Wait. They’re burning kerosene in the atmosphere? That’s bound to make you-know-who angry.
Posted on 09/01/2021 11:04:32 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, or RFA, has concluded another test of their RFA One rocket. In the test, the company performed a destructive cryogenic pressure test of their first stage prototype. The company has shown a video in which the prototype stage broke apart after it was fueled with cryogenic nitrogen to test the quality of the welds and determine the pressure at which the structure fails.
The company previously switched from the gas generator cycle to a staged combustion design for their engine.
The RFA One is a three-stage rocket currently in development. The current design calls for a 30 meters tall and 2-meter diameter rocket.
The first stage will be powered by nine of their currently unnamed engines. The engine itself runs a staged combustion cycle, which makes RFA the first company in Europe to develop such an engine to flight readiness. The goal is to provide about 100 kN of liftoff thrust, with early flights operating with lower thrust levels.
The engine will use rocket-grade kerosene known as Rocket Propellant 1, or RP-1, oxidized by liquid oxygen. The ignition will be started by the hypergolic substances of triethylaluminium and triethylborane, or TEA-TAB. Both these propellants and the ignition substance are common with those used by SpaceX on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
The goal is to reuse the first stage and recover it on orbital flights, but the company has not yet disclosed how they plan to reuse and recover it. In the past, the first stages flown by SpaceX were recovered using propulsion for a landing burn, while other companies, such as Rocket Lab, plan to use parachutes to slow the stage down and catch it with a helicopter.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasaspaceflight.com ...
Well, let’s face it. The Krauts pretty much pioneered rocket science in the ‘30s/’40s.
V3 ?
Where would the Germans launch from? The ESA site in Guyana?
Wernher von Braun was extremely important to the US Space Program as well.
London and Antwerp most affected.
Good question.
Rocket Factory Augsburg selects French Guiana for RFA ONE launches
by scceuSeptember 30, 2020
https://scceu.org/rocket-factory-augsburg-selects-french-guiana-for-rfa-one-launches/
Wait. They’re burning kerosene in the atmosphere? That’s bound to make you-know-who angry.
They copied Goddard. It started right here in the USA.
For all of the hype about the V2, That program wasn’t so good when looked out objectively. In the first place it killed more people making it than it did in use. And they spent the amount of money equivalent to the Manhattan project on it and only delivered explosives on target equivalent to two 8th Air Force thousand plane raids.
And by 1945/1945, we could do those a couple of times a week.
Sprocket Factory???
V4. Lieber Gott. The Krauts are fooling around with rockets again.
In their eyes, that was a feature, not a bug. They used the slave labor of so-called Untermenschen.
Regards,
I use to work in Augsberg. Interesting little place. Was fun to jump on the train and go in to Munich for the weekends.
Wow. The Allies must have been really close.
🙂
-- Tom Lehrer
Well almost all commercial planes as well as rockets use kerosene/kerosene based fuel and the enviro nuts regularly fly to their crazy conferences anyway.
I think that’s why the V2 scared the top US military and science heads so much- it only made sense if you were going to top it with a nuke.
Wow... that’s true. The coolest thing Germany did was to try mail rockets. Werner was amazed by Goddard’s ideas and took them forward. Goddard was not supported here well at all.
Rocket mail was going to be a fast, accurate way to deliver mail in the 1930s when NOBODY else even dreamed of such a thing.
Gotta hand it to them.
The first test landed in London
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