Armadillo drops peroxide... forever?

richard schumacher :

The problem is that they'll never succeed, or others will succeed first.

First, how can you know if they will succeed or not. Second, since when has
not being the first company in a new market a sign of failure? Do you
consider Dell a failure because IBM and others were in business years before
them? Or maybe GM prevented all other car companies from forming, it did
try, but there is still more than one car company in existance.

That's fine for a hobby but death for a business.

Yeah, tell that to the tens?hundreds? of thousands of companies that came
into existance after the first company delevoped a new product. Being first
can be an advantage, but sometimes it locks you into the wrong method of
operation.

If they do enough research they may (note I said may not will) develop a
better design than they can buy.

Better for Xcor to sell something rather than nothing, no?

It depends, but if they do decide to buy Xcor motors you will not hear me
complaining, and if they decide spend thier time developing thier own, I
still will not complain. It is thieir time, thier money, thier choice.

That is the diffirence when a private organization does it.

Earl Colby Pottinger


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The problem is that they'll never succeed, or others will succeed
first.
That's fine for a hobby but death for a business.

I don't think this sufficiently accounts for the lack of intercompany
commerce - Burt Rutan purchased an engine, but almost noone else has.
How much would Xcor charge, does anyone have a ballpark? I'm afraid
that a reasonable price would be in the $100K-$1M, which I'm sure most
companies could beat using internal development. As you point out if
time is of the essence (as in the X-prize), or if money is no object,
then it would make sense to buy an engine. But current market
conditions lead to everyone reinventing the wheel.

Better for Xcor to sell something rather than nothing, no?

Unfortunately, no - not at this point. There just isn't enough of a
market yet. Just do a quick cost/benefit analysis - to make it really
easy I'm going to assume a straight line demand curve. OK, let's
assume that they give it away for free - how many could they sell?
Maybe 10-20, right? So it is fairly easy to see that they will not be
able to make their engineering costs on volume. Of course, if they
charge enough to cover their engineering costs, they will not sell any
(because their engineering costs are not that much lower than anyone
elses, assuming time is unimportant). So Xcor really can't show a
profit short term.

There is a way out of this dilemma - Xcor can "flood the market,"
providing very inexpensive engines selling basically at the incremental
cost. That would cause rapid market growth, and eventually a market
large enough for the engine sales to make sense may appear. The
problem is that this is risky, because Xcor does not currently have
large market share (I don't really think anyone has a large market
share!) so they would essentially be funding their competitors growth
as well! If you pay to "float all boats" then you competitor ends up
with a similar market share, but more cash because he didn't have to
fund the growth.

The way to eliminate that risk is for Xcor to team up with competitors
and provide group funding for increasing the market size. This is
easier said than done, though. That's one of the things I hope to
accomplish... sort of!

-David

I don't think Xcor made suitable peroxide rockets. However with the
change
or to LOX-Alcohol I am pretty sure that they do make some desgns that
could
meet JC's needs.

Have you ever heard any ballpark pricing info? I'm curious how they
are approaching this type of thing. I'll have to ask them at Space
Access.

"David Summers" :

I don't think Xcor made suitable peroxide rockets. However with the
change or to LOX-Alcohol I am pretty sure that they do make some desgns
that
desgns that could meet JC's needs.

Have you ever heard any ballpark pricing info? I'm curious how they
are approaching this type of thing. I'll have to ask them at Space
Access.

No, it has been a long time since I asked them for a price, and even then
they were being very cagey.

However, I don't think thier smaller engines are as expensive as you think.
Engines in the 5000 Lbs thrust level that Armadillo needs are probably in the
very high tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Note that does not included any changes or the hardware for gimbaling or the
plumbing needed - expect that to atleast double the costs just in that area.

Now whether thier controls are compatible with Armadillo's present setup is
still another issue.

Earl Colby Pottinger

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In article ,
Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

No, it has been a long time since I asked them for a price, and even then
they were being very cagey.

I'd expect XCOR (or anyone else) to have very good reason to be cagey
about prices. Some people will be capable of designing and integrating
control and fuel and mounting systems for rocket engines, and some
won't. Some will want XCOR's ancillary stuff and some won't. Some will
need to buy consulting time and some won't.

If you wanted a real rocket engine (real enough to, say, have been test
fired a few times) to sit on your desk as a paper weight then I suspect
that XCOR would sell you one fairly cheaply.

--
Bruce | 41.1670S | \ spoken | -+-
Hoult | 174.8263E | /\ here. | ----------O----------

"Earl Colby Pottinger" wrote in message
...

