Questions tagged [solid-fuel]
Questions about solid fuels. The rockets that use them, the fuels that are burned, and the vendors that make them.
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Why is there a hole in solid rocket engines?
I would like to find out why there is a straight hole down the middle in all solid rocket engine motors.
I thought it only makes sense in hybrid engines where pure oxygen needs to be blown down the ...
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Why do the walls of a solid rocket booster not glow red hot?
After ignition the walls of the SRB are separated from the "reaction chamber" by solid rocket fuel. But as the burn progresses, more and more fuel is used up and so the isolation from the ...
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Could 3D printing be used to achieve perfect grain geometry of solid and hybrid rocket motors?
Solid cores, either for solid-fueled of hybrid rocket motors, use various propellant grain geometries to achieve thrust curve needed. For example, some of these could look like:
&...
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Do the solid rocket boosters of the Shuttle and SLS have a self-destruct system and was it activated during the Challenger disaster?
Videos of the Challenger shuttle explosion show both solid boosters speeding on after the main tank detonated. Were they eventually self-destructed by the ground control, or why not, and why not ...
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How were the Space Shuttle SRBs ignited? (with what?)
I'm unable to find how exactly the Space Shuttle's SRBs were ignited, or what exactly was used to ignite the rocket.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to instantly ignite a solid rocket reliably,...
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Why were Delta II SRBs asymmetrically mounted?
This diagram of the Delta II 74xx-series shows 4 booster rockets mounted rather asymmetrically. All other things being equal, it looks like the net thrust of the set would push the rocket off-axis.
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How far have autophage rockets been developed?
Ars Technica reports on a May 24 phys.org press release/precis on a University of Glasgow paper in Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets about a solid rocket intended to consume itself during use rather ...
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For a typical Shuttle mission, how much solid fuel is leftover at SRB separation?
If I understand correctly, solid booster rockets never expend literally all their fuel before jetissoning, because the burn rate slows way down in the end and it would take too long to spend it all, ...
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Why did the Vanguard rocket use a solid engine for its third stage?
The Vanguard rocket had three stages. The first two were liquid-fueled and the third was solid-fueled.
That struck me as odd, as solid fuel engines are almost exclusively used in atmosphere, and you'd ...
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What is the difference between the solid fuel Boosters of the Shuttle and Artemis?
The Shuttle boosters had 4 segments and Artemis has 5. What are the differences in total mass, thrust and burn time? Is the thrust profile (thrust over time) the same?
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Can a solid first stage compete with a liquid fueled first stage?
The thing about solids is that they can have awe inspiring amounts of thrust compared to liquid engines, as you can see in this collection of boosters and thrust levels:
Shuttle SRB - 2.8 Mlbs
Ariane ...
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How does solid propellant mean bulk temperature influence solid rocket thrust and specific impulse?
The relationship is not intuitively clear to me, would like an answer with references and/or graphs. The question arose while reading about Space Shuttle's SRBs.
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Do launchers using only solid propellant exist?
The question is restricted to launchers that have already been used to launch an object into orbit before today (April 2018).
Some military ballistic missiles run only on solid propergol (e.g. the ...
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Could one actually make a grain silo rocket?
Watching the recent SpaceX Starship tests got me to thinking:
Could you actually make a rocket using grain as the propellant?
Image from https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-sn5-second-hop-plans/...
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Why weren't SRBs used in the design of the Saturn V?
Were solids considered for the Saturn V? If so, why was the idea discarded?
I would guess this is due to a number of reasons:
Inability to throttle
Technology readiness in the era
Launch escape
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What solid fuel was used in the Katyushas rocket artillery of WW2?
The Katyushas were invented by the Soviets and used in WW2. They were trucks with rails firing a bunch of small rockets with a range of 3 to 12 km.
These were solid-fuel rockets, but I would like to ...
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Has there ever been a completely solid fuelled orbital rocket? [duplicate]
Engines and fuel management are very expensive to develop, and for smaller launch providers and space agencies this could prevent them from entering the market. My question is, would the cost savings ...
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Why are there so few solid rocket satellite launchers?
At first glance, solid rocket launching makes more sense than liquid:
Simple to scale. Once designed, it can be made perfectly the same, all the time.
Storage - Keep for as long as you want, launch ...
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Why aren't airbreathing SRBs a thing?
To the best of my knowledge, all solid rocket boosters so far use a propellant that is a solid mixture of both the fuel and the oxidiser parts of the reaction. However, given that SRBs are generally ...
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How does a solid propellant in a rocket work?
I'm a bit confused about how the fuel manages to get from wherever its being stored in a spacecraft into the engines, seeing as it is supposedly solid and so seems like it wouldn't be easy to move. ...
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How does an Electric Solid Propellant rocket work?
I saw the section in Wikipedia about Electric Solid propellants but I can't figure out what it really is, and how it works. It sounds like a solid propellant rocket that you can start and stop ...
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What limits burning speed of solid propellant?
SRBs and missiles use grain to regulate thrust over time, as only exposed surface of the propellant burns.
But what causes propellant to burn only on the surface, and regulates the speed at which the ...
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What kind of missions are US surplus ICBM's capable of launching?
It has been proposed that the US military should repurpose suborbital, nuclear weapons carrying, intercontinental ballistic missiles for civil use, like Russia and Ukraine has done since decades. How ...
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What ever happened to SpinSat - did it work?
I can find several descriptions of what the SpinSat satellite was supposed to do. I can find some nice images of it being deployed from the ISS also. But I haven't been so successful in understanding ...
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What is the correct thrust curve for a solid rocket with a simple circular hole, and why?
Going to wikipedia's article on solid-fuel rockets, I come across some graphs of thrust curves for certain bore-hole geometry. Right now I'm interested in the simplest bore-hole: a circular hole right ...
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Can a crew access room (white room) be contaminated by rocket propellant residues during launch?
Observing a Space Shuttle launch, I noticed that the crew access gantry and its white room are too close to the SRB's flames during launch; the launch umbilical tower and its crew access device on ...
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How exactly does depressurization work in a solid rocket motor?
How does the extinction process actually work in a solid rocket motor?
Most people initially always read that once a solid rocket fuel is ignited there is no way to actually stop its operation until ...
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Are ICBMs and orbital launchers similar enough to be co-developed today?
Russia has two types of hypergolic liquid fuel ICBMs deployed, UR-100N and R-36M2 Vojewoda and they are working on the big Sarmat. There's in this category also the Chinese DF-A5. (A list of ICBMs ...
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Why isn't someone building a fully reusable solid fuel rocket?
Solid rocket motors are so much simpler than liquid fueled. Why isn't e.g. SpaceX making a Falcon 9 equivalent with solid fuel only, and rescuing the segment cases with parachutes like the shuttle ...
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Are more details about the fatal rocket motor accident at Cape Canaveral in April 1964 available?
The 1966 book The Life and Death of a Satellite by Alfred Bester contains an account of a accidental ignition of a third-stage solid rocket motor in a Delta rocket spin test facility at the Cape which ...
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Why were large solid-fuel rockets so rare in the past?
When the Germans projected the A4 missile, they discarded solid-fuel propulsion and went on to circumvent the enormous technical difficulties of building a liquid-fuel engine from scratch. Germany had,...
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Why doesn't Rocket Lab use a solid stage?
I was just reading about the Scout, an all-solid rocket, and thought of Rocket Lab's Electron, which seems to have a similar mission of deploying small payloads to orbit. I understand the engines to ...
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How is solid rocket fuel sourced?
I know that Orbital ATK builds solid rocket boosters, but where do they get the bulk material from? Is there a single supplier or multiple suppliers of solid rocket fuel or do motor manufacturers ...
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What does “supersonic large amplitude ID maneuver PTI” mean, and what does a tumble motor do?
