Remember The Titans
September 24th, 2008
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From 1962 until 2005, one of the most reliable, capable and commonly used space launch systems by the United States was the Titan-II family of rockets. The class of rockers consisted of the Titan II rocket, the Titan 23B rocket (A Titan II rocket with an additional Agena D upper stage), the Titan III (A Titan II rocket augmented with two solid boosters) and the Titan IV (a stretched version of the Titan-II core with two solid boosters. Later versions produced were made of a light weight aluminum-lithium alloy.).
The Titan family of rockets includes the Titan I, the Titan II, III and IV. The Titan I was significantly different than the later titans (and IMHO doesn’t really belong in the same family, but it does have the same name). The later Titans, however, were all very similar and based around the same central rocket stage. The design remained almost unchanged from the first Titan II manufactured in 1962 to the last Titan IV rocket delivered in 2005. Later production runs of the rocket used an aluminum-lithium alloy to reduce weight and obviously the electronics were upgraded over the course of the rockets service, but other than that, the rocket design remained the same.
The Titan II was originally designed as a ballistic missile and served as such from 1962 to its final retirement in 1986. In order to act as an ICBM, the rocket needed to have the capability to be launched on short notice and to remain in a ready state for extended periods of time in a missile silo. To accomplish this, the Titan II departed from traditional rocket fuel systems which utilize liquid oxygen as the primary oxidizer and RP-1 or liquid hydrogen. Instead, the Titan II used dinitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer and a hydrazine based fuel. These are both liquid at room temperature and can easily be stored for extended periods of time.
The downside of the fuel system of the Titan II is that the compounds used are highly toxic and corrosive. If released by accident, they could prove deadly to launch crews and did on two occasions. These accidents, however, were limited to missile silo deployments, where crews were forced to work on fully fueled rockets in a confined space. As a space launch vehicle, the Titan proved to be extremely safe and reliable. The use of liquid fuels, although adding some safety issues from the toxicity also introduced several safety features. The fuels did not need to be stored at pressure or at a low temperature and did not “boil off” from the rocket. Thus, the rocket did not require ‘topping off’ before launch and there was no danger of of vented gas igniting. In the event of a failure, the fuel would burn but not explode. A space capsul could keep astronauts safely isolated from the substances in the event of a leak and a launch escape system meant that they could be brought a safe distance from the rocket in a failure.
It also meant that the rocket engines could be simpler, the components not required to operate with ultra low temperatures. The fuel could be fed partially by gravity and the two substances ignited on contact, reducing the need for ignition systems and making for a very simple and reliable rocket engine system.
Given these advantages, NASA choose the Titan II to be the launch vehicle for Project Gemini. Project Gemini consisted of ten manned flights, all using the Titan II and proved to be a resounding success. The Air force also saw the Titan II as a natural choice for manned space flight, and the initial reason for developing the system into the Titan III was the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory program. The program, however, was cancled before any manned flights were made and the rocket was religated to unmanned space launches, where it served well, launching military and research payloads including the Casini space probe, Voyager I and II, Helios and Viking.
NASA had considered returning to using the Titan system for manned launches after the Apollo program. Skylab, the first Space Station supported by the United States was supported by Apollo capsules launched on Saturn 1B rockets. The Titan III would have been able to launch Apollo sized capsules to the space station and the Titan II could have launched smaller, more Gemini-like capsules. Returning to the Titan could have meant more missions to Skylab, as NASA only had a limited number of Saturn IB rockets and they were very expensive to launch, especially considering that dedicated launch facilities were needed for the limited number of missions on the out of production rocket.
Alas, politics dictated that all manned space flight funding would be allocated to the development of the Space Shuttle. When Shuttle development ran over schedule, the US ended up without any manned space flight capability. Without any missions to Skylab to reboost the space station and Skylab ended up falling from orbit and landing in the Indian Ocean and the Australian Outback.
Retirement from ICBM use and Reuse of Former ICBMS:
The Regan administration announced that the Titan II ICMB system would be retired beginning in 1981. At the time there were 56 remaining Titan rockets in service, but the phaseout began to take these missiles offline starting in 1983. By 1985 23 remained active and by 1987, the last of the Titan rockets were deactivated.
