On Wed, 9 Jun 2004, Russell McMahon wrote:
> The first successful mass produced liquid fuelled rocket used jet vanes, but
> they have pretty much vanished from the medium to large sector and been
> replaced either by vectoring using fluid injection or by gimballing...
Do remember that decisions like these are often made based on secondary
considerations or even prevailing fashion. (Fashionable approaches are
easier to sell to funding agencies.) You can't safely draw deep conclusions
about technical superiority from such trends. Rocketry is full of cases
where interesting but poorly-explored alternatives to conventional wisdom
are neglected until something brings them into the limelight.
As an example of secondary considerations, the switch from fluid injection
to nozzle gimbaling on the Titan IVB SRBs was not because nozzle gimbaling
was deemed intrinsically superior, but because of a combination of a
change of manufacturer and a desire to end some operational headaches
caused by troublesome design details of the old fluid-injection system.
Henry Spencer
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