The Blog!

It’s been more than a month since the last time I did a detailed technical update, so for those who are interested here are some more of the gory details on our propulsion development work.

750-2B Testing and Vehicle Integration
At the end of my last post, we had just started firing the 750-2B engine. The -2B was the second rev 750, with a larger throat and longer L*, which had been modified with a bell nozzle. As mentioned, in addition to the bell nozzle, there were several other changes made. These changes included cutting away a lot of material from the outside of the chamber near the throat and replacing it with an aluminum saddle, modifying the cooling groove geometry down near the nozzle end, expanding the cooling grooves in many areas where I thought we had excess cooling to try and cut down on the coolant channel pressure drop. After the series of test, it became apparent that while most of the changes had worked perfectly, I had gotten a little too aggressive on freeing-up pressure drop. While it wasn’t clear that the engine couldn’t steady-state, the thermal margin was much smaller than I wanted, and going for a steady state firing risked damaging the engine.

In the end, we decided that I didn’t want to risk damaging our only flight engine before we had had the opportunity to fly. Our logic was that while we’ve made four different regen cooled engine designs work so far as a company, we hadn’t yet proven to ourselves that we could make an integrated vehicle fly. So, we decided to punt on trying to steady-state the -2B engine, and instead focus our efforts on flying. We had managed to run the engine for 15 seconds without any sign of damage, so we set a maximum flight duration of 9 seconds until we had the time to put the engine back on the test stand to make sure we could go longer, or until one of our other engines in the pipe had been steady-stated.

We finished up the remainder of our test series, including several tests to verify Ian’s throttle controller, and then disassembled the engine, and installed it into the flight chamber. Over the next two days, Orson, Ken Brown (our newest employee), and I started mounting the throttle valves, and figuring out how we were going to run the plumbing for this engine. My original intent for the 750-2 engine module had been to have a single module that had all the valves mounted on it, that would just have four bolts, three fluid connections and 2-3 electrical connections between it and the vehicle. Having the valves closer to the injectors would shorten up the startup and shutdown transients, and reduce the amount of priming we would have to do. However, we decided that it would be better to do first do a “Rev 0″ module first, and then take the lessons learned from that in building the full-capability module. This Rev 0 module has the valves mounted on the vehicle instead of the engine itself, and uses hoses to connect all the valves to the moving part of the engine. The engine layout concept we chose for the 750s uses a heim-joint gimbal ring (much like TrueZer0 and Unreasonable Rocket have done), which allows us to pass the LOX hose, and several smaller hoses and cables up through the middle of the gimbal ring and out the top of the engine frame. Even though the engine components are a bit more spread-out than I wanted, they all fit together pretty well, and we’ve already found several ways that we can improve the packaging for our next engine module rev.

Aluminum Combustion Chambers
While we were getting the -2B engine made late last year, we decided to try making a chamber out of 6061 aluminum, the -2A (for -2 Aluminum), to try out as an experiment. For those wondering, while copper has served us well as a chamber material, and while there are several challenges in making a working aluminum regen cooled chamber, there are several benefits if we can make it work. Aluminum is much cheaper, readily available, and easier to machine well than copper. In the future, if we ever try to use other fuels like diesel or kerosene, aluminum doesn’t catalyze coking and polymerization like copper can. Also, aluminum is substantially lighter–the aluminum chamber/saddle/jacket assembly for the 750 weighs about half what the copper chamber alone weighed for our old 500lbf engines. Lastly, we have a chamber/nozzle fabrication technique we’ve been investigating that could allow for very lightweight aluminum chambers, if we can get the aluminum to work.

Now that isn’t to say that aluminum isn’t free of risk. While a few groups have successfully fired aluminum regen chambers in the past (Bell with their Agena upper stage engine that flew hundreds of times and the Swiss Propulsion Lab), some other groups like Armadillo have run into some problems. Aluminum has a much lower max operating temperature than copper, and also typically has lower thermoconductivity. This makes the thermal design more of a challenge than you have with copper. But the fact that there were existence proofs out there (especially the SPL chamber, which is almost the same size, uses the same propellant, but runs at a higher chamber pressure), meant it was worth trying to demonstrate that ourselves.

