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Old October 26th 17, 11:25 AM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default Were liquid boosters on Shuttle ever realistic?

In article ,
says...
Actually they haven't. Superchilled RP1 drives up costs in order to
improve performance. Going for reusability drives up manufacturing
costs and design costs because you have to make things that can be
used dozens of times without attention (so you need better materials
and tighter designs without pushing for extra performance, figure out
some way to avoid 'coking' on an RP1/LOX engine, etc). It's the
normal engineering evolution of launch vehicles that was stalled while
most payloads were government.


As far as engines go, this isn't really true. All liquid fueled engines
are designed to be fired multiple times, at least on the test stand.
That's how they're qualified. Henry Spencer used to say (paraphrasing
here), there is absolutely nothing fundamental about a liquid fueled
rocket engine that makes it expendable.

Same goes for tanks and plumbing. They pretty much have to be
"certified" for a certain number of fill and drain cycles even if
they're "expendable" in order to account for tanking tests, aborts, and
etc.

Solids on the other hand are single use, excepting for complete tear
down to component parts accompanied by extreme cleaning.

Jeff
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