3 ms·
This is only re: your last sentence. It won't, solid rockets are inherently limited in their safety (for the reasons you pointed out), fuel efficiency and abil
by wolf550e 8y ago
This is only re: your last sentence.
It won't, solid rockets are inherently limited in their safety (for the reasons you pointed out), fuel efficiency and ability to be rapidly reused.
The fuel efficiency will never be that of kerolox, methalox or hydrolox engines [1].
Landing a solid the way Falcon 9 lands is impossible (there is no engine on the way back, and if you can shut it down safely and then relight it then you can't throttle it), and when you recover the parts of the rocket that are not fuel, "refueling" solid rocket is basically re-manufacturing (the STS boosters were re-manufactured, without any economy).
In general, the use of solid boosters for crewed NASA missions is a folly that was mandated by congress to funnel money into ATK (manufacturer of many military solid rockets and explosives from hand held to ICBM/SLBM, now Northrop Grumman). Ares I, Liberty and OmegA, and the SLS boosters, are just more of the same.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-propellant_rocket#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-propellant_rocket#Perfor...
- rbanffy 8y agoIndeed. The SRBs are a stupid idea. Someone must build a decent rocket factory in the same congressional district so that NASA can make safe rockets. It makes sense if refueling is just filling them with fuel in an automated way (think a giant extrusion device printing layers of fuel inside a rotating empty rocket). That way, the cost of flying a rocket becomes downtime+fuel.