So, as soon as we knew about the potential thermal issue on the -2B chamber, we decided to finish making modifications to one of our -2A chambers in parallel with integrating the -2B onto the vehicle.
We took this -2A chamber and had the outside machined to accomodate a saddle (and to factor in all of the cooling channel modifications that had worked for us on the -2B). Because the inside was already thickly anodized, we couldn’t do a bell nozzle on that one, but we were able to make all the other changes. This chamber design is what I’m calling the 750-2AS (-2 Aluminum w/ Saddle), and we got it back quickly and were able to hot fire test it by the middle of May. We steady stated the nozzle on our first day of testing the engine, and worked our way up to a 67 second steady-state firing during our next test session. Surprisingly, the thick anodization layer worked well enough as a thermal barrier coating that the aluminum chamber actually steady-stated at a much lower temperature than the copper chambers did.

Once we had determined that the engine could steady state, we decided to swap it with the -2B chamber on the vehicle, to enable longer duration hovers. We were able to work up to a 60 second hover using the new engine.

Next Steps
After we started flight tests with the -2AS engine, we decided to make the same modifications to our other aluminum chamber, but this time with the bell nozzle. This nozzle had been made as a test-piece by the guy making our copper -2B chamber, but it turned out well enough that we decided to buy it off of him. Unlike the other -2A chamber, this one used brazing instead of welding to join the two combustion chamber halves, so we’ll see how that compares in operations. The modifications to the second -2A chamber (which I’m calling this the -2AB for -2 Aluminum Bell-nozzle) were finished this past week, and the chamber is out at the anodization shop right now. If it gets back soon enough next week, we’ll swap it in before our next flight.

We’re also working on getting a few more injectors made–this time trying a single-piece aluminum construction. These new LOX injector posts have different configurations based on the results of the first set of posts we tested on the 750-1 engine back in February/March. These new injectors should hopefully win us back a few more percent of c* efficiency. Lastly, we’re planning on releasing another major rev of the engines, the 750-3 that will bring in all the various little improvements we’ve come up with as we’ve worked with the 750-2 series. We’re pretty close to meeting all our design goals for the 750lbf engines already, and with this last round of improvements, we may actually beat most of our original design performance specifications. All in all, development is going well.

Flight #8 of the Masten Space Systems X01B test rocket vehicle. The run was approximately 60 seconds to test navigation and expand the flight time. The overall performance was very encouraging. The team is excited about the progress we have been achieving and the rate at which improvements have been working.

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Flight 7 of the Masten Space Systems reusable launch vehicle demonstrator XA-0.1B-750.

Here it intentionally flies a jig around the center while fighting the tether, and then does 45 degree rotation using RCS before landing. The flight was 30 seconds long.This is the first bipropellant RLV to fly with an aluminum rocket engine, the second flight of the day with that engine, and the 7th flight of this vehicle.

The guys are on the way back to the shop to evaluate flight data but we had two flight tests today. There may still be time to do some static fire tests on the new 750lbf engine. Here are the videos from earlier today:

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact:
Masten Space Systems
Michael Mealling
+1-678-640-6884
mmealling@masten-space.com

http://www.masten-space.com/

MASTEN SPACE’S XA-0.1B-750 VEHICLE COMPLETES FIRST FLIGHT

Mojave, California – May 8, 2009 - Masten Space Systems completed their first vertical take-off, vertical-landing (VTVL) rocket flight demonstration Friday. The demonstration proved out the design and controls of the 730lb rocket-powered vehicle, known as XA-0.1B-750 or “Xombie”, its internal nickname.

While the vehicle was attached to a safety tether, it took off, ascended a few meters, descended, and shut down its engine as designed. The instant the engine shut off the entire team yelled, “YES!”
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The guys just flew our first successful tethered test flight on XA-0.1b-750! Details to follow as I get them….

The company had its annual migration to Phoenix two weeks ago for Space Access 2009, and we figured it was about time for a technical update.

Changing Directions on XA-0.1B
We have had some ups and downs since our last update, and a recent change in directions. This is a picture of XA-0.1b doing its first four engine test. The engine startup was perfect, but a previously damaged igniter solenoid left the igniter running until it burned through the side of the engine. The end result was one engine that had a finger-sized hole in its side, and another that had taken a decent flame toasting.

