Aerospike Engine 

To push ants to LEO and beyond!

The Most Interesting Rocket Engineers Who Happen to Be Twins in the World

roy romano a

That's one powerful welder , that's why it takes twins .

The Blues Brothers!

Probably 73 tests plus some minor tests not worth enumerating. So 73 tests.

TheDct88 there are more tests that just firing it up and letting her rip.

Or maybe, 73 deliberate tests, and an accident that happened produce useful data.

over meaning more then .. moron !

+patman0250 Don't you mean more than?....Ha moron

Check all the Classified USAF projects! They use it!

@@theclephane2914 How can we find the classified projects, the darknet?

@@headbanger1428 war thunder fora?

Camera angle

yeah, it looks like it went over his glove.

oh yeah, I love my thrusters clustered.

he and Elon just got me here

Boeing does it all the time. Yhe aerospike is far less complex, thus less goes wrong in the hands of dumb drunk UAW workers that assemble the engines.

Must be nice being naive

Infrastructure issues. The SSME has a manufacturing base already in place. So it's chapped to build and operate.

Not mentioned in video, Thrust drop-off at supersonic transition (rocket crossing sound barrier) as unsolved issue with aerospike engines.

so if someone solves it, it mean money to the man-or women?

It is. Just because they don't show you the vehicles using them, doesn't mean they're not in use.

My guess is hydrogen peroxide weight/duration. Not a long range solution.

+SILLACE ESTEKAY not sure but i think the skylon plane will use one.

+Shannon Miller Nope. Skylon uses an air breathing rocket called SABRE.

The project it was attached to was cancelled. I never had the infrastructure built to support it. So the space shuttle main engine is cheaper to build. Even though the ssme is less efficient.

2sudonim oh yeah

Skylon uses a spike configuration on its inlet. But it appears - at least the public view of the engine cutaways - to use traditional nozzles. It would certainly be smart to use this design. It's a heartbreaking fact of life in all engineering that engineers don't stop progress. Others do; lawyers chiefly, then business types, political types, regulatory... omg

ramosel ambient air pressure I would imagine. Obviously the exhaust plume dilates with altitude. One of the ingenious aspects of it is it’s organic efficiency at any altitude. I find this to be one of the most interesting aspects of it.

Pete Kuhns Elon dusk

Nope!

+Corey McGuire Yup! Howdy! I had a few VHS tapes I kept from my previous life in the aerospace industry. I finally got around to digitizing, editing, and uploading them. The most rare and critical videos are in the Internet Archive. Look up DC-X. I was on that project.

+Samuel “Spaceman Sam” Coniglio Its amazing to see this video during the "spaceplane" race, and to hear her say "only the best will win". Now, in 2016, we are just getting to the testbed of the new engine that could actually pull the entire spaceplane idea off, unfortunately, we are still a very long way off. Thanks for sharing this video. It is awesome to see things that come from "insiders" at the biggest rocket club in the world!

also, were these ever tested at Plumbrook in Milan, Ohio? my uncle did large HVAC (read industrial level) jobs out there, and I use to go to the Vocational Trade School right down the road. I would stop on the way home and take pictures of the dome. Until recently I had thought Plumbrook was an observatory. A few months ago I learned they had the worlds largest vac chamber for spacecraft testing. Crazy to think I could have been taking pics of some pretty cool stuff in that huge building and that dome and had no idea lol!

I witnessed the maiden flight of DC-X at White Sands Missile Range. I have a photo with my Nation Space Society chapter posing in front of it.