In this question I linked to a YouTube video of the Ares X-1 launch. You can start listening at 02:00 for the point where these are mentioned:
"Supersonic large ...
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How do you handle variations in launches with a solid second stage?
Watching the Antares launch for Orb-1 mission of Cygnus, I was thinking about the booster.
First stage is built in Ukraine by the company that makes the Zenit. They use the NK-33 engine, (Called an ...
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Burn 1st stage structural material as fuel?
Aluminum/Magnesium alloys can burn quite nicely. The stoichiometry is favoriable. Instead of $CO_2$ which is mostly oxidizer by mass, you might end up with $Al_2O_3$ and $MgO$ as exhaust.
The ...
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How do HMX-fuelled rockets launch without exploding?
Unlike most civilian solid-fuel rockets, which use ammonium perchlorate/aluminium fuels with a rubber binder (known in the industry as ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, or APCP for short), ...
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Could the SS520 be used to return a payload from Mars to Earth?
The Japanese SS520-5 nanosat launcher has a payload of 5kg or so to LEO on an all solid fuel rocket with a total mass of about 2.6 tons. To reach LEO its delta-V totalled over all three stages must be ...
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Why was the Minotaur V built as a 5-stage design?
Why is Orbital Science's Minotaur V rocket a five stage design? I am aware this is derived from an ICBM design, but why would anyone want a five stage design for launching non-lethal payloads? It ...
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How do you find the propellant mass needed to reach an specified altitude? (altitude at end of burn plus altitude during coast)
This question is basically entirely explained in the title, but I'll explain it more so this question doesn't get shut down. Basically, does anyone have an equation to find the propellant mass(solid) ...
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What was the first large rocket to use APCP solid fuel?
I'm surprised wikipedia doesn't have a history section for its APCP article. If I'm not mistaken, early solid rockets used something other than APCP, and really really early solid rockets used black ...
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How will the SRBs used by the SLS differ from those used by the Shuttle?
The Space Launch System, which recently secured funding from Congress, uses many features that were developed from the Shuttle program, including the first-stage engines and boosters, and it's overall ...
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Does the Oberth effect motivate complementing ion electric propulsion with chemical rocketry?
The solar electric ion propulsion engine of the Dawn spacecraft to Vesta and Ceres used Mars for gravity assist. Would it be gainful to complement an ion engine with a high thrust (solid) chemical ...
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Ways to obtain thrust curves of different grain geometries
Different grain geometries in solid-fuel rockets produce various thrust curves:
I can imagine it's not too difficult to obtain a thrust curve of a specific grain geometry with a measurement while ...
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Aerospike with solid fuel
I was scrolling in youtube and I saw this awesome video
and I think, if we put an aerospike nozzle in a sounding rocket,or even a small orbital rocket, as a first stage solid booster, this type of ...
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Could HIBEX propellant be used for amateur rockets?
The HIBEX rocket was a precursor to the Sprint missile system deployed briefly back in the 1970s. The rocket was only 18 feet long but had extraordinary performance(an acceleration of 100 G's!). But I ...
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Is it unusual to vector the thrust from an SRB?
Let me explain. The term SRB (Solid (fuel) Rocket Booster) usually refers to a solid (fuel) rocket which is attached to something else in order to "boost" it.
But I just read this answer by @...
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What limits pressure buildup in SRB's?
According to st. Robert's Law, propellant burn rates increase with pressure.
When an SRB is ignited, propellant starts to burn, making the pressure rise in the combustion chamber.
The flow through the ...
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Which rockets use(d) solid-fuel upper stages?
The Antares is unusual in that it's using solid-fuel in the second stage. I was surprised about that and a couple of questions immediately popped up which are already covered on this site: How can a ...
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What is the requirement of spacer rings in solid rocket motors in sounding rockets?
I saw this report SOLID ROCKET MOTOR DESIGN L-CLASS, here as shown in FIGURE-8, they have charged the motor with grain segments with spacer rings in between. Can`t we charge the motor without any ...
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