We were then faced with a decision. Do we repair the 500lbf engines or do we move on? The engines that were damaged were the original engines developed for XA-0.1 three years ago. These four flight engines had been fired over 500 times between the four of them, had been dropped, one had been landed on when XA-0.1 died, and they were generally mistreated more than a rocket engine ever should. More importantly we knew that the igniter design on the old engines was a weak link that was likely to fail again in the future. In the end, we decided that we had learned about all there was to know about them. And everything we had learned had gone into making the new 750lbf engines easier to deal with, more robust, and more efficient. And frankly, we were simply tired of dealing with an inferior design. So the decision was made to retire the 500lbf engines and to go with a vehicle using one centrally mounted 750lbf engine module instead.

Our original plan before the failure was that our next vehicle, 0.1D would be a single-engine vehicle with an all-aluminum frame. However, that new frame hadn’t been started yet, and 0.1B was now available, so we decided to modify it into a single-engine vehicle to get something flying quickly. While most of the group was off at Space Access, Orson (our intern for the spring) and I removed the old engines, cut off the old engine mounts and legs, removed the old T-bottle pressurant systems, and its mount points, and pulled all the old engine-specific cables and boxes off the vehicle. When Dave got back, he designed some new landing legs, a new engine mount interface, and some mounting interfaces for two, much lighter carbon fiber pressurant bottles. The vehicle dropped from a dry weight of around 850lb down to a prediction of around 350lb, giving a theoretical maximum flight duration in the 90-110s range (depending on how much performance we can squeeze out of the system).

We’re still planning on starting X0.1D (Xoid) soon, since the modified 0.1B (B-750) is likely too marginal to bank on for the LLC. But doing B-750 should allow us to start getting data on the engine module design and the single-engine flight controls a lot quicker, instead of waiting a month or two for the new vehicle to be built. In order to get this put together as quickly as possible, some of the tight integration that we were going to do for the engine module has been put off for a “Rev 0″ version that is simplified a bit. This will allow us to test out new features more iteratively, and hopefully avoid some of the issues we ran into in developing the old 500lbf modules.

B-750 and 750-2B Progress
I’m strongly tempted to nickname this vehicle the Xom-B Phoenix, as it is quickly rising again from its ashes. After everyone else got back from Space Access, we had a welder friend, Harley Clairday (formerly with Protoflight), come out and do all the welding on the vehicle. It took two days over the past week, but the vehicle frame is now upgraded, and it’s standing on its own legs, with the new carbon fiber bottles mounted. The new engine module is on the vehicle now for hose and plumbing fitup, and the new cold-gas RCS thrusters have been designed, and mounting tabs for them have been fabricated. There’s still a fair deal of wiring and plumbing to do before the vehicle is ready to fly, but we’re still pushing at this date for a flight by the end of the month if possible.

While the vehicle has been coming back together, we’ve also been working on the engine in parallel. We had mocked up the engine structure a few months ago, using plastic, and had just gotten in the real aluminum parts and the gimbal actuators. Everything fits together tightly, and seems to be working the way intended. The new gimbal actuators (Ultramotion bugs like the ones we selected for XA-0.1B) and their mounting interfaces should work a lot better on this vehicle than they did on the old 500lbf engines.

The flight motor for this engine was originally going to be the 750-2 (the second Rev 750lbf design that had a slightly bigger throat and longer L* to correct for some issues we had caught before we fired the 750-1). During the ~80 test firings we did of the 750-1, we found a few more issues, which required doing some modifications to the 750-2 engines before they could be fired.

We had found a cooling issue on the 750-1, that we had to make a workaround to fix. It worked, and we got off a 121 second firing last month, but we wanted to do things right for the new engine. In order to fix the cooling issue we ran into, we needed to shorten the nozzle a bit, and make some modifications to the coolant channels down near the nozzle end. We realized that these modifications were taking us most of the way to adding a saddle anyhow, so we also made that modification. We got the parts back from the machinist Tuesday afternoon, the parts fit together well, and were assembled and installed on the trailer by Wednesday night.

