1.
Boeing
–
The Boeing Company is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, and satellites worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support services, Boeing stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Boeing Companys corporate headquarters are located in Chicago and the company is led by President, Boeing is organized into five primary divisions, Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Defense, Space & Security, Engineering, Operations & Technology, Boeing Capital, and Boeing Shared Services Group. Boeing bought Heaths shipyard in Seattle on the Duwamish River, which became his first airplane factory. Boeing was incorporated in Seattle by William Boeing, on July 15,1916, Boeing was later incorporated in Delaware, the original Certificate of Incorporation was filed with the Secretary of State of Delaware on July 19,1934. Boeing, who studied at Yale University, worked initially in the timber industry and this knowledge proved invaluable in his subsequent design and assembly of airplanes. The company stayed in Seattle to take advantage of the supply of spruce wood. William Boeing founded his company a few months after the June 15 maiden flight of one of the two B&W seaplanes built with the assistance of George Conrad Westervelt, a U. S. Navy engineer. Boeing and Westervelt decided to build the B&W seaplane after having flown in a Curtiss aircraft, Boeing bought a Glenn Martin Flying Birdcage seaplane and was taught to fly by Glenn Martin himself. Boeing soon crashed the Birdcage and when Martin informed Boeing that replacement parts would not become available for months, Westervelt agreed to build a better airplane and soon produced the B&W Seaplane. This first Boeing airplane was assembled in a hangar located on the northeast shore of Seattles Lake Union. Many of Boeings early planes were seaplanes, on April 6,1917, the U. S. declared War on Germany and later in the year entered World War I. On May 9,1917, the became the Boeing Airplane Company. With the U. S. entering the war, Boeing knew that the U. S. Navy needed seaplanes for training, so Boeing shipped two new Model Cs to Pensacola, Florida, where the planes were flown for the Navy. The Navy liked the Model C and ordered 50 more, the company moved its operations to a larger former shipbuilding facility known as Boeing Plant 1, located on the lower Duwamish River, Washington state. Others, including Boeing, started selling other products, Boeing built dressers, counters, and furniture, along with flat-bottom boats called Sea Sleds. In 1919 the Boeing B-1, flying boat made its first flight and it accommodated one pilot and two passengers and some mail. Over the course of eight years, it made international airmail flights from Seattle to Victoria, on May 24,1920, the Boeing Model 8 made its first flight
2.
S-IC
–
The S-IC was the first stage of the American Saturn V rocket. The S-IC stage was built by the Boeing Company, like the first stages of most rockets, most of its mass of more than 2,000 tonnes at launch was propellant, in this case RP-1 rocket fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. It was 42 meters tall and 10 meters in diameter, the stage had five F-1 engines in a quincunx arrangement. The center engine was fixed in position, while the four engines could be hydraulically gimballed to control the rocket. The Boeing Co. was awarded the contract to manufacture the S-IC on December 15,1961, by this time the general design of the stage had been decided on by the engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The main place of manufacture was the Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans, wind tunnel testing took place in Seattle and the machining of the tools needed to build the stages at Wichita, Kansas. MSFC built the first three test stages and the first two flight models and they were built using tools produced in Wichita. It took roughly seven to nine months to build the tanks and 14 months to complete a stage, the first stage built by Boeing was S-IC-D, a test model. The largest and heaviest single component of the S-IC was the thrust structure and it was designed to support the thrust of the five engines and redistribute it evenly across the base of the rocket. There were four anchors which held down the rocket as it built thrust and these were among the largest aluminum forgings produced in the U. S. at the time,4.3 meters long and 816 kilograms in weight. The four stabilising fins withstood a temperature of 1100 °C, above the thrust structure was the fuel tank, containing 770,000 liters of RP-1 fuel. The tank itself had a mass of 11 metric tons dry, nitrogen was bubbled through the tank before launch to keep the fuel mixed. During flight the fuel was pressurized using helium, that was stored in tanks in the oxygen tank above. Between the fuel and liquid oxygen tanks was the intertank, the liquid oxygen tank held 1,305,000 liters of LOX. It raised special issues for the designer, the lines through which the LOX ran to the engine had to be straight and therefore had to pass through the fuel tank. This meant insulating these lines inside a tunnel to stop fuel freezing to the outside, two solid motor retrorockets were located inside each of the four conical engine fairings. S-II S-IVB Apollo Stages to Saturn Apollo Saturn Reference Page Video of static test on YouTube
3.