I do watch it i early 90s great ideas in movie but but fx age bad

The Sabre engine technology is chiefly a novel - although fairly simple to comprehend - heat exchanger cooling multi-mach compression friction in the inlet for control of air density and velocity (higher mass slower speed - the cooling causes the contraction into which the nozzle spike is regulating a balanced flow - therefore a constant massive high speed feed of very hot air cooled within seconds to a higher density low velocity air mass the turbine can pull in for oxygen). There is no reason the traditional nozzles can't be replaced by an aerospike nozzle as shown in this video. It has to do with the perception of risk in the financial political and professional communities. You have a "new" technology on the front end and the risk people are going to say no to putting a "new" technology on the rear end as well - multiplying your risk, as it were. It's an economy-of-scale judgement (mostly false due to overthinking) and it plagues human thinking. We can only ingest just so much knowledge and angst about not knowing before we blow up our ideas and settle for less.

wraith01mg I don't think so. The open spike creates a low pressure zone for pump exhaust to exit, but it's still contributing to thrust, so you don't gain anything by going to staged combustion.

Nothing wrong. The X-33 Venture Star program was meant to have an Aerospike engine, and one of the only programs to use it. When the program was canceled testing for the aerospike engine stopped aswell. However Arca Space plans on making an SSTO with the engine.

X-33 happened.

***** not

Fred Pilcher like we said in French "they throw the baby out with the bathwater "

Alberto Knox American aerospace engineering still uses PSI, pounds thrust and slugs, i.e., they've never converted to metric. It causes problems when NASA scientists buy hardware and then have to convert everything over. See Mars Climate Orbiter.

I think the program that was supposed to use it, and would have flight tested it got cancelled. The engine is never flight tested, and since they're not planning on frequent Single Stage to Orbit flights any time soon they won't spend more money to continue the Aerospike development.

339s at sea level and 436s vacuum according to the rocketdyne wiki

Nearly the same as SSME. It's not surprise that politicans prefered traditional and cheeper, bell shaped nozzle engines.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

+Richie Mann Rocket engines are compared in impulse seconds.Ud actually have to convert it to seconds if they gave it in minutes to compare it to another rocket engine

Or... spacex would have adapted, like they always do

It's kind of true. Since they failed there was a big empty gap where SpaceX aggressively stept-in

It won't. The project or was attached to, the VentureStar, was canceled over issues with its fuel tanks and heat shield. The engines worked fine but the other two key technologies, composite fuel tanks and metallized heat shield never panned out.

There are rotating detonation engines in roadmap. Why concentrate on obsolete technologies variations that do not improve Isp and Thrust?

+Mac Anix It's an old video man

That's Big Government for you! Or should I call it 'Progress'?

i suppose we can start more work on ion thrusters.

I didn't even know that Rocketdyne had done aerospike development work back in the 70's? I knew about the XRS-2200 work/tests done during the X33 program, but to find out those engines have been worked on way before that time makes it even more puzzling that nobody is building aerospikes these days?!?!

It is complicated to cool the inner cone of the engine, thats the main problem. Normal bell nozzles work good enough on staged rockets. A single-stage-to-orbit vehicle would be expensive and not necessary. But they look so awesome! :) The first attempts to use aerospikes were back in 1941, when the Germans built the Messerschmitt Me 262. It was used with a jet engine, not a rocket engine, but the concept is the same.

Meh, i like aerospikes that are in video games, really helpful in my ssto

china has a good space program if they keep going like that they maybe overtake nasa in 10 years or so but i highly doubt that after nasa starts launching the sls

China!

+Mr. Lowery R&D costs money

+omgcow Tell me about it! The R&D for the F-35 is running up to about a trillion dollars when all is said and done and for this massive expenditure the US and the unlucky pals of the US who signed contracts ordering the defunct POS vapor-plane MIGHT, that's MIGHT get an operational aircraft! WHOA! Fuckin beautiful!

+Mr. Lowery Well, without it we'd not have any of the luxuries we have. It makes our projects more efficient in the long run, and thus cost effective. Besides, getting off this planet is worth way more than your pathetic tax money you'd only use on self pleasurable desires, m8.

+omgcow Do you even know what a trillion dollars actually is? Anyone who thinks the government spending a trillion dollars on a single defense program that has produced unusable results is a moron! Sorry pal, but the F-35 paperweight isn't defending anything. It's a trillion dollar piece of shit!