At 05:19 PM 2/6/2003 -0800, Randall Clague wrote:
Clean, I'll give it. No aluminum, and I think no chlorine. EPA will like it. But AFAIK - this is the Stanford wax hybrid, right? - they're just doing GOX/wax static tests. If that's the case, they're extrapolating from non-flight weight data to theoretical performance with flight weight hardware. As Michael likes to point out, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory."
True enough. There may be mechanical strength or scaling issues with wax that have not yet been explored. But it does look promising.
It may give the people doing nitrous hybrids a migration path to LOX? Which is probably worth something. That assumes that Stanford releases the composition of the wax, and that the amateur rocketry community hasn't already considered and rejected this propellant combination.
We don't necessarily need to duplicate their formulation exactly. Their wax composition must have the following properties: 1) high melting point (relative to normal paraffin) 2) low thermal conductivity/opaque and 3) clean melting (i.e. melts rapidly into a thin liquid). The first two are pretty obvious; the last goes to the mechanism for rapid fuel atomization they've mooted.
If the performance is indeed as good as Shuttle SRBs, then yes, one could stack some of these things and make orbit. I don't think it's good enough for SSTO - hybrids and solids require thick case walls because the entire fuel casing has to support the combustion chamber pressure - but that's a guess.
Well, in that sense solids and hybrids are equivalent to pressurized liquids, which also make bad SSTOs. I think you could make a recoverable, re-usable LOX/wax TSTO that would be relatively inexpensive and simple.
-p
Mars or Bust!
www.marssociety.com
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