[AR] SSME competition (was Re: Hyperganic uses AI...)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 21:15:36 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 31 Mar 2020, roxanna Mason wrote:
It was P&W who had the XLR-129 and lost the SSME contract.
Regardless, the point about politics, but yes I remembered it was P&W
after sending the message but didn't know they had a number for it being
a demonstrator.
It wasn't just a company demonstrator -- for a while it was a funded
development effort as part of a USAF hypersonic-spyplane project (a Mach
20 boost-glide vehicle air-launched from a B-52). Most of the major
subassemblies had been developed and tested, but it wasn't quite a
complete engine yet -- no LOX pump -- when the spyplane project lost
funding, possibly because it lost an internal competition against MOL.
(Dick Mulready's book comments that one downside of working for the spook
shops was that sometimes you would never know why a project had suddenly
closed down.)
One condition of entering the SSME competition was that NASA got unlimited
use of all your technology, *whether or not you won*. And P&W didn't
realize that the competition was a sham with a pre-chosen winner. When
they figured out that they'd never had a chance of winning, and all the
high-pressure-engine technology they'd sweated to develop was about to be
handed to Rocketdyne to build the SSME, they sued NASA (!). To dodge the
lawsuit, NASA had to claim that the P&W technology was of no value... and
so they couldn't touch it thereafter, and Rocketdyne had to do its own
sweating.
Henry
Other related posts: