Носители легкого класса: технический облик

[Александр Ч.]

Старый пишет:

Александр Ч. пишет:

Старый пишет:

Теплотехник пишет:
как профессионал (см. ник) скажу "ТТУ из ступеней Тополя - НННШ, кроме Морского старта, и то если их аттестует МИТ на морской и при этом тропический климат. Тополь в ТПК и Тополь-М в шахте живут в тепличных условиях, а на Байконуре днем +20, ночью -5. Ни один РДТТ этого не переживет... Это в Куру зимой +22, летом +25, там можно.

А обернуть в теплозащитный чехол?

Представил себе Протон завернутый в одеяло...

Ну тут же про ТТУ на основе Тополя. У меня постоянно стоит перед глазами Минотавр-1 завёрнутый в банановую кожуру.

Рокот вон тоже в одеяло завернут
Я про предложение Цих:

[Александр Ч.]

Кстати, у нас же уже есть доморощенный конкурент для Adler by Lin и прочим легким носителям. Даже шесть раз успешно вывел нагрузку. Я про Старт-1, как раз из Тополя    Кто-нибудь помнит во сколько аттракцион обошелся?

PS Наверняка можно на его базе и нанолончер сделать  

[Димитър]

Так что можно или нельзя ТТУ?

Можно! РН Старт вывела уже 5 спутников с космодрома Свободный. Кстати, ракета как раз на основе Тополя.

[Теплотехник]

То Димитър: а откуда стартовал "Старт"? с открытой ПУ, или всё-таки из термостатируемого ТПК на штатном для "Тополя" автомобиле??

[SFN]

 http://novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/forum/messages/forum13/topic3266/message1009714/#message1009714

[Петр Зайцев]

Еще у японцев были ракеты с ТТРД, но их пускали только при плюсовой температуре. То же самое с Вегой (про это Теплотехник уже заметил).

Одно непонятно - как орбиталовцы умудряются пускать "Таурус" из Кодъяка. У них ведь нет никакого пускового контейнера. Только вращающаяся башня, и все. Может быть какие-нибудь чехлы? Я где-то видел срываемый на старте чехол, но не могу вспомнить где.

[Salo]

На Минотавре вестимо.

[Димитър]

Теплотехник пишет:
То Димитър: а откуда стартовал "Старт"? с открытой ПУ, или всё-таки из термостатируемого ТПК на штатном для "Тополя" автомобиле??

Главное - что стартовал и успешно (Старт-1). Откуда - это вопрос технологии.

[Димитър]

Кстати, не понимаю, почему на форуме столько тем про легкие ракеты! ИМХО, для всех типов ракет существует ПРЕВЫШЕНИЕ ПРЕДЛОЖЕНИЯ НАД СПРОСОМ. Тем более - для легких ракет. С одной стороны - конверсионные ракеты, с другой – сопутствующий груз на тяжелых и средних ракетах. Любой новой ракете будет очень трудно возвратить деньги, потраченные на ее создание.

ИМХО, создание новой легкой ракеты имеет смысл только в двух случаях:

1. Если какая-то страна (Турция? Нигерия? Индонезия?) хочет войти в космический клуб, запустив собственный спутник на своей ракете. Легкую ракету сделать проще и дешевле, чем тяжелую.

2. Если нужно опробовать в полете какое-то новое решение.

Пример: проект «Ишим» - воздушный старт с разделением на сверхзвуковой скорости. Такого пока в мире не было.

 

Так что рулят конверсионные ракеты. Откроем тему про их настоящее и будущее?

[ВВК]

Теплотехник пишет:
То Димитър: а откуда стартовал "Старт"? с открытой ПУ, или всё-таки из термостатируемого ТПК на штатном для "Тополя" автомобиле??

с ТПК здесь можно посмотреть
 
http://www.rg.ru/2008/12/03/reg-dvostok/kosmodrom.html

А ссылка эта отсюда

http://novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/forum/messages/forum13/topic7214/message1217078/#message1217078

[Salo]

http://aviationweek.com/space/spacex-alum-goes-after-falcon-1-market-firefly

SpaceX Alum Goes After Falcon 1 Market With Firefly
Aerospike revival, advances in composite structures are shaping design of low-cost smallsat launch vehicle
Aug 25, 2014  Frank Morring, Jr. | Aviation Week & Space Technology
 
A version of this article appears in the August 25 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

As entrepreneurial "New Space" grows up, veterans of its early days are finding innovative ways to tackle old problems and enter emerging markets that did not exist when their industry was an infant—a decade ago.
Thomas E. Markusic, a propulsion engineer who cut his New Space teeth running Elon Musk's flight-test center in Texas and later held senior posts at Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, has kicked off a startup called Firefly Space Systems that is developing  a low-cost Falcon 1-class launch vehicle to launch small satellites using a methane-fueled aerospike engine and composite cryotanks.
 

This "Alpha" version of the Falcon 1-class launch vehicle under development by Firefly Space Systems would use methane fuel and a plugged aerospike main engine (inset) to achieve operational and cost efficiency. Credit: Firefly Space Systems

Going fr om a standing start early this year, Markusic and a handful of like-minded entrepreneurs have self-funded a rapid buildup to 30 employees. They have opened facilities in Austin, Texas, and Hawthorne, California (not far from the SpaceX factory), and started buying fiber-winding gear for composite tanks to be built using an out-of-autoclave process tested at Marshall Space Flight Center this summer. They have also bought land for a test site within commuting distance of Austin.
"One thing I learned at SpaceX, if you don't have your own test site you're not going to go anywhere, really," says Markusic. "I wanted to keep everything co-located too. Austin allowed me the possibility to have a relatively closely co-located test site, so right now we're in a suburb of Austin with our engineering offices, and we just bought a 215-acre test site in Briggs, Texas."
The aerospike rocket-engine technology that Firefly will test at the Briggs site builds on the way a rocket's plume expands as it ascends through the atmosphere. Without a bell-shaped nozzle to contain it, the plume basically assumes the most efficient shape for the ambient atmospheric pressure, allowing the engine to operate with greater efficiency.
The technology has been tried repeatedly over the years, and once was considered for the space shuttle main engine. The suborbital X-33 reusable launch vehicle prototype built by the Lockheed Skunk Works featured a ground-tested Rocketdyne XRS-2200 linear aerospike engine integrated into the lifting-body vehicle's tail (AW&ST June 7, 1999, p. 57), and while that vehicle never flew, a team from California State University, Long Beach, and Garvey Spacecraft Corp. flew a small ethanol-fueled aerospike in September 2003.
In Firefly's planned "Lumen" engine, which uses what is known as a plug aerospike configuration, a ring of 10 combustion chambers surrounds a truncated spike (see inset illustration).  As the plumes from the combustors expand with the dropping ambient air pressure as the vehicle ascends, the interior parts of them push against the so-called plug to generate additional thrust.
"We come off the pad with, effectively, a 30:1 area ratio nozzle, which dramatically increases our performance," Markusic says. "That's the theory. In practice it doesn't quite work that way. The aerospike actually goes through kind of a closed-wake and an open-wake regime, and you really don't start seeing the benefits until the pressure starts going down a little bit in practice. But if you integrate over the whole boost trajectory you definitely see an enhancement."
Just as Firefly is drawing on a lot of government research in its aerospike technology, the company is using a key element of the SpaceX Merlin engine—the pintle injector—in its new engine's combustion chamber. Markusic, who jumped ship from NASA to SpaceX after the agency sent him to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands to observe the first flight of the Falcon 1, says he started working on the technology—also used on the Apollo program's lunar-descent engine —at SpaceX and when he was developing a liquid-fuel alternative to the hybrid engine used on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.
"A pintle injector is a great injector for a startup company because it's bulletproof," he says. "There's never been a pintle injector that's been shown to be unstable."
But while it is willing to borrow pintle technology from the Merlin and other engines, Firefly is using methane fuel instead of kerosene as a way to avoid the expense and operational difficulty associated with the helium used to pressurize propellant tanks. Helium is hard to contain, and SpaceX has learned the hard way that helium leaks can cause costly delays (AW&ST June 11, p. 22). With methane, Firefly is able to use a heat-exchanger built into the aerospike plug to boil both of the engine's propellants—methane and liquid oxygen—for autogenous pressurization.
Methane gives higher engine-exhaust velocity than kerosene, but it is much less dense, which in a launch vehicle means more weight for the larger tanks needed to hold enough of it to get to space. To attack that problem, Firefly is working toward lightweight composite tankage and other structure, using engineers who honed their skills developing the composite structures on Virgin's WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft. The company is also watching the results of composite tankage tests just wrapping up at Marshall Space Flight Center.
NASA scuttled the X-33 program in part because an experimental composite liquid hydrogen tank failed during tests at Marshall in 1999. Boeing built the tanks used in the tests this summer using a new out-of-autoclave curing process, and  Markusic—who worked at Marshall for five years—says he and his colleagues have been following the test series closely. Firefly has just signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA for help with the tank technology and other development issues.
SpaceX dropped its Falcon 1 program after three launch failures and two successful orbital flights, and moved on to the medium-lift Falcon 9. Firefly hopes to pick up wh ere Musk left off, using a high flight rate and the mass production it enables to hold down the price of a launch with its two-stage "alpha" vehicle to $8-9 million. That would put 409 kg of payload into a circular 500-km equatorial orbit, or 218 kg into polar orbit at the same altitude. The goal is to tackle the smallsat launch market emerging on the coattails of advances in the tiny cubesat form factor, which has far more spacecraft built or in development than rides to space to accommodate them (AW&ST Aug. 4, p. 19).
"There are two fundamental approaches to lowering costs," Markusic says. "The first is mass production, and the second one is reusability. To tap into this mass-production avenue, you have to have something to be mass produced. Now the only launch vehicle that can honestly be mass produced is a small launch vehicle, because that is the only kind of launch vehicle that has a lot of payloads. There is an availability of an order of magnitude more launches for small satellites than there is for large satellites."
 