The obvious thing to do with these rockets was to reuse them for space launch. Given that they had been kept maintained and in perfect working order, they were more than capable of being used to launch satellites up to about four tons into low earth orbit as-is. With minimal modification and the addition of solid boosters, the rocket was capable of launching more than fourteen tons into LEO, or even 25 tons if upgraded to Titan-IV configuration. By today’s standards the (unmodified) Titan II is considered a medium/low capacity launch platform. It’s comparable to the Taurus II or Delta II rockets and significantly more powerful than the Falcon 1 or the Minotaur.
Thus, in 1988, the Air Force allocated funds to convert the retired Titan II’s into medium launch platforms, dubbed the Titan 23G, the main modifications were a new payload fairing and some new avionics. All fourteen of the venerable rockets flew perfectly, although in one case the mission was considered a failure because the upper “orbital kick stage” did not fire properly and the satellite ended up in an unusable orbit.
The last of the converted Titan II’s was launched in 2003. Fourteen of the rockets were launched. But.. there were 56 of them. 56 highly capable rockets that were perfecly capable of space launches and which were just sitting there, already in the inventory and needing only minor modification and refurbishment. And rockets are very expensive.
So what happened to the other 42 rockets? One or two ended up at a museum and the rest…
Here they were, or what’s left of them, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base/AMARC in 2006:
And earlier this year…
No, the ones that are missing are not being sent to launchpads, but have been ‘recycled’ for their aluminum. These magnificent rockets will not fly again. It’s the end of the line and any that are left now are likely very close to their end. Whether or not they could even be salvaged now is questionable. In the early 1990’s, these rockets were just a few years retired from being kept active and ready, but today it may not be feasible to reuse them given that they’ve been sitting in the desert for so long with little or no care.
The official reason for their demise:
The last of the Titan II missiles was launched in 2003. The last Titan to be launched was a Titan IVB, which was launched in 2005. The launches of the Titan 23G’s were all successful but only a fraction of the total number of missiles avaliable were converted. Although they proved very successful for the Air Force, NASA declined to ever use the launch system, although they were apparently offered the opertunity to get in on the program to convert the rockets. (Sorry, I don’t have the citation for that)
In 2003, with the last Titan II launched and the last of the newer Titan IV delivered and being readied for launch, the Air Force announced that it would be tearing down the Titan launch facilities to make room for other rocket launch systems. The old launch towers, tanks and assembly buildings were taken down and the program was ended. There are now no more launch pads configured for the Titan family of rockets in use.
Lockheed Martin had stated in the early 1990’s that it would no longer manufacture or support the Titan series of rockets. The company said that the rocket was obsolete and apparently the Air Force agreed. Lockheed Martin and the United Space Alliance effectively killed the Titan system by ending the production and showing no interest in refurbishing or supporting the existing Titan II rockets.
The reason given was the Titan’s Hydrazine based fuel system (Aerozine 50) was too expensive and that liquid hydrogen fueled rockets like the Delta and RP1 (kerosene) fueled rockets like the Atlas V were cheaper and more effecient to fuel. Lockheed Martin therefore stated that they were only interested in focusing on their Atlas rocket system.
I don’t buy this. Yes, hydrazine fuel systems are a bit more expensive, but it seems hard to believe that the cost of the fuel would be so great as to offset the savings of using an existing rocket than buying an entirely new one. The Russian Proton rocket, considered the most economical medium to heavy launch system in existence today uses a nearly identical fuel mixture and continues to have great success with it. The fuel is also used for the Space Shuttle’s Orbital Maneuvering System and for most space satellites, so the facilities to maintain and transfer the fuel still must be maintained to some extent.
The price of refuirbishing the rockets was also cited as the reason the program was not extended. The cost of the minimal refurbishment did indeed turn out to be somewhat more than expected, especially for the first of the rockets refurbished.
The Titan 23G had a flyaway cost of about $26 million dollars. The entire cost per launch of the refurbished Titan II’s, including the new payload adapters, the new guidence systems, fuel, launch services and support comes out to about $34 million per launch. The first Titan rockets refurbished turned out to be more expensive than anticipated, but the last batch of six rockets refurbished were only $26 million each.