Space Shuttle external tank
–
A Space Shuttle External Tank was the component of the Space Shuttle launch vehicle that contained the liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. During lift-off and ascent it supplied the fuel and oxidizer under pressure to the three Space Shuttle Main Engines in the orbiter, the ET was jettisoned just over 10 seconds after MECO, where the SSMEs were shut down, and re-entered the Earths atmosphere. Unlike the Solid Rocket Boosters, external tanks were not re-used and they broke up before impact in the Indian Ocean, away from shipping lanes and were not recovered. The ET was the largest element of the shuttle. The ET was the backbone of the shuttle during launch, providing support for attachment with the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters. The tank was connected to each SRB at one forward attachment point and one aft bracket, in the aft attachment area, there were also umbilicals that carried fluids, gases, electrical signals and electrical power between the tank and the orbiter. Electrical signals and controls between the orbiter and the two rocket boosters were also routed through those umbilicals. Although the external tanks were discarded, it could have been possible to re-use them in orbit. Plans for re-use ranged from incorporation into a station as extra living or research space, as rocket fuel tanks for interplanetary missions. Another concept was to use the ET as a carrier for bulky payloads. One proposal was for the mirror of a 7-meter aperture telescope to be carried with the tank. Another concept was the Aft Cargo Carrier, over the years, NASA worked to reduce the weight of the ET to increase overall efficiency. For each pound of weight reduction, the capability of the shuttle spacecraft was increased almost one pound. The original ET is informally known as the Standard Weight Tank and was fabricated from 2219, a high-strength aluminum–copper alloy used for many aerospace applications. The first two, used for STS-1 and STS-2, were painted white to protect the tanks from ultraviolet light during the time that the shuttle spends on the launch pad prior to launch. After STS-4, several hundred pounds were eliminated by deleting the anti-geyser line and this line paralleled the oxygen feed line, providing a circulation path for liquid oxygen. This reduces accumulation of oxygen in the feed line during prelaunch tanking. After propellant loading data from tests and the first few space shuttle missions were assessed
4.
Space Shuttle orbiter
–
The Space Shuttle orbiter was the reusable spaceplane component of the Space Shuttle program. Six orbiters were built for flight, Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, all were built in Palmdale, California, by the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Rockwell International company. The first orbiter, Enterprise, made its flight in 1977. An unpowered glider, it was carried by a modified Boeing 747 airliner called the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and released for a series of atmospheric test flights, Enterprise was partially disassembled and retired after completion of critical testing. The remaining orbiters were fully operational spacecraft, and were launched vertically as part of the Space Shuttle stack, Columbia was the first space-worthy orbiter, and made its inaugural flight in 1981. Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis followed in 1983,1984 and 1985 respectively, in 1986, Challenger was destroyed in an accident shortly after launch. Endeavour was built as Challengers replacement, and was first launched in 1992, in 2003, Columbia was destroyed during re-entry, leaving just three remaining orbiters. Discovery completed its flight on March 9,2011. Atlantis completed the last ever Shuttle flight, STS-135, on July 21,2011, additionally, two reusable solid rocket boosters provided additional thrust for approximately the first two minutes of launch. The orbiters themselves did carry hypergolic propellants for their RCS thrusters, the vertical stabilizer of the orbiter had a leading edge that was swept back at a 45-degree angle. There were four elevons mounted at the edges of the delta wings. These, along with a movable body flap located underneath the main engines, controlled the orbiter during later stages of descent through the atmosphere, overall, the Space Shuttle orbiter was roughly the same size as a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 airliner. This control system carried out the usual attitude control along the pitch, roll, and yaw axes during all of the phases of launching, orbiting. This system also executed any needed orbital maneuvers, including all changes in the altitude, orbital plane. These were all operations that required a lot more power and energy than mere attitude control, the forward rockets of the Reaction Control System, located near the nose of the Space Shuttle orbiter, included 14 primary and two vernier RCS rockets. The aft RCS engines were located in the two Orbital Maneuvering System pods at the rear of the orbiter, and these included 12 primary and two vernier engines in each pod. The RCS also controlled the attitude of the orbiter during most of its re-entry into the Earths atmosphere – until the air became dense enough that the rudder, elevons and body flap became effective. During the early process of the orbiter, the forward RCS thrusters were to be hidden underneath retractable doors
5.
