Rockets and Efficiency Many of us find Elon Musk to be kind of fascinating. I guess it is not only because he seems to be a huge success at everything he decides to do, but also because of his personality. I wonder how many know he challenged Putin to a UFC match. UFC is the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He also seems to have improved those areas he got into such as electric cars and rockets. Electric cars have been around since 1881, when one was tested in the streets of Paris. As far as rockets go, SpaceX, the company run by Musk, was the first to develop rockets which could be reused after launching. Who will ever forget the first time they saw a SpaceX rocket land back on earth tail first like something out of a science fiction movie? There are aerospace companies coming up which are using rockets created on a 3D printer and some claim they will be reusable. As each of these companies form, the new aerospace companies realize reusable rockets are the way to go until something better comes along, because they lower the launch price quite a bit. When a rocket is printed, the metal, mainly aluminum, is melted together as the print head circles around the shell. The target is to build a complete rocket in 60 days. There is improvements in 3D printing which comes down the road every once in a while, so as time goes by, who knows how fast we will be able to print a rocket? The number of parts gets reduced dramatically, and the cost goes down incredibly. An example is an injector for a rocket engine built traditionally has 1000 parts or more and takes about 9 months to build. A 3D printer can create one in one piece and take only 2 weeks for about one tenth the cost. Many aerospace companies have switched over to 3D printing that part. Relativity, a new aerospace company has become the world’s leading expert on 3D printing of reusable rockets and parts. One new innovation for a rocket was deemed impossible, yet it has been developed. The University of Florida researcher and his team have just created a device to propel the upper stages of rockets. It is known as a rotating detonation rocket engine. The engine is lighter, has greater range and is cleaner burning. It is the opposite of the newer engines being used by the some of the non-legacy space companies which use methane and oxygen in their engines, this engine falls back on the traditional fuel of hydrogen and oxygen. It is said the engines will be able to create explosions of 4,500 mph to 5,600 mph. There are, as of the writing of this article, eight aerospace companies which use reusable rockets. This is one of the things I don’t like about the SLS system. It is not reusable, along with all its other problems. The legacy aerospace companies still build things the same way they did 60 years ago by machining thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of parts, which unlike using a 3D printer for at least some of the parts, causes more problems during assembly and testing. Note how many years behind schedule the NASA Space Launch System has fallen behind, along with how much the price has gone up and all the problems it has had so far. In all fairness, it has been said, when the contract was awarded to the legacy space companies congress had passed a bill stating the companies had to use the same components and fuel the space shuttle used, hampering innovation to some extent. This has been a great example of why congress and the government should stay out of specifying how rockets should be built, and probably many other things. Maybe it is time to revisit some of the proposals for designing and powering rockets from the past. I say this because what was impractical in the past, may not be any longer because of the improvement in our capability and the advancement of technology. At this moment there are more rocket companies using reusable rockets or going to use reusable rockets. They are SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Neutron, Relativity, Blue Origin, Orbex, i-Space, Stoke, and Exos. I am still waiting to see a reusable rocket form the legacy companies. One of the things we are just starting to find out is with 3D printing of rocket parts, we can build parts in a way which we couldn’t before, thus making some of the designs much more efficient. There is a big difference between a 3D built rocket from a traditionally built one. The whole method of building is different. A legacy rocket company will take maybe ten years to build a newly designed giant rocket and then spend years trying to fix the parts that don’t work. The people that build 3D printed rockets spent much less time building a rocket, so they can redesign another to work out the flaws they discover since the software the 3D printer uses is much easier to modify than trying endless times to find problems to correct. What we have to do is get faster engines and eventually find other means of propulsion. Once we do this the design of the vehicle may not be as important as it is now. I say this because of all the UFOs which have been sighted. Notice they are not what we would call aerodynamic, yet they seem to have no trouble flying in the atmosphere, underwater, or out in space. One of the ideas from the past was having a motor which released a nuclear blast behind the reinforced ship every few seconds which was used for propulsion. This was impractical for many reasons, not just because we would be infecting huge areas of space with our radiation. On the other hand, some scientists believe the idea of a nuclear engine is a good one and would propel our rocket faster than any chemical rocket could travel, but there is problems with nuclear power on a rocket. The first is all the heavy shielding which is needed to protect the crew. Another problem is the generation of nuclear waste if a fission system is used. This is the chance of a nuclear accident. Can you imagine we fly to a planet with intelligent beings on it and we have a nuclear accident? The reactor is heavy and so is the shielding making it impractical right now. There is said to be an engine in development which uses a nuclear reactor but with liquid hydrogen and it is said it has the potential to reach 123,000 mph. It is believed the fastest a chemical rocket can go is about 36,500 mph. The nuclear engine in this case is over 3 times faster. This means our nearest neighbor; Alpha Centauri would still be thousands of years away at that speed.
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