On the other hand, the Atlas V in it’s lowest cost configuration has a launch cost of about $110-$138 million. Admittedly, the Atlas can carry nearly twice the payload to low earth orbit than the Titan 23G can, although the Titan can be fitted with extra boosters to achieve an equal or greater payload. Per kilogram to orbit, however, the Atlas V is at least three times as expensive, and may be unnecessary for smaller payloads. The Delta II is the most comperable rocket to the Titan 23G which is currently in service. It has about the same payload capacity but the per-launch cost is more than twice as much as that of the converted Titans. The Delta II also does not have as high a reliability rating as the Titans, having twice exploded shortly after takeoff.
At a flyaway cost of $26 million, that makes the Titan 23G about the cheapest thing around to get a medium to medium-large sized payload into low earth orbit or a small to medium payload to geostationary orbit or into deep space. The cost, however, assumes that the cost of refurbishment would be constant. As was demonstrated with the two refurbishment runs, the cost tended to decrease with more units processed due to tooling and the cost of producing the larger fairings and adapters in quantity. It’s hard to be certain, but had all the avaliable Titans, all 56 of them been refurbished in the 1990’s, it’s possible that the per-unit cost could have been considerably lower than even the $26 million cost.
Conclusion:
Let me first say that this is speculation, and I don’t want anyone to quote me as stating this as being known fact, but I strongly suspect that the reason for the demise of the Titan and the scrapping of more than forty perfectly good rockers probably had a lot to do with the fact that Lockheed Martin would rather sell the government a whole new rocket for over one hundred million dollars than get paid a considerably lower amount to refurbish a rocket already in the inventory.
The Titan II facilities already existed and the launch could be done with hardware the Air Force and systems the Air Force already had. The Air Force was experienced with the system and could do most of the launch services in house. It may have been fair to end the production of new Titan rockets, but the platform should have continued to be used, at least in my opinion, until the units already avaliable in the inventory had been expended.
Oh well. Too late now. The facilities were demolished and the rockets, if any are left, have been unmaintained and left out in the desert for two decades. Soon there will be no more, save a few museum pieces.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Good Science, History, Politics, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 24th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
There’s no doubt at all that not using the Titan-2’s to their complete extent was profit driven. There were charges that Lockheed-Martin actually may have intentionally inflated the bill for the conversion not just to make more money but to kill the future of converting them. Remember these rockets were taken out of service in 1985-1987 and conversion started in 1988. They were one year off ready to launch and had been kept in fully operational condition. LockMart managed to stop them from all being converted so they could sell more Titan IV’s and later kill the whole line to consolidate it with Atlas.
It should have only cost about a few million for the guidence system update. The fairing doesn’t count, IMHO because that’s per-payload in some cases. It would have been more if they had upgraded them with solids to TIII’s. I don’t think it would have been worth upgrading them to TIV’s because that requires them being cut and stretched.
BTW: There were a couple of titan explosions. Most were during development but a Titan III exploded in the 80’s due to a problem with the solid booster burning through the balloon tanks.
Magnificent rocket though. I don’t think the line should have been ended, but at worst they should have used what they had. Man-Rated is as high as you can go with a rocket and the TII was as reliable as they get in general for that kind of rocket scale.
They only built a handful of the LiAl alloy. That was a carryover from the Shuttle external fuel tank where the alloy was first used. It only added modestly to the capacity.
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September 24th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Hydrazine has other disadvantages than toxicity. The main one is its inferior specific impulse. You get a lot more bang for the buck, pound for pound, out of good ol’ kerosene/LOX. You get even more out of LH2/LOX (which the Space Shuttle uses), but there are penalties to LH2, mostly its very low density, requiring very large tanks. Kerosene is also less dense than hydrazine, and therefore requires larger tanks, but in general, kerosene/LOX has a good balance between energy density and specific impulse.
The reason the Russians use hydrazine is not because it is better than kerosene. In fact, their hugely popular Soyuz rocket (used for a lot of commercial satellite payloads as well as Soyuz manned spacecraft) is powered by kerosene. Their heavy Proton uses hydrazine for the same reason the Titan did — it was originally devised as an ICBM.