Kilogram
–
The kilogram or kilogramme is the base unit of mass in the International System of Units and is defined as being equal to the mass of the International Prototype of the Kilogram. The avoirdupois pound, used in both the imperial and US customary systems, is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg, making one kilogram approximately equal to 2.2046 avoirdupois pounds. Other traditional units of weight and mass around the world are also defined in terms of the kilogram, the gram, 1/1000 of a kilogram, was provisionally defined in 1795 as the mass of one cubic centimeter of water at the melting point of ice. The final kilogram, manufactured as a prototype in 1799 and from which the IPK was derived in 1875, had an equal to the mass of 1 dm3 of water at its maximum density. The kilogram is the only SI base unit with an SI prefix as part of its name and it is also the only SI unit that is still directly defined by an artifact rather than a fundamental physical property that can be reproduced in different laboratories. Three other base units and 17 derived units in the SI system are defined relative to the kilogram, only 8 other units do not require the kilogram in their definition, temperature, time and frequency, length, and angle. At its 2011 meeting, the CGPM agreed in principle that the kilogram should be redefined in terms of the Planck constant, the decision was originally deferred until 2014, in 2014 it was deferred again until the next meeting. There are currently several different proposals for the redefinition, these are described in the Proposed Future Definitions section below, the International Prototype Kilogram is rarely used or handled. In the decree of 1795, the term gramme thus replaced gravet, the French spelling was adopted in the United Kingdom when the word was used for the first time in English in 1797, with the spelling kilogram being adopted in the United States. In the United Kingdom both spellings are used, with kilogram having become by far the more common, UK law regulating the units to be used when trading by weight or measure does not prevent the use of either spelling. In the 19th century the French word kilo, a shortening of kilogramme, was imported into the English language where it has used to mean both kilogram and kilometer. In 1935 this was adopted by the IEC as the Giorgi system, now known as MKS system. In 1948 the CGPM commissioned the CIPM to make recommendations for a practical system of units of measurement. This led to the launch of SI in 1960 and the subsequent publication of the SI Brochure, the kilogram is a unit of mass, a property which corresponds to the common perception of how heavy an object is. Mass is a property, that is, it is related to the tendency of an object at rest to remain at rest, or if in motion to remain in motion at a constant velocity. Accordingly, for astronauts in microgravity, no effort is required to hold objects off the cabin floor, they are weightless. However, since objects in microgravity still retain their mass and inertia, the ratio of the force of gravity on the two objects, measured by the scale, is equal to the ratio of their masses. On April 7,1795, the gram was decreed in France to be the weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of the metre
6.
Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39
–
Launch Complex 39 is a rocket launch site at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida, United States. The site and its collection of facilities were built for the Apollo program. As of 2017, only Launch Complex 39A is active, launching SpaceXs Falcon 9. LC-39 is also being modified to support launches of the SpaceXs Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy, as well as NASAs Space Launch System, with a new, smaller pad, C, added to support smaller launches. SpaceX leases Launch Pad 39A from NASA and has modified the pad to support Falcon Heavy launches in 2017 and beyond. NASA began modifying Launch Pad 39B in 2007 to accommodate the now defunct Project Constellation, Pad C was originally planned but never built for Apollo, and would have been a copy of pads 39A and 39B. A smaller pad, designated 39C was constructed from January to June 2015 to accommodate small-class vehicles, NASA launches from LC-39A and 39B have been supervised from the NASA Launch Control Center, located 3 miles from the launch pads. LC-39 is one of launch sites that share radar and tracking services of the Eastern Test Range. During the 1920s, Peter E. Studebaker Jr. son of the automobile magnate, in 1948, the Navy transferred the former Banana River Naval Air Station located south of Cape Canaveral, to the Air Force for use in testing captured German V-2 rockets. The sites location on the East Florida coast was ideal for this purpose in that launches would be over the ocean and this site became the Joint Long Range Proving Ground in 1949, and was renamed Patrick Air Force Base in 1950. The Air Force annexed part of Cape Canaveral to the North in 1951, forming the Air Force Missile Test Center, Missile and rocketry testing and development would take place here through the 1950s. After the creation of NASA in 1958, the CCAFS launch pads were used for NASAs civilian unmanned and manned launches, including those of Project Mercury, in 1961, President Kennedy proposed to Congress the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. NASA began acquisition of land in 1962, taking title to 131 square miles by outright purchase, on July 1,1962, the site was named the Launch Operations Center. At the time, the highest numbered launch pad on CCAFS was Launch Complex 37 and it was designed to handle launches of the Saturn V rocket, at the time the largest, most powerful rocket then designed, required to take Apollo to the Moon. Initial plans included four pads evenly spaced 8,700 feet apart to damage in the event of an explosion on the pad. Three were scheduled for construction and two would have built at a later date. The numbering of the pads at the time was from north to south, with the northernmost being 39A, Pad 39A was never built, and 39C became 39A in 1963. With todays numbering, 39C would have been north of 39B, Pad 39E would have been due north of the mid-distance between 39C and 39D, with 39E forming the top of a triangle, and equidistant from 39C and 39D
7.
Kennedy Space Center
–
The John F. Kennedy Space Center is one of ten National Aeronautics and Space Administration field centers. Since December 1968, Kennedy Space Center has been NASAs primary launch center of human spaceflight, Launch operations for the Apollo, Skylab and Space Shuttle programs were carried out from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 and managed by KSC. Located on the east coast of Florida, KSC is adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the management of the two entities work very closely together, share resources, and even own facilities on each others property. Additionally, the center manages launch of robotic and commercial missions, researches food production and In-Situ Resource Utilization for off Earth exploration. Since 2010, the center has worked to become a multi-user spaceport through industry partnerships, there are about 700 facilities grouped across the centers 144,000 acres. There is also a Visitor Complex open to the public on site, the military had been performing launch operations since 1949 at what would become Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. In December 1959, the Department of Defense transferred 5,000 personnel, President John F. Kennedys 1961 goal of a manned lunar landing before 1970 required an expansion of launch operations. On July 1,1962, the Launch Operations Directorate was separated from MSFC to become the Launch Operations Center, therefore, the decision was made to build a new LOC site located adjacent to Cape Canaveral on Merritt Island. NASA began land acquisition in 1962, buying title to 131 square miles, the major buildings in KSCs Industrial Area were designed by architect Charles Luckman. Construction began in November 1962, and Kennedy visited the site twice in 1962, on November 29,1963, the facility was given its current name by President Lyndon B. Johnson under Executive Order 11129. Johnsons order joined both the civilian LOC and the military Cape Canaveral station under the designation John F. Kennedy Space Center, spawning some confusion joining the two in the public mind. Located on Merritt Island, Florida, the center is north-northwest of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Ocean and it is 34 miles long and roughly six miles wide, covering 219 square miles. KSC is a major central Florida tourist destination and is one hours drive from the Orlando area. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers public tours of the center, Center workers can encounter bald eagles, American alligators, wild boars, eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, the endangered Florida panther and Florida manatees. From 1967 through 1973, there were 13 Saturn V launches, the first of two unmanned flights, Apollo 4 on November 9,1967, was also the first rocket launch from KSC. The Saturn Vs first manned launch on December 21,1968 was Apollo 8s lunar orbiting mission, the next two missions tested the Lunar Module, Apollo 9 and Apollo 10. Apollo 11, launched from Pad A on July 16,1969, Apollo 12 followed four months later. From 1970–1972, the Apollo program concluded at KSC with the launches of missions 13 through 17, on May 14,1973, the last Saturn V launch put the Skylab space station in orbit from Pad 39A
8.
