that in segmented boosters like the Shuttle ones, it is easier to catch the flaw early on, and you only need to recycle the affected segment
Why no mention of the V2, which was the biggest turning point in history of rockets..
He probably avoided that because it was liquid fueled and this was about solid rocket motors.
He showed the V2 at 1:23. He also showed the Saturn V, which was designed by the same guy that designed the V2. He did his homework.
The Chinese Gravity 1 solid fuel rocket launch can put 6.5 tons into LEO. It launches from a barge at sea.
Why is there a question mark on the end of the subtitle? It is not a question.
Build the Sea Dragon!
"We are so committed, we use rocket boosters to fly our rocket to the launch pad"
(60s mentality)
One unaddressed factor is cost: A rocket is 90% or more by weight fuel, and large rockets use thousands of tons of fuel. Liquid oxygen, aviation grade kerosene and methane are all mass-produced on an industrial scale at minimum cost; they're a very mature technology. Solid rocket motors use a rubber-like plastic compound as fuel and a solid perchlorate chemical as a mixed-in oxidizer. This is just plain more expensive per ton. One thing solid rocket motors can't do is be inexpensive; on the scale of rockets like the Saturn V, the Shuttle, the Space Launch System or SpaceX's Starship, they simply would be too expensive to be the entire rocket.
How they got their start in space launch was in the 1960s when the USA was struggling to upgrade their comparatively small military rockets to be able to launch larger payloads soon, without having to go back to the drawing board and build larger rockets from scratch and wait years in the meantime. Rockets like the Titan 2 and Thor got solid boosters strapped on to increase their throw weight. If the USA had decided to continue exploring the Moon it would have used an upgraded Saturn V with solid boosters added for more payload. This could be done quickly if not cheaply. When the Shuttle was developed, solid rocket boosters were seen as the fastest and easiest way to make the boosters recoverable, even if not as desirable from a technical standpoint. The SLS is intended to recycle the technology used to build the Shuttle; without them the SLS core components would have to be largely redesigned.
SpaceX's "gas up and go" plan for Starship means that liquid fuel rockets will hopefully be cheaper and even faster than a solid rocket alternative.
Never say never...less polluting mixes might bring the very large multi-million pound thrust resuable monolithic solid back.
Thiokol was bought in 2001 by ATK, then again in 2018 by Northrup Grumman. they still make perchlorate, and boosters in Utah. lots of smaller missile parts for various navy and air force freedom gluzzies. And the big booster, I believe for United launch Alliance.
It certainly looks like methalox is the future choice for most civilian rocket propulsion. Considering everything, it looks like the best choice.
Methane is a good choice if you want to build a re-usable stack and you want to use the same propellent for all stages of that stack. It's not the *best* choice by most measures, but it's one that makes a lot of sense for a certain set of design constraints...it's cheap and burns cleanly, it offers a better ISP than solids or kerosene, a better energy density than hydrogen, and it pairs well with oxygen in terms of compatible temperatures.
That said, it's not an automatic winner. Take Vulcan, for example... ULA picked the BE-4 engine so methalox was part of the package, but if they'd had a better engine candidate, it probably would have made more sense for them to stick to kerosene for the higher energy density. They're building an expendable vehicle with a low flight rate, so they don't benefit much from a cheap non-coking fuel, and they're already using hydrogen for the upper stage, so they don't get any benefit from commonality across the stack. So they're mostly getting the downsides of methane (cryogenic, lower density) and none of the upsides.
@@simongeard4824 Yes, different situations call for different fuels. Even hypergolic fuels made a lot of sense at one time, for certain situations. I can see why the Soviets would make a moon rocket booster using them. It made some things much easier. Alas, they had to learn the downsides the hard way. So have we. Some people in Damascus AR could tell you all about it.
As for trends, yes, with re-use being more and more of interest, methalox is going to be ascendant. It certainly looks that way. If you want maximum ISP above all else, then LH2+LOX is probably the choice. Once out in space, ion drive is going to be bigger and bigger. OTOH I think solid fuels have peaked, for most purposes. Again, it depends. A launch escape tower is probably a solid fuel situation. It's great that we have so many choices now.
Babe, wake up. Curious Droid uploaded a new video.🤭
This was a very interesting video because it is the first time I've ever heard of 'stopping and restarting' a SOLID ROCKET motor/engine(did not know that was possible, hashtag/notarocketscientist)