There is one other problem with hydrazine, other than its toxicity. It is also one of its big strengths. Hydrazine combined with nitrogen tetroxide is hypergolic — that is, it ignites spontaneously when the two fluids come into contact, and will continue to burn until one or the other propellant is exhausted (or the flow of propellant is stopped). The upshot is that you do not need an igniter, which greatly simplifies the engine, and simplicity is generally good for reliability. The downside is that you need to keep the two propellants apart at all costs when you don’t actually want to burn. Google “Nedelin Catastrophe” for the single worst accident involving hypergolic propellants. (Important note: the accident did not need to claim so many lives, and it was probably avoidable. Many safety rules were ignored, allowing the accident to occur. Still, the propellants would not have ignited if it had been a kerosene rocket.)
Not exactly. Titan/Gemini did have a crew escape, but it was never tested in a pad abort scenario, and there is some doubt as to whether or not it would have been able to save the astronauts in such a scenario. Certainly, it would not have sheltered the crew during a pad abort requiring escape. Rather than an LES tower like Mercury or Apollo or Soyuz (a solid-fueled rocket which wrenches the capsule free of the rocket and carries it a safe distance away), Gemini had ejection seats. Had the Titan ever exploded on the pad, the crew would’ve been ejected out at a 90 degree angle. They may not have been able to climb to a safe distance for parachute deploy, and in any case, would have landed quite near the pad. Fortunately, Titan II was a very reliable rocket, and they never had to test that system in a real-life scenario.
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September 24th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Douglas Aircraft Company (later McDonnell Douglas) designed two aircraft that turned into legends the DC-3 and the DC-9. Both types still fly today. In fact there is a whole sub-industry that has grown up to keep these birds in the air, because in their respective niches, there simply isn’t anything better. However McDonnell Douglas is gone.
These two machines taught the aerospace sector a very important lesson: build obsolescence into your product, or just stop building a system when it becomes too successful, or the party is over. I suspect this was the reasoning behind scrapping the the Titans and the other launch systems that where declared obsolete.
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September 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Calli Arcale said:
That was always a concern. There was debate during GEmini as to whether or not to provide a launch escape system more like mercury. The ejection-seat based system was modified for the capsule though so it would not shoot the astronauts out at a 90 degree angle. It would shoot them more upward and away from the rocket. It also had (IIRC) longer burning rockets than most of the fighter escape seats.
A hydrazine leak would have been bad, but they did test the space suits to provide some protection. Don’t get me wrong, I mean, it can be nasty stuff. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are nasty too though and if you have a catastrophic loss of those or even RP1, then you can most definitely get an explosion or raging inferno that is at least as bad.
Yes, the Nedelin catastrophe was a horrible incident. I’m just saying that there are enough advantages and if you have a good launch escape system, then it’s not that much more risky than RP-1 or LH2. You gain some and loose some. Space flight is always risky. THe N1 also was a horrible desisster when it made a big U-Turn and came back onto the launch complex.
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September 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Calli Arcale said:
True, but specific impulse is generally considered more important for upper stages because those are the fuel you actually have to lift all the way. You’re right that high density fuels have the nice ability to sit in smaller tanks, which is especially important for lower stages since those will be exposed to air resistance.
I’ve read several times that propane has been considered one of the best multi-altitude rocket fuels. Higher density than LH2. Only slightly lower specific impulse. It can be kept a liquid at much more reasonable pressure or temperature than LH2. It’s also considered safer and it’s generally avaliable in quantity at low cost.
Does anyone have any idea why propane has not been pursued very much for use as a rocket fuel? It’s proven highly successful in some tests but never taken all the way.
