SpaceX's Grasshopper VTVL takes a 40 meter hop

nokia69 wrote: »

this looks like too little too late, bezos has spent half a billion and is still waiting to reach LEO

now he wants to build a methane engine for a reuseable system, I wonder where he got that idea, its going to take him four more years, god knows what spaceX will be doing in four years

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, says that the missions to Mars by his company will use rockets powered by methane, which can be manufactured on the Red Planet

Advantages of methane fuel

All of these engines are being either developed or proposed by Chemical Automatics Design Bureau, KBKhA, based in the city of Voronezh. They became a fruit of a research dating back to 1995. By that time it was established that the replacement of traditional kerosene with a liquefied natural gas could produce a higher specific impulse -- the key performance characteristic of rocket engines. Moreover, liquid methane was estimated to cost up to 30 percent less than kerosene.

Cooling capability of methane is also three times higher than that of kerosene making it more effective as a coolant for the combustion chamber. Moreover, the methane would leave no solid residue in the engine's fuel lines, excluding the need for a laborious cleaning before a new test or a delivery of an already tested engine for the installation on the rocket. With an equal performance characteristics to a kerosene engine, methane propulsion system would require lower pressure in the combustion chamber and on the exit lines from its fuel pump.

Industry veterans also noted that the development of methane propulsion would not require any major new infrastructure or newly qualified personnel

...

In 2011, GKNPTs Khrunichev, the developer of the Proton rocket, officially started the development of the MRKS-1 reusable rocket system relying on methane engines. (655)

KB Khimmash work

Along with Voronezh-based KBKhA, KB Khimmash (a.k.a. KBKhM) design bureau in Korolev developed a methane version of the engine designated S5.86 No. 2 with a thrust of 7.5 tons. It was first tested in 1997 at NITs RKTs center north of Moscow. During a test on July 27, 2011, the engine fired for 2,000 seconds, proving the capability for multiple firings and confirming the absence of residue in fuel lines even under the most adverse conditions.

Work at NPO Energomash

Around 2013 or 2014, a design of the RD-192 engine intended for methane and oxygen propellant also surfaced.

nokia69 wrote: »

I think he is just following spaceX, and being a bit of a prick about it too

no need to bring hydrogen to Mars, plenty of water there already

The VfR was completely unaware of all this when they started work. Oberth had originally wanted to use methane as fuel, but it was hard to come by in Berlin, their first work was with gasoline and oxygen, Johannes Winkler, however, picked up the idea, and working independently of the VfR, was able to fire a liquid oxygen-liquid methane motor before the end of 1930. This work led nowhere in particular, since, as methane has a performance only slightly superior to that of gasoline, and is much harder to handle, nobody could see any point to following it up.

It featured increased performance compared to the baseline Soyuz-U, due to the use of syntin propellant, as opposed to RP-1 paraffin, used on the Soyuz-U.[1]

The increased payload of the Soyuz-U2 allowed heavier spacecraft to be launched, while lighter spacecraft could be placed in higher orbits, compared to those launched by Soyuz-U rockets. In 1996, it was announced that the Soyuz-U2 had been retired, as the performance advantage gained through the use of syntin did not justify the additional cost of its production.