Countdown to new smallsat launchers

[HMXHMX]

I like peroxide for the non-cryogenic simplicity, and the small batch advantages, and for the not-having-to-explain-why-you-want-LOX-in-Australia ease, but that's about it.

You also need to explain why you need HTP in Australia, as its a chemical also used in drug making.

Mates and I have bought tons of it without trouble. LOX is a game of 20 questions with "no" at the end.

That's pretty remarkable.  Here in the States, I've purchased (pre 9/11) 40K lbm of 70% H2O2 (and then raised it to 85% using a wiped film vacuum distillation setup).  All of that went though our Roton tip thrusters.  LOX is trivially easy to get in tanker truck lots here, provided it goes into a vendor approved Dewar.

[CameronD]

Mates and I have bought tons of it without trouble. LOX is a game of 20 questions with "no" at the end.

That's pretty remarkable.  Here in the States, I've purchased (pre 9/11) 40K lbm of 70% H2O2 (and then raised it to 85% using a wiped film vacuum distillation setup).  All of that went though our Roton tip thrusters.  LOX is trivially easy to get in tanker truck lots here, provided it goes into a vendor approved Dewar.

Heh.   Over here, we have Regulations and Standards and officials in fluoro-coloured vests all designed to stop people killing themselves (or someone else)..  but you guys? Not so much.
 
EDIT: ..and that's one reason we don't have an officially-sanctioned Space Program.. What's the word?  Oh, yes.  It's "dangerous". 

[QuantumG]

That's pretty remarkable.

Just talked to my mate and he says "yes, but our process was horrible". Lots of wasted effort with sparging before moving to a evaporation process. He bought small quantities of 90% from a guy in Melbourne which was a lot cheaper (and better quality) than the 30% they were using to make 80%.

All of the rocket work I've seen Australians do with LOX has been at universities, where they just walk over to the chemistry building and ask for some. I'm sure if you had the money to throw around you could change the entire industry's attitude, but most amateurs don't have the clout. I've heard many stories about how easy it is to rent a dewar from one of our two industrial gas suppliers and get it filled with small amounts of LOX. I've personally discovered that getting the dewar is harder than they say, and they're much happier filling it with LN2 than LOX. At every stage they will say "what do you want it for?" If the answer is rockets, then nope, sorry. So you bend the truth and say it's for testing cryogenic fittings (well, it is!) and they say you only need LN2 for that. Apparently there's some welding process that uses LOX and they do most of their small batches for that, so if you can figure out those magic words they'll hand it over. Apparently the very big batches are either for medical use (good luck pretending to be a hospital) or for aquaculture. When you start looking up where to buy commercial fish raising equipment you know you've taken getting LOX too far.

[Katana]

Of course, if you recover liquid engines, you could fuel them up fairly easily and fly again. For solids, you might as well build a new motor because reuse doesn't save money.

That's why I think many companies are pursuing liquid engines. Combined with the fact that a much greater degree of control is possible with liquids and performance is significantly higher (Isp and mass fraction). For a solid rocket, you need more stages, and you need a final liquid stage anyway if you want anything like a precision orbital insertion (which most payloads want).

From the SLS thread, which was going off topic.

Expanding on this:

Look at Pegasus. It's 3 solid stages and a small liquid stage to null out the dispersion from the previous stages. Even though it's air-launched. To get it launched from the ground, you'd need another solid stage, like Taurus. So you're up to 5 stages, all of them with different combustion characteristics due to different chamber sizes, etc. and the last one (which is optional but a necessary for most payloads) is liquid anyway.

Even if solids are easier (they kind of are), the overall rocket needs 5 stages with a whole bunch of staging events and different tests needed on each. That's very complicated and likely to fail. Pegasus has a decent reliability, but it didn't start that way.

With liquids, you can use just two stages. And you can cluster, allowing you to use the same engine for both stages (although long-term, you'd probably be encouraged to change the upper stage for optimal performance).

Heck, you can even do it with a single stage if you have a pump fed engine of high performance. Probably a better approach would be like the Russians did with R7/Sputnik:

Parallel stages with everything using the same engine type and everything lit on the ground. Surprised no one has taken that approach, since it seems easiest to test. I think I'd take that approach if I were developing a LEO nanosat launcher. Atlas (the original) was similar, but just staged off the engines (which is more complicated than the R7 approach and also requires really good tank mass fraction).

3 solid stages +1 liquid stage from ground launch is OK, use a bigger first stage. The SS-520-4 have only 3stages. (Talking about its failure is unfair, no commercial launcher company reach orbit on maiden flight, even Pegasus and Falcon1).

Commercial rockets with R7 architecture are common.
Lin industry, Microcorsm, Constoga 1620 solid.
It is not necessarily better than the Falcon1 architecture with liquids.