BTW. Here’s some info on specif impulse [I got it mainly from Wikipedia]
Titan:
First Stage: 258 s [atmospheric]
Second Stage: 316 s [in a vacuum]
RP-1 Engines:
F-1 (saturn-5): 264.72 s
Merlin: 255 s [atmospheric] 304 s [in a vacuum]
RL-180 (Atlas-V) : 311 sec Atmosphere / 338 vacuum
Soyuz Main Engine: 245 s Atmosphere / 310 s vacuum
LH2:
Centaur/RL10: 433 s
SSME: 453 s vacuum / 363 s in atmosphere
RS68 (Delta and going to be on the Ares 5) 410 s Vacuum / 365 s atmosphere
So I don’t know, but it seems to me like it stacks up decently. I mean, considering that they were already in the inventory I don’t see how you could quibble too much over the speffic impulse given that you’re asking the difference between a small cost to use it versus 100+ million for a new rocket. I’d accept the fuel might be a bit more expensive.
Maybe there are other factors.
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September 24th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Calli Arcale said:
Isn’t that one of the main reasons it was used for the Apollo lander? I remember hearing that the big design criteria for the engine being high reliability and simplicity so it was just a chamber with the two fuels stored in pressurized tanks and all that really needed to be done was to open two valves and as long as they were in the tanks and had not leaked, it would light 100%. I don’t know though if the astronautscould have accessed the valves if the automated electronic systems to open them didn’t work.
But A whole thing with Apollo was the nightmare of being left on the moon with dead engines. Therefore, I think it was probably a good idea to go that way.
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September 24th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Yes, reliability and simplicity were major reasons for using it on the LM. It’s also why it is used so often in other applications, such as the Space Shuttle’s maneuvering engines (OMS and RCS). Hypergolics are also used in almost every satellite and deep space probe, although ion drives are gaining popularity as they become more powerful. (They’ve been around a while, but Deep Space 1 was the first probe to use ion propulsion for its primary propulsion.) In these space applications, hydrazine is basically your only choice (in various forms, both bipropellant and monopropellant) because it is so conveniently storable. Voyager 1 still has some on board; as long as it can produce enough heat to keep it from freezing, it’ll be able to adjust its orientation to point at Earth and keep doing good science. (It uses a monopropellant system. The hydrazine flows over a catalyst.)
Soyuz spacecraft rely on unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine (UDMH, the most popular form in Russia) and nitrogen tetroxide. They have an official on-orbit lifespace of six months. The propellant will last much longer than that, but the valves and seals inside the system degrade over time as they are exposed to the corrosive UDMH and N2O4, and eventually there is risk of a seal failing, resulting in Very Bad Things. The Russians do have systems that can handle that exposure pretty much indefinitely (eg. the propulsion system aboard the Zvezda module, which uses the exact same propellant combination), but they want a more cost-effective solution for the single-use Soyuz modules.
Chem Geek, you’re right that it’s not as simple as I was putting it; my main point was to be devil’s advocate and say that just because the Russian’s use hydrazine does not mean it must be a good propellant. There are lots of factors, and for one vehicle, hydrazine is best for your first stage, while for another, kerosene is best. Once in a while, even LH2 is best, even though I dissed it for its low density.
There are a LOT of interesting propellants out there. The first Americans in space were not sent there on any of these propellants. They went up on alcohol.
(The Redstone missile, a direct successor to the V-2, used alcohol and LOX, just like its German predecessor.) The X-15 rocketplane was powered by ammonia and LOX. There have been experiments will all kinds of other propellants. Solids remain very popular (and have largely replaced hypergolics for ICBMs) because of their stark simplicity. Some of the more interesting concepts include nuclear propulsion, such as the cancelled NERVA. NERVA was actually test-fired in the desert. Would’ve been a very interesting engine, but probably a public relations nightmare. 
Quote Comment
September 25th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Yes I agree that there are all kinds of propellants that are good for given circumstances. Solid rockets are simple and often cheapest, but they don’t have as much control as liquid fueled rockets. Hydrazine or UDMH or Aerozine-50 is probably the best thing going still for simple in-orbit engines of medium power. Ion thrusters are very effecient but far far too weak to be used as a ‘kick engine’ or to make any kind of short-term maneuver. They’re good for maintaining altitude or for continuous low-thrust activities.
Hydrogen has excellent specific impulse but requires a very large tank. In some cases, three or four times the size of the O2 tank. It needs the tank to be really well insulated and it has a tendency to ‘boil off’. It has only so/so energy density per volume but excellent energy density per mass. The engines that burn it need to have turbopumps and components that can work with something that cold, but on the other hand, the cryo hydrogen can be used to cool the engine bell allowing the engine to be reused with minimal wear and tear.
RP1 is very high energy density. It’s stable and burns but generally does not explode. It’s not hazardous at all. It’s liquid at room temperature. It’s avaliable cheaply. It works extremely well for the first stage of large rockets where energy density is more important than delta I due to the air resistance and the fact that it does not need to be boosted all the way to space. RP1 has a somewhat crappy Specific impulse though.
Liquid fuels can be a bit of a design challenge in weightlessness – being sure you can pump them from the tank. Something like O2 or H2 will generally vaporize to fill the void so you don’t have the same pumping problems. There are ways to eliminate this with liquid fuels too though.
Hydrazine can also be used as a monopropellant with a catalyst, which it is commonly used for for small motors for attitude correction or reactionary control systems. It’s by far the most common for this. Hydrogen peroxide has been used for that too, but only for a few early satellites because although it works the same, it’s not as high in energy density or as high performance.
(by the way, when I say Hydrazine I mean hydrazine-based and hydrazine-like fuels. This includes raw hydrazine, Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and Aerozine-50 which is a mixture of both. They all work about the same but the 50/50 mix is standard in American applications for a number of reasons. Diniytrogen tetoxide is the standard oxidizer).
My point here has more to do with the fact that we basically threw away 40+ rockets with amongst the highest reliability rating and perfectly capable of launching medium payloads like scientific satellites, defense communications, metereology etc etc into orbit and even capable of higher with added stages either a centaur upper stage or stage-0 boosters. Based solely on the cost breakdown I don’t buy that it was somehow prohibitively expensive to use the hydrazine fuel system. The full launch cost is still less than a third that of a comparable delta-II built from the ground up.
I strongly believe that the fact that these highly reliable rockets, completely in working condition and ready to be used were scrapped because Lockheed-Martin and the United Space Alliance/Boeing did not really like the idea of a contract to refurb a rocket that the government already owned for a few million dollars when they could sell them a brand-spanking-new one and make many many times as much off of it.
Hydrazine may not be the best propellant for the first stage, but I don’t think it’s so bad that it’s worth an extra 50-80 million to go with another rocket when you have an existing one that uses hydrazine. I’d take the less-than-ideal fuel and save the money.
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September 25th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Speaking of rockets with interesting propellants, Wired News has an article on Roger Shawyer’s ‘electromagnetic relativity drive’ Chinese researchers claim they’ve confirmed the theory behind the concept, and are proceeding to build a demonstration device.
In essence, the (so called) Emdrive is a resonating bottle full of microwaves. Because microwaves are a low frequency form of light, their behavior is governed by Special Relativity. And while microwaves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation may be thought of as very fast moving particles, they also have to be thought of as waves. When the particles are moving at c, energy is transferred by the wave traveling at group velocity. (Group velocity is the result of waves of different wavelengths interacting with each other.)
While, according to Einstein, velocity of electromagnetic waves is the speed of light in the medium they are moving in whatever happens, group velocity varies. Group velocity can be any speed from stationary to light speed (a few physicists suggest the additional possibility of faster than light), and this varies the amount of momentum striking an impenetrable barrier, and thus the force exerted on it. Hence, it is possible to have a bottle full of electromagnetic waves exerting more force on one end than the other, whereas this is not possible for anything else that an engineer would normally be expected to encounter.
In the case of the prototype Emdrive, the closed resonating cavity is wider at one end than the other. Mathematical analysis shows that group velocity is higher at the wide end than the narrow end and that consequently, there is a net force exerted on the wide end. Furthermore, the net force exerted is proportional to the Q, or the effectiveness that the cavity shows as a resonator.
The thrust produced is small but significant, around 85 mN of thrust, for the prototype, but the only fuel it needs is electricity and that is easy to come by in space with solar cells. Used a satellite thrusters it would extend a birds lifetime indefinitely, and when it was time to retire it allow it to be de-orbited cheaply. More importantly however, payloads could be lifted in to LEO and power themselves up to geosync in about a month to six weeks without the need to carry fuel.
