![]() The successful launch of LandSpace’s rocket late Tuesday followed the first flight of the Zhuque-2 launcher in December. Future explorers could tap into natural resources on Mars to produce their own methane rocket fuel. There’s another advantage to methane, but it may not be realized for decades. That’s one of the reasons SpaceX switched to methane for its next-generation Starship rocket. Kerosene fuel-used to power SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 boosters-deposits more soot inside reusable rocket engines, requiring cleaning and refurbishment between missions. Methane provides other benefits for reusable rockets. Its temperature is closer to that of liquid oxygen, used as an oxidizer on rockets fueled by hydrogen, kerosene, and methane. Liquid methane is a cryogenic fluid, but it has a warmer boiling point and higher density than hydrogen. Kerosene is stored close to room temperature and can power high-thrust engines, and its higher density translates into smaller fuel tanks.īut engineers have widely accepted methane as the preferred fuel for a new generation of rockets. AdvertisementĪ highly refined grade of kerosene, RP-1 (Rocket Propellant-1), is the most common liquid fuel for rockets currently in service. It has to be stored near minus 423° Fahrenheit (minus 253° Celsius) and is prone to leaks because of the hydrogen molecule’s tiny size. Liquid hydrogen offers the best fuel efficiency of any conventional rocket fuel but is difficult to handle. Hydrazine is toxic and has fallen out of favor for use in large rockets, but most members of China’s family of Long March rockets-built and operated by state-owned enterprises-are still fueled by hydrazine. In the past, most large liquid-fueled rockets have used kerosene, hydrogen, or hydrazine as fuel. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Rocket Lab’s Neutron launch vehicle, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn-all partially or fully fueled by methane-are also in various stages of development. Relativity has retired the Terran 1 design to move on to the much larger Terran R rocket. Relativity Space launched its smaller Terran 1 rocket from Florida in March, but the upper-stage engine misfired a few minutes after liftoff, preventing the vehicle from reaching orbit. ![]() When operational, the reusable Starship vehicle’s payload capacity will be 100 times that of the Chinese Zhuque-2 rocket. SpaceX test-launched its huge methane-fueled Super Heavy booster and Starship launch vehicle from Texas for the first time in April, but the mission was terminated before it reached space. ![]() In its current form, the 162-foot-tall (49.5-meter) Zhuque-2 rocket can loft a payload of about 3,300 pounds (1.5 metric tons) into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit, a destination favored for many Earth observation satellites. The Zhuque-2 (Vermillion Bird-2) rocket is relatively small compared to other methane-fueled rockets in development in the United States. “The (Zhuque-2) rocket is the world's first liquid oxygen methane rocket that successfully entered orbit, and it is also the first launch vehicle in domestic civil and commercial aerospace to successfully enter orbit based on a self-developed liquid engine.” “The flight mission was completed according to the procedure, and the launch mission was a complete success,” LandSpace said. The company called the launch a success in a press release, and publicly available US military tracking data confirmed the rocket reached an orbit at an average altitude of about 280 miles (450 kilometers). LandSpace launched the Zhuque-2 rocket at 9 pm ET Tuesday (01:00 UTC Wednesday) from the Jiuquan spaceport, a military-run facility in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China. A commercial Chinese firm named LandSpace launched its Zhuque-2 rocket late Tuesday and made history as the first company to send a methane-fueled launcher into orbit, beating a bevy of US vehicles to the milestone.
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