Rocketdyne F-1
–
The F-1 is a gas-generator cycle rocket engine developed in the United States by Rocketdyne in the late 1950s and used in the Saturn V rocket in the 1960s and early 1970s. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, the F-1 remains the most powerful single-combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever developed. The F-1 was originally developed by Rocketdyne to meet a 1955 U. S. Air Force requirement for a large rocket engine. The eventual result of requirement was two engines, the E-1 and the much larger F-1. The E-1, although tested in static firing, was quickly seen as a technological dead-end. The Air Force eventually halted development of the F-1 because of a lack of requirement for such a large engine, however, the recently created National Aeronautics and Space Administration appreciated the usefulness of an engine with so much power, and contracted Rocketdyne to complete its development. Test firings of F-1 components had performed as early as 1957. The first static firing of a full-stage developmental F-1 was performed in March 1959, the first F-1 was delivered to NASA MSFC in October 1963. In December 1964, the F-1 completed flight-rating tests, testing continued at least through 1965. Early development tests revealed serious combustion instability problems which caused catastrophic failure. Initially, progress on this problem was slow, as it was intermittent, oscillations of 4 kHz with harmonics to 24 kHz were observed. Eventually, engineers developed a technique of detonating small explosive charges outside the combustion chamber. This allowed them to exactly how the running chamber responded to variations in pressure. The designers could then quickly experiment with different co-axial fuel-injector designs to obtain the one most resistant to instability and these problems were addressed from 1959 through 1961. Eventually, engine combustion was so stable, it would self-damp artificially induced instability within 1/10 of a second, the Rocketdyne-developed F-1 engine is the most powerful single-nozzle liquid-fueled rocket engine ever flown. The M-1 rocket engine was designed to have more thrust, however it was tested at the component level. The F-1 was a rocket motor, burning RP-1 as fuel. A turbopump was used to fuel and oxygen into the combustion chamber
9.
Space Shuttle main engine
–
Built in the United States by Rocketdyne, the RS-25 burns cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, with each engine producing 1,859 kN of thrust at liftoff. Although the RS-25 can trace its heritage back to the 1960s, concerted development of the began in the 1970s, with the first flight, STS-1. The RS-25 has undergone several upgrades over its history to improve the engines reliability, safety. The RS-25 operates at temperatures ranging from −253 °C to 3300 °C, the Space Shuttle used a cluster of three RS-25 engines mounted in the aft structure of the orbiter, with fuel being drawn from the external tank. Following each flight, the engines were removed from the orbiter, the RS-25 engine consists of various pumps, valves and other components which work in concert to produce thrust. Once in the MPS lines, the fuel and oxidizer each branch out into separate paths to each engine, in each branch, prevalves then allow the propellants to enter the engine. Once in the engine, the flow through low-pressure fuel and oxidizer turbopumps. From these HPTPs the propellants take different routes through the engine, meanwhile, fuel flows through the main fuel valve into regenerative cooling systems for the nozzle and MCC, or through the chamber coolant valve. Fuel passing through the MCC cooling system then passes back through the LPFTP turbine before being routed either to the tank pressurization system or to the hot gas manifold cooling system. Once in the injectors, the propellants are mixed and injected into the combustion chamber where they are ignited. The burning propellant mixture is ejected through the throat and bell of the engines nozzle. It boosts the liquid oxygens pressure from 0.7 to 2.9 MPa, during engine operation, the pressure boost permits the high-pressure oxidizer turbine to operate at high speeds without cavitating. The LPOTP, which measures approximately 450 by 450 mm, is connected to the vehicle propellant ducting, the HPOTP consists of two single-stage centrifugal pumps mounted on a common shaft and driven by a two-stage, hot-gas turbine. The main pump boosts the liquid oxygens pressure from 2.9 to 30 MPa while operating at approximately 28,120 rpm, the HPOTP discharge flow splits into several paths, one of which drives the LPOTP turbine. Another path is to, and through, the oxidizer valve. Another small flow path is tapped off and sent to the heat exchanger. The gas is sent to a manifold and then routed to pressurize the liquid oxygen tank, another path enters the HPOTP second-stage preburner pump to boost the liquid oxygens pressure from 30 to 51 MPa. It passes through the oxidizer preburner oxidizer valve into the oxidizer preburner, the HPOTP measures approximately 600 by 900 mm
10.
Saturn V
–
The Saturn V was an American human-rated expendable rocket used by NASA between 1967 and 1973. The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload, to date, the Saturn V remains the only launch vehicle to launch missions to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit. A total of 15 flight-capable vehicles were built, but only 13 were flown, an additional three vehicles were built for ground testing purposes. A total of 24 astronauts were launched to the Moon, three of them twice, in the four years spanning December 1968 through December 1972 and it was known that Americas rival, the Soviet Union, would also try to secure some of the Germans. Von Braun was put into the design division of the Army due to his prior direct involvement in the creation of the V-2 rocket. Between 1945 and 1958, his work was restricted to conveying the ideas, finally, they turned to von Braun and his team, who during these years created and experimented with the Jupiter series of rockets. The Juno I was the rocket launched the first American satellite in January 1958. The Jupiter series was one step in von Brauns journey to the Saturn V. The Saturn Vs design stemmed from the designs of the Jupiter series rockets, as the success of the Jupiter series became evident, the Saturn series emerged. Between 1960 and 1962, the Marshall Space Flight Center designed a series of Saturn rockets that could be used for various Earth orbit or lunar missions. NASA planned to use the C-3 as part of the Earth Orbit Rendezvous concept, the C-4 would need only two launches to carry out an EOR lunar mission. On January 10,1962, NASA announced plans to build the C-5. The three-stage rocket would consist of, the S-IC first stage, with five F-1 engines, the S-II second stage, with five J-2 engines, the C-5 was designed for a 90, 000-pound payload capacity to the Moon. The C-5 would undergo component testing even before the first model was constructed, by testing all components at once, far fewer test flights would be required before a manned launch. The C-5 was confirmed as NASAs choice for the Apollo program in early 1963, the C-1 became the Saturn I, and C-1B became Saturn IB. Von Braun headed a team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in building a vehicle capable of launching a spacecraft on a trajectory to the Moon. Before they moved under NASAs jurisdiction, von Brauns team had begun work on improving the thrust, creating a less complex operating system. It was during these revisions that the decision to reject the single engine of the V-2s design came about, the Saturn I and IB reflected these changes, but were not large enough to send a manned spacecraft to the Moon
11.
Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster
–
After burnout, they were jettisoned and parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean where they were recovered, examined, refurbished, and reused. The SRBs were the most powerful rocket motors ever flown, each provided a maximum 13,800 kN thrust, roughly double the most powerful single-combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever flown, the Rocketdyne F-1. With a combined mass of about 1,180,000 kg, the motor segments of the SRBs were manufactured by Thiokol of Brigham City, Utah, which was later purchased by ATK. The prime contractor for most other components of the SRBs, as well as for the integration of all the components and retrieval of the spent SRBs, was USBI, a subsidiary of Pratt and Whitney. This contract was subsequently transitioned to United Space Alliance, a liability company joint venture of Boeing. Out of 270 SRBs launched over the Shuttle program, all but four were recovered – those from STS-4, over 5,000 parts were refurbished for reuse after each flight. The final set of SRBs that launched STS-135 included parts that flew on 59 previous missions, recovery also allowed post-flight examination of the boosters, identification of anomalies, and incremental design improvements. The two reusable SRBs provided the main thrust to lift the shuttle off the pad and up to an altitude of about 150,000 ft. While on the pad, the two SRBs carried the weight of the external tank and orbiter and transmitted the weight load through their structure to the mobile launch platform. Each booster had a liftoff thrust of approximately 2,800,000 pounds-force at sea level and they were ignited after the three Space Shuttle Main Engines thrust level was verified. Each is 149.16 ft long and 12.17 ft in diameter, only then could any conceivable set of launch or post-liftoff abort procedures be contemplated. In addition, failure of an individual SRBs thrust output or ability to adhere to the designed performance profile was not survivable, each SRB weighed approximately 1,300,000 lb at launch. The two SRBs constituted about 69% of the total lift-off mass, the propellant for each solid rocket motor weighed approximately 1,100,000 lb. The inert weight of each SRB was approximately 200,000 pounds, while the terms solid rocket motor and solid rocket booster are often used interchangeably, in technical use they have specific meanings. The term solid rocket motor applied to the propellant, case, igniter, each booster was attached to the external tank at the SRBs aft frame by two lateral sway braces and a diagonal attachment. The forward end of each SRB was attached to the tank at the forward end of the SRBs forward skirt. On the launch pad, each booster also was attached to the launcher platform at the aft skirt by four frangible nuts that were severed at lift-off. The boosters were composed of seven individually manufactured steel segments and these were assembled in pairs by the manufacturer, and then shipped to Kennedy Space Center by rail for final assembly
12.