In all honesty I am not going to hold my breath. I thought this whole EmDrive thing had the smell of cold fusion all over it right from the beginning, and it has been berated in harsh terms several times in different publications, on the other hand it has a following in the scientific community and the Chinese are convinced enough to build a prototype.
We will see.
Quote Comment
September 25th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Something like that I’ll believe when I see it. The Chinese may be convinced enough to build a prototype, but it would not be the first time a major government or scientific body who should have known better have had a big scam pulled on them.
I’m not going to get too excited until I see actual confirmation that a workable model has been demonstrated and develops real thrust.
That would be revolutionary if those things could be done, but yes it smells of cold fusion to me,
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September 25th, 2008 at 11:19 am
DV82XL said:
Yes I agree I won’t get too excited about this until when/if it becomes a reality – verified, proven etc. As Ctrl Alt Del says, even the Chinese or some other government are not immune to being fooled into funding something that has nothing to it. And in this case there is at least a valid argument on both sides.
IF it turns out to be valid (which it may not), it could be extremely revolutionary though. It states that the prototype “only consumes a quarter of the amount of power” of the NSTAR ION Engine.
NSTAR consumes 2.3 kilowatts. So if the report is acurate then this unit is developing the 85 mN out of 575 watts.
Now consider that we can easily build a megawatt microwave magnetron or even higher. High power magnetron have been manufactured for decades in the multi-megawatt range for high power radar. So if this scales, then it could be BIG.
But.. it may also be another cold fusion fiasco too.
Quote Comment
September 25th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
If I am reading it right they claim that a single engine would have a theoretical max thrust of 3 tonnes from 1kW of microwave power, in practice this would be less. Still, if true that’s impressive.
Even if this pans out the limiting factors are going to be finding materials that will preform at these high power densities.
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September 25th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I think I would rather ride a Titan II into space with toxic fuel or not than I would ride on the new Ares especially the Ares-1. It is actually all perched ontop of a single giant solid rocket booster with only one nozel and gimble control so I’d be worried if any of the four actuators on it fail, there’s not a lot you can do. I read something saying they were concerned about that and the fact that the way it is built it is prone to vibrations and could be unstable.
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September 26th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Ares-I is a whole ‘nother ball of wax, and there many industry observers who suspect it had more to do with placating Utah lawmakers whose constituencies include the former Morton Thiokol (the world’s largest manufacturer of solid rocket motors, and the only company that builds gigantic segemented boosters). Thiokol lost business when the Titan IV was retired, and stands to lose even more when Shuttle retires. Ares I keeps it in business. Now, this may be coincidental, but one does wonder….
Getting back to Titan, I do agree that the scrapping of surplus Titan IIs was a waste. However, you are not going to find a whole lot of long-term vision in the upper management of very many large defense contractors. Their focus is entirely on their bottom line, and delivering short-term results to their shareholders. Being unwilling to take a contract to modernize Titan IIs is probably inevitable, based on that. It’s unfortunate, because the same sort of thinking ends up costing the country a lot of money in the long term. But the government cannot (and probably should not) compel Lockheed or anyone else to fix up these boosters and sell them on the commercial market. It’s just not the way our system operates.
Russia is not so bound. They are making money selling their old ICBMs as light- to medium-lift satellite launch vehicles. They’re even selling Volnas (sub-launched IRBMs; low capacity, but can be fired into very interesting orbits since the launch site can be at any latitude desired). It’s a shame this couldn’t happen with Titan II.
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September 26th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
There are some problems with the way that the US bidding process for federal and military projects is layed out. It is very inflexible and can discourage competition by favoring certain groups. In the case of the Titan II’s it is likely that this played a big role.
Lockheed Martin was likely able to clinch the contract because they may have had a some inroads or exclusive rights due to the rockets being already provided by them and legacy Martin products. The Air Force may have even had the ability to do the refurbishment in house or to buy the new components and assign another contractor but the way funding is allocated may have precluded them from doing this. Therefore, Lockheed Martin could get the contract exclusively and bully out other competitors or smaller contractors or multiple-party arrangements due to it being a single project. All they had to do then was drag their feet and make it expensive and that way they could kill it.