[Robotbeat]

Conestoga doesn't count, it was too cobbled together.

I'm not saying it's the end-all, be-all approach, it's just the one I would try if I were to start a smallsat launcher company. And like R7, I'd probably go for a low-end turbopump as the initial approach (ask me 2 or 3 years ago, and I would've gone for pressurefed... but with metal 3d printing and the ability to do an electropump, I'd go that route... or possibly copy R7 again and use peroxide to drive the turbopump).

[Katana]

Conestoga doesn't count, it was too cobbled together.

I'm not saying it's the end-all, be-all approach, it's just the one I would try if I were to start a smallsat launcher company. And like R7, I'd probably go for a low-end turbopump as the initial approach (ask me 2 or 3 years ago, and I would've gone for pressurefed... but with metal 3d printing and the ability to do an electropump, I'd go that route... or possibly copy R7 again and use peroxide to drive the turbopump).

Copying historical launcher is a good idea worthy of deep discussion. I would choose this route too.

R7 is rather large , for the need of nuclear warhead.  The US counterpart launchers at that time are Juno and Vanguard, with single V2 derived peroxide turbopump engine first stage, 20~30 ton GTOW.

Or build a scaled model of R7 with electric pump engines.

Turbopumps are easier to scale up, motors are easier to scale down.

[Steven Pietrobon]

Mates and I have bought tons of it without trouble. LOX is a game of 20 questions with "no" at the end.

That's the opposite experience of people I know. Mark Blair from the Australian Space Research Institute was able to get LOX for his Ausroc II vehicles in the 1990s. Mark might be able to help you out. A friend of mine had a visit from the police when he ordered some HTP. Just needed to make sure the HTP could not be got at by criminals.

[QuantumG]

Mark Blair from the Australian Space Research Institute was able to get LOX for his Ausroc II vehicles in the 1990s.

Ahh.. that pre-Sep-11 world.

Mark might be able to help you out.

Alas, I have reverted to less wholesome pursuits than rocketry. Fun to think about though.

[Katana]

That's pretty remarkable.

Just talked to my mate and he says "yes, but our process was horrible". Lots of wasted effort with sparging before moving to a evaporation process. He bought small quantities of 90% from a guy in Melbourne which was a lot cheaper (and better quality) than the 30% they were using to make 80%.

All of the rocket work I've seen Australians do with LOX has been at universities, where they just walk over to the chemistry building and ask for some. I'm sure if you had the money to throw around you could change the entire industry's attitude, but most amateurs don't have the clout. I've heard many stories about how easy it is to rent a dewar from one of our two industrial gas suppliers and get it filled with small amounts of LOX. I've personally discovered that getting the dewar is harder than they say, and they're much happier filling it with LN2 than LOX. At every stage they will say "what do you want it for?" If the answer is rockets, then nope, sorry. So you bend the truth and say it's for testing cryogenic fittings (well, it is!) and they say you only need LN2 for that. Apparently there's some welding process that uses LOX and they do most of their small batches for that, so if you can figure out those magic words they'll hand it over. Apparently the very big batches are either for medical use (good luck pretending to be a hospital) or for aquaculture. When you start looking up where to buy commercial fish raising equipment you know you've taken getting LOX too far.

Fish transporting trucks have LOX dewars onbord.

But how could you get a range for launch to space (even orbit) when getting a dewar of LOX is too dangerous?

[Katana]

Mark Blair from the Australian Space Research Institute was able to get LOX for his Ausroc II vehicles in the 1990s.

Ahh.. that pre-Sep-11 world.

Mark might be able to help you out.

Alas, I have reverted to less wholesome pursuits than rocketry. Fun to think about though.

Chemical regulation should not be major problem of small sat launcher companies. Except in house manufacture of APCP?

[QuantumG]

Fish transporting trucks have LOX dewars onbord.

But how could you get a range for launch to space (even orbit) when getting a dewar of LOX is too dangerous?

1. Throw money at the problem.
2. Bang your head against the wall until it cracks.

[Katana]

Fish transporting trucks have LOX dewars onbord.

But how could you get a range for launch to space (even orbit) when getting a dewar of LOX is too dangerous?

1. Throw money at the problem.
2. Bang your head against the wall until it cracks.

So it is nearly worthless to care about availability issues for (supposed) small satellite launcher company situation. The company ought to afford BOTH LOX and HTP, if it could afford range and GNC for orbital launch.

[QuantumG]

So it is nearly worthless to care about availability issues for (supposed) small satellite launcher company situation. The company ought to afford BOTH LOX and HTP, if it could afford range and GNC for orbital launch.

When you live in a backwater you've gotta build your own roads.

