[AR] Re: Valley Tech throttleable restartable solids (!)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2020 18:47:38 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 26 Mar 2020, Uwe Klein wrote:
<restartable rocket>
So the quenching depends on depressurizing the chamber.
Is this "reliable"? at all | below the described altitude?
If it's done right, with attention to dP/dt and how the propellant
responds to it, it's reliable. This is fairly standard technology for
solid-fuel ballistic missiles, although they typically use pyro charges
that blow open vent ports, because they don't need to do restarts.
(Disregard post-Challenger comments about how solids "can't be shut down",
which come from people not very familiar with either the technology or the
history. In fact, solids were chosen for the Shuttle boosters on the
*explicit* assumption that they *could* be shut down in an emergency, via
vent ports; unfortunately, once that choice was made, it was cast in
concrete, and could not be reconsidered when it turned out that shutdown
transient loads would be too high for the orbiter and ET structures.)
Henry
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