VTVL
–
Vertical takeoff, vertical landing is a form of takeoff and landing for rockets. VTVL rockets are not to be confused with aircraft which take off and land vertically which use the air for support and propulsion, such as helicopters,1961 Bell Rocket Belt, personal VTVL rocket belt demonstrated. VTVL rocket concepts were studied by Philip Bono of Douglas Aircraft Co. in the 1960s, apollo Lunar Module was a 1960s two-stage VTVL vehicle for landing and taking off from the moon. The Soviet Union did some development work on, but never flew, the McDonnell Douglas DC-X was an unmanned prototype VTVL launch vehicle that flew several successfully test flights in the 1990s. In June 1996, the set a altitude record of 3,140 metres. Follow-on VTVL designs including Mastens Xaero and Armadillos Stig were aimed at higher-speed flight to higher suborbital altitudes, SpaceX announced plans in 2010 to eventually install deployable landing gear on the Dragon spacecraft and use the vehicles thrusters to perform a land-based landing. The test vehicle made eight successful test flights in 2012–2013, grasshopper v1.0 made its eighth, and final, test flight on October 7,2013, flying to an altitude of 744 metres before making its eighth successful VTVL landing. F9R Dev1 made its first test flight in April 2014, to an altitude of 250 meters before making a vertical landing. 2013, SpaceXs DragonFly is a prototype low-altitude rocket-powered test article for a version of their Dragon space capsule. The DragonFly is a reusable launch vehicle, intended for low-altitude flight testing expected to start in 2014. On November 23,2015, Blue Origins New Shepard booster rocket made the first successful vertical landing following an unmanned suborbital test flight that reached space. On December 21,2015, SpaceXs 20th Falcon 9 first stage made a landing after boosting 11 commercial satellites to low earth orbit on Falcon 9 Flight 20. On April 8,2016, SpaceXs Falcon 9 made the first successful landing on their Autonomous spaceport drone ship as part of the SpaceX CRS-8 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, the technology required to successfully achieve VTVL has several parts. First, thrust must be greater than weight, second the thrust is required to be vectored. Guidance must be capable of calculating the position and attitude of the vehicle, RCS systems are usually required to keep the vehicle at the correct angle. Landing legs and deployment mechanisms add to the weight of the vehicle compared to expendable vehicles and it can also be necessary to be able to ignite engines in a variety of conditions potentially including vacuum, hypersonic, supersonic, transonic, and subsonic. Elon Musk has discussed the potential for substantial reductions in space flight costs as a result of being able to reuse rockets after successful VTVL landings, vertical landing of spaceships was the predominant mode of rocket landing envisioned in the pre-spaceflight era. Many science fiction authors as well as depictions in popular culture showed rockets landing vertically, typically resting after landing on the space vehicles fins, the spacecraft stopped mid-air again and, as the engines throttled back, began its successful vertical landing