Yesterday, the guys did a dozen firings on the new engine. We did one longer run that may have reached thermal steady state, but we’ve got another round of tests for tomorrow, and possibly a few for early next week. We’re not out of the woods yet, but the early results look very encouraging. The new throat and nozzle gained us enough thrust to fly with, the longer L* gained us another 2% of c* efficiency, and the bell nozzle gained us at least a few percent of Cf efficiency. We’re not quite to where our goals for this engine are, but they’re definitely good enough to fly with, and there are still a few new injector elements we want to try when we have a chance. The injectors are pretty easy to interchange (it takes about an hour to swap them at the moment), so we can do those improvement tests in parallel with flight testing.

Part of the testing we did on the 750-1 included two days of testing out a dynamic throttle control algorithm. It seemed to work very well, but there are enough changes to the 750-2 that we’re going to run it again with the new engine to make sure our gains and relations are set right before we try to fly with it. We’ll also be testing the new gimbal controller as soon as we get the new gimbals and H-bridges wired up.

Anyhow, Michael asked me to keep this short, so we’ll post some more pictures of the engines and vehicle as they come together. If you’re out in the Mojave area, there’s a fly-in/space-in this Saturday where we’ll have the B-750 on display.deadweight loss Weight Loss Program Review la weight loss review
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XA-0.1B
We’ve now tested all four of the engines on XA-0.1B, including the one that took the brunt of the crash of XA-0.1. All of them worked, though we’ve been finding small issues that have needed to be resolved as we go. I think we’re all looking forward to retiring these engine modules. They have been fantastically instructive, and improved our vehicle and engine technology a great deal, but that means that they include a lot of concepts that are now deprecated. We’re still deciding what we’re going to do with these modules, whether we get them all working as-is and try to fly, or make modifications to bring them closer to our state of the art.

We just got clearance from the FAA to use a high lift forklift for moored testing on the airport, and are hoping to have all of the rest of the clearances soon.

I’ve been posting videos to YouTube after various tests. To get word of new videos the quickest, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

High speed of the mach diamonds in front of a clear blue sky:

A view of an engine in the same spot, but looking down the plume:

Two engine testing:

Test of the fourth engine:

Note how the condensation from the LOX line on the right of the engine gets sucked down into the rocket plume. The rocket does a great job of dragging surrounding air down with the exhaust. The curvy line at the top of the frame is jacketed wiring for one of the transducers, and it’s perfectly safe a few inches from supersonic thousand degree fire.

Interns
We have a couple new interns. In Mojave, Orson Bell is helping us with the testing programs, and quickly got a Labview VI running to collect thermocouple data on the 750 tests. He’s from Washington State University, and has a bachelors in physics with a minor in mathematics, and is finishing up a bachelors in French. I think he’s the only intern we’ve had who has experience working with radioactive materials.

Working with Michael Mealling in Atlanta, Colin Ake is a Georgia Tech senior majoring in Management. He has worked at one local startup and is heavily involved in the local Atlanta entrepreneurial community. He is helping us build out our sales funnel and channel strategy by organizing Sugar around market segments and campaign, identifying the customers to add as well as doing an initial prioritization.

Test trailer and 750 lbf engine
We’ve been fixing squawks from the early trailer tests, and it’s working pretty well now. We made a modification the the nozzle-end cooling on the 750-1 engine and tested that earlier this week. The Pauls Breed of Unreasonable Rocket, Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings, and Robin Snelson (who produced the fantastic Mojave promotional video) all happened to stop by that day. In testing, there are days when everything goes right, and there are days you’re trying to show off to people. Those days do not coincide.

We had some problems with the fuel feed to the engine igniter. I haven’t had time to track it down yet; we demonstrated ~700 runs on this igniter on the test cart, so we know it’s a champion of reliability. It’s likely that our procedure for igniter re-installation is flawed and there was some junk in the fuel metering orifice, or that there’s a flaw in the wiring to the solenoid. We’ll find it and fix it. We did end up getting a firing in, and the thermal data appears to be improved.

Here’s video from the second engine test; this is the closest I’ve put a camera to an engine so far. Considering that I had the cameras forty feet away a few months ago, it seems that eventually I’ll have a camera inside the chamber.

The audio is out of sync with the video, which is why the firing noise doesn’t seem to stop at the right point.

