Archimedes (rocket Engine)
Archimedes is a liquid-fuel rocket engine burning liquid oxygen and liquid methane in an oxidizer-rich staged combustion cycle. It is designed by aerospace company Rocket Lab for its Neutron rocket. History Archimedes was presented on December 2, 2021, in a webcast by Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck as a fully reusable, gas generator engine using liquid oxygen (LOX) and methane as propellant, a departure from the company's previous Rutherford, which is electrically pump fed. He then stated that it had a thrust of and 320 seconds of specific impulse. The same day, the Neutron page on Rocket Lab's website was updated specifying the thrust of the nine Archimedes engines used on the first stage as at sea level and a maximum thrust of and the upper stage's single vacuum optimized Archimedes at . It was expected to have its first hot-fire test during May 2024. In an interview published on the CNBC website, Beck stated that Archimedes would be manufactured in New Zealand and its very ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab Corporation is a Public company, publicly traded aerospace manufacturer and List of launch service providers, launch service provider. Its Rocket Lab Electron, Electron orbital rocket launches Small satellite, small satellites, and has launched 63 times as of April 2025. A Sub-orbital spaceflight, sub-orbital Electron variant called HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) serves other needs. The company also supplies satellite components including Star tracker, star trackers, Reaction wheel, reaction wheels, Solar cell, solar cells and arrays, Satellite radio, satellite radios, separation systems, as well as flight and ground software. The Expendable launch system, expendable Electron rocket first Rocket, launched in May 2017. In August 2020, the company launched its first Rocket Lab Photon, Photon satellite. The company built and operates satellites for the Space Development Agency, part of the United States Space Force. In May 2022, the company attemp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Specific Impulse
Specific impulse (usually abbreviated ) is a measure of how efficiently a reaction mass engine, such as a rocket engine, rocket using propellant or a jet engine using fuel, generates thrust. In general, this is a ratio of the ''Impulse (physics), impulse'', i.e. change in momentum, ''per mass'' of propellant. This is equivalent to "thrust per massflow". The resulting unit is equivalent to velocity. If the engine expels mass at a constant exhaust velocity v_e then the thrust will be \mathbf = v_e \frac . If we integrate over time to get the total change in momentum, and then divide by the mass, we see that the specific impulse is equal to the exhaust velocity v_e . In practice, the specific impulse is usually lower than the actual physical exhaust velocity inefficiencies in the rocket, and thus corresponds to an "effective" exhaust velocity. That is, the specific impulse I_ in units of velocity *is defined by* : \mathbf = I_ \frac , where \mathbf is the average thrust. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rocket Engines Using The Gas-generator Cycle
A rocket (from , and so named for its shape) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to Acceleration, accelerate without using any surrounding Atmosphere of Earth, air. A rocket engine produces thrust by Reaction (physics), reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from rocket propellant, propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere. Multistage rockets are capable of attaining escape velocity from Earth and therefore can achieve unlimited maximum altitude. Compared with Airbreathing jet engine, airbreathing engines, rockets are lightweight and powerful and capable of generating large accelerations. To control their flight, rockets rely on momentum, airfoils, Reaction control system, auxiliary reaction engines, gimballed thrust, Reaction wheel, momentum wheels, Thrust vectoring, deflection of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rocket Lab Rocket Engines
A rocket (from , and so named for its shape) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using any surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere. Multistage rockets are capable of attaining escape velocity from Earth and therefore can achieve unlimited maximum altitude. Compared with airbreathing engines, rockets are lightweight and powerful and capable of generating large accelerations. To control their flight, rockets rely on momentum, airfoils, auxiliary reaction engines, gimballed thrust, momentum wheels, deflection of the exhaust stream, propellant flow, spin, or gravity. Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th-century China. Significa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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CNBC
CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Daytime television in the United States, daytime trading day, and early-evening hours, with the remaining hours (such as weekday prime time and weekends) are filled by business-related Television documentary, documentaries and reality television programming, as well as occasional NBC Sports presentations. CNBC operates an accompanying financial news website, CNBC.com, which includes news articles, video and podcast content, as well as subscription-based services. CNBC's headquarters and main studios are located in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, while it also maintains a studio at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square, New York City. CNBC was originally founded in April 1989 as the Consumer News and Business Channel, a joint venture between NBC ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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SpaceX Raptor
Raptor is a family of rocket engines developed and manufactured by SpaceX. It is the third rocket engine in history designed with a Staged combustion cycle#Full-flow staged combustion cycle, full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle, and the first such engine to power a vehicle in flight. The engine is powered by cryogenic Methane#Rocket propellant, liquid methane and liquid oxygen, a combination known as Liquid rocket propellant#Methane, methalox. SpaceX's super heavy-lift launch vehicle, super-heavy-lift SpaceX Starship, Starship uses Raptor engines in its SpaceX Super Heavy, Super Heavy booster and in the SpaceX Starship (spacecraft), Starship second stage. Starship missions include lifting payloads to Earth orbit and is also planned for missions to the Starship HLS, Moon and SpaceX Mars program, Mars. The engines are being designed for reuse with little maintenance. Design Raptor is designed for extreme reliability, aiming to support the airline-level safety required by the p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Merlin (rocket Engine Family)
Merlin is a family of rocket engines developed by SpaceX. They are currently a part of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, and were formerly used on the Falcon 1. Merlin engines use RP-1 and liquid oxygen as rocket propellants in a gas-generator power cycle. The Merlin engine was originally designed for sea recovery and reuse, but since 2016 the entire Falcon 9 booster is recovered for reuse by landing vertically on a landing pad using one of its nine Merlin engines. The injector at the heart of Merlin is of the pintle type that was first used in the Apollo Lunar Module landing engine ( LMDE). Propellants are fed by a single-shaft, dual- impeller turbopump. The turbopump also provides high-pressure fluid for the hydraulic actuators, which then recycles into the low-pressure inlet. This eliminates the need for a separate hydraulic drive system and means that thrust vectoring control failure by running out of hydraulic fluid is not possible. Revisions Merlin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Curie (rocket Engine)
Curie is a liquid-propellant rocket engine designed and manufactured by Rocket Lab. A bipropellant is used for the propulsion of the third stage/kick stage of the Electron rocket, as well as the Photon. The composition of the propellant is a trade secret. The kick stage rocket produces of thrust, and has a specific impulse of approximately 320 seconds. It was first used on 21 January 2018 during Rocket Lab's first successful orbital rocket launch, and helped to boost two small CubeSats, the weather and ship-tracking Lemur-2 CubeSats built by the company Spire Global, into a circular orbit. Description The Curie engine, named after Polish scientist Marie Skłodowska–Curie, is a small liquid-propellant rocket engine designed to release "small satellites from the constricting parameters of primary payload orbits and enables them to fully reach their potential, including faster deployment of small satellite constellations and better positioning for Earth imaging". It is 3D p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stennis Space Center
The John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC) is a NASA rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi, United States, on the banks of the Pearl River (Mississippi–Louisiana), Pearl River at the Mississippi–Louisiana border. , it is NASA's largest rocket engine test facility. There are over 50 local, state, national, international, private, and public companies and agencies using SSC for their rocket testing facilities. History The initial requirements for NASA's proposed rocket testing facility required the site to be located between the rockets' manufacturing facility at Michoud Assembly Facility in eastern New Orleans, Louisiana, and the launch facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Also, the site required barge access as the rocket stages to be tested for Apollo were too large for overland transport. Additionally, the Apollo motors were too loud to be tested at Marshall Space Flight Center's existing test stands near Huntsville, Alabama. A more isolated s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Electric Pump-fed Engine
The electric-pump-fed engine is a bipropellant rocket engine in which the fuel pumps are electrically powered, and so all of the input propellant is directly burned in the main combustion chamber, and none is diverted to drive the pumps. This differs from traditional rocket engine designs, in which the pumps are driven by a portion of the input propellants. An electric cycle engine uses electric pumps to pressurize the propellants from a low-pressure fuel tank to high-pressure combustion chamber levels, generally from to . The pumps are powered by an electric motor, with electricity from a battery bank. Electrical pumps had been used in the secondary propulsion system of the Agena upper stage vehicle. As of December 2020, the only rocket engines to use electric propellant pump systems are the Rutherford engine, ten of which power the Electron rocket, and the Delphin engine, five of which power the first stage of Astra Space's Rocket 3. On 21 January 2018, Electron was the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Staged Combustion Cycle
The staged combustion cycle (sometimes known as topping cycle, preburner cycle, or closed cycle) is a power cycle of a bipropellant rocket engine. In the staged combustion cycle, propellant flows through multiple combustion chambers, and is thus combusted in stages. The main advantage relative to other rocket engine power cycles is high fuel efficiency, measured through specific impulse, while its main disadvantage is engineering complexity. Typically, propellant flows through two kinds of combustion chambers; the first called and the second called . In the preburner, a small portion of propellant, usually fuel-rich, is partly combusted under non- stoichiometric conditions, increasing the volume of flow driving the turbopumps that feed the engine with propellant. The gas is then injected into the main combustion chamber and combusted completely with the other propellant to produce thrust. Tradeoffs The main advantage is fuel efficiency due to all of the propellant flowin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |