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A Spaceplane Is Born: XCOR Piston Pumps – the Holy Grail

• fernly 13y ago
  > The typical life-span of a high performance rocket turbo pump today is about 30 minutes... before it renders itself unusable ... [and] will cost between $500,000 and several million dollars... OK, I am boggled...
  • DuskStar 13y ago
    This is part of why SpaceX is so focused on enabling recovery and reuse of their launch vehicles - the rocket costs an enormous amount relative to the propellant/launch site. As for the turbo pump only running for 30 minutes - if the launch vehicle it's attached to is going to destroy itself, why bother designing the pump to last longer, likely adding several pounds? "Oh, this new pump will last 100x longer than that old model - but you're just going to crash it into the ground at several hundred miles an hour, because recovering it would cost far more than just buying one more of the old model. Sound good?"
  • erobbins 13y ago
    They are expensive to design and test, and once they are in production the number produced is extremely limited, plus they are hand built and assembled... so the unit cost is very high.