Other communication
We kind of suck at updating this thing, but there are a number of other ways to keep up with the company. Four of us have accounts on Twitter. They’re all personal accounts, but some of us have no lives outside work, so they tend to be work-centric. Being personal accounts, they’re likely to include politics or other stuff that may offend, so don’t take any of them as official MSS word on anything. Dave is @dmasten, Michael is @mmealling, I (Ben) am @wikkit, and Colin Ake is @colinake. There are hundreds of interesting people on there, and I’m about to offend a dozen of them by not mentioning them, but you should also consider following @jeff_foust, the prolific space blogger, and William @Pomerantz, who does Lunar Lander Challenge stuff at the X Prize Foundation.

We also have a new fan group on Facebook for MSS.

Everyone here has been busy. Early this week our new 750 lb thrust engine entered testing. Here are two videos from the first firing:

In slow motion:

The low down skinny on this engine:
Regeneratively cooled, LOX/Isopropanol, nominal 250 psi chamber pressure putting out 750 lbs thrust. Nozzle expansion is ideal at 150 psi chamber pressure at 3000′ MSL altitude. While the initial test article is a copper chamber, the design is for an all aluminum engine. We’ll get lots of thermal data from this test chamber, verify our models, find the best injector geometry, make some design tweaks, and then start testing the aluminum chamber.

Meanwhile, we have a number of other projects going on. We are still in static testing of the XA-0.1B vehicle. We are aiming for tether testing before the end of February. I am doing detail design of a follow on XA-0.1 series vehicle that we call “Xoid” - XA-0.1D. Jon is about to release for manufacturing the first parts of a 2500 lb thrust engine.

Back on December 17th we met with a representative of President-Elect Obama’s NASA Transition Team to discuss our thoughts about NASA and the commercial space sector. As requested we submitted our one pager of notes from the meeting. As of yesterday they have been posted to the change.gov website. Here is what the document said:

Masten Space Systems (MSS) is an aerospace R&D company creating reliable and reusable rocket vehicles and components. The company is focusing on regeneratively cooled bipropellant propulsion systems and fully reusable vertical takeoff and landing launch vehicles that provide drastically reduced operational costs and very rapid turnaround times. The markets that MSS plans to develop are more commercial in nature than the historically government dominated, non‐comsat markets of the past.

MSS would like to communicate the following five points to the NASA Transition Team:

Continued Support for the Suborbital Science Program

MSS believes that the emerging commercial suborbital launch industry can significantly increase the scientific return of microgravity, heliospheric astronomy, and aerospace research and testing missions without increasing costs. This program should be embraced and expanded. One key aspect of this is allowing for the existing Human Tended Suborbital Science responses to include non‐human‐tended missions since many launch providers can fly in unattended mode.

Clarification of Commercial RLV Launch Services Procurement Directives

As the commercial sector begins offering payloads on a “retail” basis, NASA’s launch procurement processes should be updated to reflect this by allowing launch services to be procured directly from the GSA list. Current SOMD directives prevent this. A standardized and open procurement process for launch services enables parts of NASA not considered part of the Suborbital Sciences Program (education, testing, etc) to acquire low cost launch services without significant overhead.

Encouraging Large and Small Business Partnerships

MSS believes that NASA and the country can greatly benefit from partnerships between large aerospace primes and small, entrepreneurial space companies. In particular NASA could encourage partnerships that “wrap” technologies and services from these smaller companies with the confidence building analysis and modeling that NASA’s processes require. Many of these smaller companies have made a conscious choice not to sell to NASA due to existing contracting and analysis overhead. Larger aerospace companies are well suited to deal with that overhead and act as a buffer between government procurement practices and how small businesses operate.

Renewed Focus on Fundamental Aerospace Technology Research

NASA should re‐energize its efforts around fundamental research on space exploration technologies such as on orbit propellant storage, settling and transfer, fuel depots, and power transmission and storage.

Cislunar Infrastructure as a Component of U.S. Space Exploration Policy

MSS also suggests that NASA reexamine the role of on‐orbit cislunar infrastructure such as fuel depots, lunar cyclers, and reusable lunar landers as a means to decrease cislunar exploration costs over time and to create analog infrastructure for reducing risk and costs for human missions to Mars.