Hybrid Rocket Fuel
| Who |
Brian Cantwell |
| Title |
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics |
| Affiliation |
Stanford University |
| Question |
How long before hybrid rocket fuel could be used? |
| Length |
1:31 min |
| Transcript |
“How far away from application is this fuel? That’s a good question. I think it’s not a matter of a decade, and probably less than five years. We started these experiments at Stanford in 1998 on a very small, 70-pound-thrust motor. Today, we’re here at NASA Ames testing on a 25-hundred-pound-thrust motor, and the performance of the fuel is consistent with those earlier experiments. So, the next step is to scale up to still larger sizes, and I think that should happen within the next year or two, and applications should begin to follow fairly soon after that.
I think the most important applications are where there is a need for increased safety and a need for lower cost. And you can hardly find any applications that don’t need both of those things. I think in the case, for example, of the Space Shuttle, there’s a need to increase the safety of the Shuttle boosters. There this fuel could have an application to the development of a hybrid-rocket-based Shuttle booster. The other application is to a potentially low-cost system for launching payloads into orbit. I think right now the biggest block to the commercialization of space is the cost of getting things into space. This technology has the potential for dramatically lowering that cost.” |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
| Question |
Can hybrid rockets save on launch costs? |
| Length |
23 sec |
| Transcript |
“How much lower the cost can go is a hard question to answer because no one has ever developed and commercialized a large hybrid rocket system. All I can really say definitively is if you start to list the areas where cost reductions can occur, that list goes on for dozens and dozens of items. So, substantial cost reduction should be possible.” |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
| Question |
What is a hybrid rocket? |
| Length |
1:09 min |
| Transcript |
“A hybrid rocket can be thought of as a chemical rocket that’s halfway between a conventional liquid and a solid. You can see both types on the Space Shuttle. The main engines that burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen represent a conventional liquid rocket. The two boosters on either side are solid rockets. If you were to look up inside the boosters, what you would see would be a very large amount of solid propellant that is mixed fuel and oxidizer that once you ignite it, it burns until it’s finished. You can’t turn it off. The hybrid uses a liquid oxidizer in a tank, followed by a valve, followed by a motor case and a nozzle. And in the motor case there is a solid fuel. The advantage of that is is because the liquid is in liquid form and the fuel is in a form of a large, solid block, it’s very immune to a large chemical explosion. Another advantage of the hybrid, which is sometimes not recognized so quickly, is that it’s easier to
throttle a hybrid rocket than it is a conventional liquid rocket." |
| Date |
9/19/92 |
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