Credit: Firefly Space Systems

Firefly is "definitely set for the near term," but its funding needs are moving deeper than the pockets of its founders. The principals have started fundraising in earnest, with "one hard commitment that will give us a multi-tens-of-million-dollar injection in about the next month [and] we have a couple of fairly solid leads," Markusic says, noting that there is a shortage of places for investors who want to get into New Space to put their money.
"What we're finding is that there's a scarcity of investment opportunity," he says. "People like the team we're building, and like the idea that they can actually get some capital in and potentially have a high payoff." 

[Solar Sailor]

Ещё одни    На этот раз с гибридным движком. Искал по форуму - вроде не упоминалось.

http://www.mishaalaerospace.com/orbital-vehicle

Our M-OV is designed to deliver satellites in the 800 to 1,000 lbs (363 to 454 kg) class to LEO (Low Earth Orbit). It also performs as a development platform for the Lunar Vehicle.

Летом испытывали двигатель:

[Salo]

http://spacenews.com/silicon-valley-fund-invests-in-new-zealands-rocket-lab/

Silicon Valley Fund Invests in New Zealand's Rocket Lab
by Jeff Foust — March 2, 2015
Rocket Lab, with a U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles but most of its technical staff in Auckland, New Zealand, is developing a small launch vehicle called Electron. Credit; Rocket Lab video  
 
WASHINGTON — A company with offices in the U.S. and New Zealand announced March 2 that it closed a new round of funding to allow it to complete development of a small low-cost launch vehicle by 2016.
Rocket Lab Ltd. said it had completed a second, or Series B, financing round, led by venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) of Menlo Park, California. Two funds that participated in an earlier round, Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park and New Zealand-based K1W1 Ltd., also contributed to the Series B round, Rocket Lab said in a statement.
In a March 2 interview, Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck declined to specify how much money the company raised, citing competitive reasons. He did say the company raised a "considerable amount" that will sustain the company through the start of commercial operations in the second half of 2016.
 Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck. Credit: Rocket Lab video
BVP spokeswoman Tiffany Spencer also declined to state how much the fund was investing in Rocket Lab. "However, we believe it is sufficient to fund the company well into commercial operations," she said March 2 in response to a SpaceNews inquiry.
Rocket Lab, with a U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles but most of its technical staff in Auckland, New Zealand, is developing a small launch vehicle called Electron. The vehicle is designed to place up to 110 kilograms into a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit at a price of $4.9 million per launch.
Beck said Rocket Lab plans to conduct the first in a series of Electron test launches from New Zealand by the end of this year. Commercial launches would begin in mid to late 2016. Beck said the company has signed contracts for more than 30 commercial launches, but declined to name the customers.
Rocket Lab plans to launch from New Zealand primarily because its planned site there supports a wide range of launch azimuths for satellites that need to go into polar or more equatorial orbits. "It's like a combination of Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base," he said of the site, the location of which the company plans announce in the near future.
Also making a "strategic investment" in Rocket Lab is Lockheed Martin. That investment, Beck said, will lead to development work between the two companies in "Electron-based technologies," but declined to be more specific.
In the statement, Lockheed Martin chief scientist Ned Allen said he believed Rocket Lab's technology could have a variety of applications. "We look forward to working with them to complement our overall efforts in small lift capabilities and hypersonic flight technologies," he said.
The investment is the latest evidence that Silicon Valley-based venture capital funds are showing an increased interest in space ventures. BVP previously invested in one other space company, Skybox Imaging, which was acquired by Google in 2014. David Cowan, a BVP partner who previously was on Skybox's board of directors, will join Rocket Lab's board as part of the investment.
BVP separately announced March 2 that it had hired Scott Smith, chief operating officer of Iridium, as a part-time operating partner. Smith, who will retain his job at Iridium, will advise BVP on potential investments in what the fund calls the "spacetech" sector. Smith was also a board member of Skybox prior to its sale to Google.
In an essay in the technology news publication TechCrunch March 1, Cowan said advances in computing and other technologies made space ventures more compelling. "Unencumbered by government bureaucracy, this new breed of enterprise can move quickly, attract the best talent with equity ownership, and take calculated design risks that government contractors cannot afford to," he wrote of emerging space companies.

[profan]

Solar Sailor пишет:
Ещё одни      

Одна?
Based in Miami, Florida, MISHAAL Aerospace is certified as a woman-owned company

 

[Salo]

http://tass.ru/kosmos/1824579

Ракетные двигатели на сжиженном газе

Кроме этого НТС Роскосмоса рекомендует создать ракетные двигатели на сжиженном газе, которые, в частности, будут использовать в сверхлегких ракетах-носителях.
По итогам состоявшегося очередного заседания НТС принято решение: "Рекомендовать Роскосмосу рассмотреть возможность включения в проект Федеральной космической программы до 2025 года работы по созданию ракетных двигателей на сжиженном природном газе для применения в новых космических комплексах, в том числе - с многоразовой ракетой-носителем сверхлегкого класса".
Данное предложение выработано с учетом реальных возможностей "государственного финансирования проектов ФКП до 2025 года и Федеральной целевой программы развития космодромов до 2025 года, а также необходимость первоочередного развития российских орбитальных группировок космических аппаратов научного, социально-экономического и двойного назначения", отметили в Роскосмосе.

[Ваш доктор]

Salo пишет:

Дмитрий В. пишет:
Сереж, ты для каких объемов баков считал? Уж больно массы газов наддува большие.

Давление в баках 71-72 атм. Объём около 70 м3 на двух ступенях.

[Shin]

Товарищ "Ваш доктор" уходит в бан навсегда за разжигание.

[Salo]

А вот идеальный двигатель для второй ступени проекта лёгкой РН "Самара" Дмитрия В.:
http://www.energia.ru/ktt/archive/2015/02-2015/02-07.pdf
 

[ZOOR]

Кажется, этой феерии еще не было
http://www.rks.name/Doks/CometTT.html

Новый алгоритм полета: Предполагает изменение всей летной программы, поскольку в проекте «Комета» используется принципиально-новый принцип  полета. Например, применение многоразового горизонтального стартового ускорителя, позволяет (впервые в мире) использовать режим «скрытного старта», когда ракета набирает скорость и по инерции осуществляет полет по баллистической траектории при выключенных двигателях, включая их в полете на значительном удалении от стартовой позиции. В военном применении это затрудняет обнаружение стартовой позиции ракеты, и повышает ее живучесть.

А дальше вообще обманывают

Новая инерционная система управления: Предлагается заменить громоздкие и дорогостоящие гидроприводы, отклоняющие реактивную струю каждой ступени на новую единую систему управления, которая (впервые в мире) обеспечивает изменение траектории полета путем смещения центра массы ракеты. Таким образом, одно единственное устройство, размещенное в головной части, позволяет управлять ракетой на всех этапах полета. Это значительно уменьшает себестоимость силовых установок ступеней (каждая из которых в обычном варианте требует применения отдельных громоздких гидроприводов), улучшается управляемость ракеты, и повышается ее надежность.

[Геннадий Ермолицкий]

Дмитрий В. пишет:
И получается все та же "1,5 - ступенчатая" схема. Да еще и с присущим ей крупным недостатком: огромными перегрузками в конце АУТ. Придется дросселировать РД0120 очень глубоко - потеря УИ. Между тем, уже вполне можно создать одноступенчатую РН с приемлемыми характеристиками. Что касается "1,5-ступенчатой" схемы, то целесообразно применить двухрежимный ЖРД с переменным соотношением компонентов: http://www.kbkha.ru/?p=8&cat=12&prod=64
 Тогда сбрасываемые баки 1-й ступени будут легче, а перегрузка в конце АУТ - существенно ниже.

Но, идея красивая. Почему её не использовать в МБР ?  На орбиту не надо, а огромные перегрузки становятся достоинством. Вопрос: как безопасно избавляться от верхнего бака?