4 ms·
Spinning the rocket sends the liquid to the sides, not the bottom where the pumps are.
by greglindahl 8y ago
Spinning the rocket sends the liquid to the sides, not the bottom where the pumps are.
- tomp 8y agoThat's why you have the spiral inside the tank, so that it "scoops" the fuel to the bottom.
- outworlder 8y agoThat doesn't sound right. I would expect that the centripetal force will send the fuel to the end of the rocket (or ends, depending on where the pivot point is).
- aw1621107 8y agoNot if you spin the rocket end-over-end
- skykooler 8y agoBut then the rocket isn't consistently pointing the engines in the right direction.
- gpm 8y agoDepends on how fast you need to spin it. If you had a reasonably long period, the lighting of the engines and the cancellation of the angular velocity could occur fast enough that the engines would act like they were consistently pointed in one direction. I think a bigger issue might be that all the mass is at the engines, so the engines would stay nearly fixed with the other end of the rocket rotating rapidly, and pretty much all the propellant would go to the wrong end of the rocket.