Industrial Secrets in Rocket Design

In article ,
TangoMan wrote:
How much is rocket design a standardized engineering discipline?

Classical, conventional rocket design is pretty close to being standardized.
(Although "ossified" might be a better word...)

What I'm trying to grasp is whether the Atlas, Delta, Arianne, Zenit, etc
have any design characteristics that stump their competitors to such a
degree that they can't be duplicated...

Generally not. Competitors might wonder about details, about whether
(say) Zenit had found a particularly good way of addressing some specific
issue, but not about how it could be addressed at all.

The closest anybody comes to a real stumper is "how do the Russians make
pump turbines stand up to oxidizer-rich preburner exhausts?", and while
oxidizer-rich preburners were quite a surprise, once Western engineers
were convinced that the idea should be taken seriously, they started
having ideas about how it might be done.

Do any of these rockets have breakthrough engineering that is unique to only
their design or are they all whittling at the edges to gain minute
efficiencies and they barely differ from each other in overall efficiency?

Pretty much the latter. Breakthrough engineering is generally a gamble,
and the political environment for large rockets in recent decades has
strongly discouraged gambling.

This is not to say that there aren't large advances to be had, only that
the orthodox NASA-industrial complex is unlikely to produce them. Their
big priority is to minimize the risk of embarrassing failures.

(The original idea of X-planes was partly to try things out on a scale
where failures would not be too embarrassing, so that unorthodox ideas
could be evaluated in flight... but of late, while X-planes still have
some latitude, NASA has been insisting that X-rockets must not fail. That
was what killed X-34: NASA insisted on major new precautions against the
slightest possibility of failure, but refused to pay the extra costs.)
--
MOST launched 1015 EDT 30 June, separated 1046, | Henry Spencer
first ground-station pass 1651, all nominal! |

"Henry Spencer" wrote:
In article ,
TangoMan wrote:
How much is rocket design a standardized engineering discipline?

Classical, conventional rocket design is pretty close to being standardized.
(Although "ossified" might be a better word...)

This jogged my memory about something I'd been thinking about
recently. Everyone knows how expensive the Shuttle is.
Compared to other rockets the cost per kg of payload is
several times higher. But that's being somewhat unfair to
the Shuttle, in terms of evaluating how well the system
does what it does (though, of course, it is quite fair to
compare what you can use). As I've said more than once the
Shuttle stack wastes a lot of mass with the orbiter,
transforming a heavy lift launch on the scale of the Saturn
V into something on the scale of the Titan IV. But think
about it in terms of just putting mass into orbit. The
Shuttle system deliver about 4x as much "useful" mass to
orbit as its cargo payload, so it's cost per kg to orbit is
thus about 4x higher than what it really ought to be. With
an OSP or Apollo launch (for example) they'd count the
capsule as part of the payload, though for the Shuttle they
don't. Anywho, look at it that way and you see something
which, I think, is pretty disturbing. The Shuttle's cost
figures are in the *same* range as for other launchers
except a small handful of very cheap launchers (like Soyuz).
So, really, vehicles like the Atlas V aren't that much of
an improvement in cost over the Shuttle, behind the scenes
it's still more or less the same stuff going on and the
same costs. Certainly it's good to avoid that payload
waste but I think it's more than a little unsettling that
despite a whole new generation of launch vehicles, things
haven't budged much.