I don't think Xcor made suitable peroxide rockets.
However with the change or to LOX-Alcohol I am pretty
sure that they do make some desgns that could meet JC's
needs.

Armadillo has opted not to use Xcor engines for good reasons.

I expect that they could develop their kind of engines a lot cheaper, (a
tenth?), than Xcor could - I think JC commented to this effect sometime
back.

Xcor have to cover their bills as they go, which means selling to
others, with all the constraints that implies - they have to develop a
different class of engine. I am sure that they are both taking the best
approaches for their respective positions.

For all that, I am not unhappy that Armadillo is adopting LOX. I
suspect that once one gets over the initial development hump, that
performance and development comes cheaper and easier with LOX, than with
H2O2. LOX can also be taken all the way, they should not have to change
horses again, though I am sure the H2O2 experience was not wasted, I
suspect they are now ready for LOX.

I always hoped that an "open source" crude but effective LOX engine
could be developed. Something that would get considerable incremental
development from many people, and which could become the backbone of
many small launch vehicles. Sort of a collective engine program with
everyone customising it to their own needs and adding to the body of
knowledge on it.

A technical thought -considering Armadillo's need to now gimbal the
engine, and the perhaps desire to standardize on engine size, (for ease
of development?). I was wondering if it might be easier to use multiple
small standard engines, and gimbal them collectively. In addition to
giving engine out capacity this might enable roll control via individual
engines. While there might be a performance cost with the smaller
engines, they could be developed to a higher level, and swapped in and
out more easily as new and improved models came along. Just a thought.

Pete.

The trade offs for multiple smaller engines a

1) Smaller engines have a higher percentage of energy leaking into the
engine housing, so cooling is harder.
2) The engines must individually be much more reliable for the same
overall reliability. (Though this can be moderated somewhat by engine
out capability).
3) Gimballing an engine where the thrust was off-center (due to engine
out or engine partial thrust problems) would take a lot more mass and
energy.

There are ways of making it work, of course - the question is, is it
worth it?

Pete Lynn wrote:

I always hoped that an "open source" crude but effective LOX engine
could be developed. Something that would get considerable
incremental
development from many people, and which could become the backbone of
many small launch vehicles. Sort of a collective engine program with
everyone customising it to their own needs and adding to the body of
knowledge on it.

Pete.

A sort of 'Linux' engine? Yeah, sounds neat. Then again, so does Linux.
Last time I checked, Windows is still king--and despite protestations
otherwise, it's not in any near term danger of being toppled. And
that's for machines that all run basically the same architecture. No
one really knows yet what shape a real commercial space launch
architecture would take, because it doesn't exist yet.

Isn't this sort of how SpaceX developed Merlin? They took open source
data from the Fastrac program and modified it to fit their vehicle. I
think if you ask Elon Musk though, it was anything but cheap. We're
still waiting on the first flight test, although now it seems largely
an issue of range availability more than anything else....

Tom Cuddihy

David Summers wrote:

The trade offs for multiple smaller engines a

1) Smaller engines have a higher percentage of energy leaking into the
engine housing, so cooling is harder.
2) The engines must individually be much more reliable for the same
overall reliability. (Though this can be moderated somewhat by engine
out capability).
3) Gimballing an engine where the thrust was off-center (due to engine
out or engine partial thrust problems) would take a lot more mass and
energy.

There are ways of making it work, of course - the question is, is it
worth it?


The former Soviets never got it quite right on the N-1 first stage,
but there were probably some vibration and other dynamics issues they
didn't properly address, either....

--

You know what to remove, to reply....

"Joann Evans" wrote in message
...
David Summers wrote:

The trade offs for multiple smaller engines a

1) Smaller engines have a higher percentage of energy
leaking into the engine housing, so cooling is harder.
2) The engines must individually be much more reliable
for the same overall reliability. (Though this can be
moderated somewhat by engine out capability).
3) Gimballing an engine where the thrust was off-center
(due to engine out or engine partial thrust problems)
would take a lot more mass and energy.

There are ways of making it work, of course - the
question is, is it worth it?


The former Soviets never got it quite right on the N-1 first
stage, but there were probably some vibration and other
dynamics issues they didn't properly address, either....

I suppose it probably ends up easier to just gimbal each engine
separately- you only have to design it once. The gimballing and
plumbing seems fairly straight forward, scalable, and practical for many
engine systems, it is only the actuation that seems overly involved.
Perhaps there may still be some benefit from actuating collectively, a
bit like a two way Venetian blind, with an overlaid mechanical system
for roll control.

Basically an array of individually gimballed engines that you steer
collectively with only three actuators, (x, y and roll).

Pete.