[Katana]

I am not sure Blue Origin's detailed reasons for moving on from hydrogen peroxide, whether it is related to performance, storage issues, or something else. What I do know is that a Blue Origin employee gave me the distinct impression that while they would keep their data on it in case they ever had a reason to go back, none of their forward plans involve H2O2.

I had also considered if peroxide could be used as a monopropellant thruster, but I am not sure if there is a good way to keep high concentration peroxide stable enough for a long duration mission.

One possible fobidding problem of HTP: qualified human resources.

LOX is widely used in Aerospace and common industry, but HTP have very few uses. When the team size grow above 100, no more HTP qualified / experienced workers exist on job market, while training hundreds of new workers became unmanageable.

[savuporo]

That was the Russian argument for switching to LNG: industrial experience and personnel footprint is so vast, that even though development may be harder, operations will be so much easier. Hope they convince themselves.

[Katana]

So it is nearly worthless to care about availability issues for (supposed) small satellite launcher company situation. The company ought to afford BOTH LOX and HTP, if it could afford range and GNC for orbital launch.

When you live in a backwater you've gotta build your own roads.

A startup could either start with social networking and fundraising before going to development, or build a (BE-2 level) prototype with peroxide, for PR and fundraising, and discard it.

And later steps would go away from those minimal scale problems. They are painful steps but not core value of the project. Concerning too much on details loose focus on core value and doom the project.

[Robotbeat]

Y'all realize that the R7 rocket family, which is BY FAR the world's most launched rocket (with 3 different launch sites) with over 1800 launches uses peroxide for the turbopumps, right?

Peroxide isn't that hard to get and isn't that hard to train people for. Same with LOx.

[savuporo]

Y'all realize that the R7 rocket family, which is BY FAR the world's most launched rocket (with 3 different launch sites) with over 1800 launches uses peroxide for the turbopumps, right?

Peroxide isn't that hard to get and isn't that hard to train people for. Same with LOx.

R7 was designed for and operated by Red Army. Like torpedoes have had no problems burning peroxide either. Note that there are launch vehicles burning UDMH as well in more than one place, also hence apparently not that hard to get and train for.

Somewhat different constraints and rules for a new entrant trying to operate under modern regulatory environment and commercial supply chain.

[Rik ISS-fan]

Expanding on this:

Look at Pegasus. It's 3 solid stages and a small liquid stage to null out the dispersion from the previous stages. Even though it's air-launched. To get it launched from the ground, you'd need another solid stage, like Taurus. So you're up to 5 stages, all of them with different combustion characteristics due to different chamber sizes, etc. and the last one (which is optional but a necessary for most payloads) is liquid anyway.

Have you heard about OBV (GBI), also known as Taurus Lite. link 1)Spacerockets 2)Gaunter Space Page
This is a ground launches rocket that uses the same stages as Pegasus. it has a 400lb payload instead of 1000lb.
Pegasus doesn't always use the liquid upperstage. The default Pegasus is without HAPS.

Also you don't have to use three different stages. For example VLM-1 that is being developed by Brazil and Germany uses the same stage S50 (only the nozzles deviate) as first and second stage. With a solid S44 stage it can orbit about 150kg to 500km SSO. They estimate a launch will cost 10mln so it ain't cheap per launch.

The big disadvantage of high performance solids (Ammonium Perchlorate) is that highly toxic Hydrogen Chlorates get produced during the combustion proces. And they are classed as explosive devices. Both create legislative issues. LOx-RP-1; HTP-RP-1; LOx-LNG LOx-H2 only develop normal combustion products. The regulation on these liquid propellants is most likely much less restrictive.

[CameronD]

So it is nearly worthless to care about availability issues for (supposed) small satellite launcher company situation. The company ought to afford BOTH LOX and HTP, if it could afford range and GNC for orbital launch.

When you live in a backwater you've gotta build your own roads.

A startup could either start with social networking and fundraising before going to development, or build a (BE-2 level) prototype with peroxide, for PR and fundraising, and discard it.

And later steps would go away from those minimal scale problems. They are painful steps but not core value of the project. Concerning too much on details loose focus on core value and doom the project.

A more practical way to go would be the way RocketLab did it.  Start with commercially-available LOX (install your own liquefaction plant if necessary) and some form of Kerosene (Household lamp oil if you need to; some folks I know have even trialled with diesel) and go from there.  You'd need a (sorry, need to stop here for a second and just say that I have to use stupid words to get my point across. I know that means I must have a weak argument, but that's why I use bad words).-load of spare $$$ and some appropriate friends in high places, but after a year or three of development and EIS's and Council Approvals you might actually get to fly something...

..or you could also save the $$$, join the military and fly taxpayer-funded rockets instead.