I’m sure that Lockheed Martin was not happy with the idea of a few million to refurbish a rocket the Air Force already owned when they could sell a whole new one.
The bidding process is just very flawed. I could type a whole page about how this kind of thing happens all the time because of the fact that single contractors can get a commitment and then are able to alter the way it is done or to trap the government in a commitment even when the private contractor does not hold up their side of the bargain. It really encourages this kind of thing. It’s hard to blame the companies when Uncle Sam will roll over and let them do this.
The Titan II refurb was therefore probably killed by the funding system that forced the Air Force to keep the contract with one party and that party was able to decide because there was probably a clause for flexible expenses or unexpected costs. It seems like a good idea to allow for flexibility if there are some kind of problems in the system or things don’t turn out as they’re planned, but it’s really a means of allowing them to hold the military hostage.
I can give you another couple of examples of this, especially in the military. A good one would be the KC-135. These airplanes have been around forever. The most recent ones were built in 1965. They have turned out to be absolutely perfect for the job. They are actually based on the Boeing 707. They have four engines, which is of value for a military aircraft that needs high reliability and redundancy. They’re very rugged. They’ve turned out to be very survivable and very flexible. They’ve been modernized by life extension programs numerous times and now have the latest avionics, new high effeciency engines and so on.
The KC-135 will last a long time for a few reasons. They only get a few hundred pressurized flight hours per year which is really what matters in the life of the aircraft. Also, they have been found to be less susceptible to metal fatigue and wear and tear than many newer aircraft. When they were built they were overengineered. They’ve very beefy, strong airplanes with more structure than they really need. This makes them a little heavier than they might need to be, but it also makes them exceptionally rugged and reliable and means that they can safely take much more flight cycles than were initially planned.
Boeing, as you can probably imagine, is not too happy with this. I think DV82XL is right about some things. As Boeing looks back they’re probably kicking themselves for making the airframe so sturdy and well built.
Boeing has wanted to sell the Air Force new tankers and has been pressuring them to lower the flight hour certification on the KC-135. It erupted into a whole scandal over a contract for a refueler version of the Boeing 767. Northrup Grumman has tried to push for a refueler version of an Airbus airliner.
The contract has been awarded and then frozen at least twice. The air refueling command has been part of the problem because they do not necessarily want the new aircraft. They prefer the four-engine aircraft, which can fly on one with the new turbofans when flying in combat situations. They do not want to go to a two engine system for these missions and cite the fact that the KC-135 has some safety advantages in that area and if necessary it can throttle up more thrust. They also like the KC-135 for being so solid and rugged. The flight hours on the KC-135 are far higher than the new tankers.
This is the same story as the Titans.
Boeing made a plane back in the 1950’s that was just too solid and too long lasting and now they’re regretting that it’s still flying and has years left of service life.
It may be that it is a higher profile area or it may be because maintenance contracts are ongoing, but they have not been successful in killing it yet. (not for lack of trying)
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September 26th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
An Actual Scientist said:
First, thank-you for making the point I was trying to my first post in this thread, I was rushed at the time and didn’t do a very good job of it.
Your points are very valid and are also true in the commercial sector as well, the last plane to be built with the old design philosophy was the 747, since then it has been very obvious that airframes are being made in such a way that they will be impossible (or rather much too expensive) to maintain beyond its pre-determined life. Not only that but manufacturers of system and engine components are using intellectual property laws to prevent refurbishment of their parts. This effectively forces Maintenance, Repair, Overhaul Organizations (MROs) to by new parts, and when the supply is cut off, (and it is) the units involved cannot be put back into service. (For those who are wondering, component repair is a huge part of the MRO world.) Of course no secondary sources are licensed.
Of course there have been similar fights in the automotive aftermarket parts industry as well. however in this case the OEMs are being kept at bay by insurance companies and their deep pockets. However that war is far from being over, and some feel that the tide may turn as intellectual property legislation grows.
This is particularly irritating as new rapid manufacturing technologies are making it relatively easy to produce new components quickly and inexpensively. Yet another example of how totally screwed we all are going to be by the ‘information economy.’
In any rational system, things like the Titans might still be produced, if not by the OEM, then by others as the designs passed into the public domain.
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