Blast from the Past: NASA Fires Historic Engine Parts for New Rocket

[Buster's Uncle]

Blast from the Past: NASA Fires Historic Engine Parts for New Rocket
By Robert Z. Pearlman | SPACE.com – 1 hr 35 mins ago.. .

 
NASA is reigniting its mighty moon rocket engine using parts retrieved from museums and displays.
 
Engineers working this month at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are completing a series of test firings using recovered components from 40-year-old F-1 engines. The 19-foot-tall (5.8 meter) by 12-foot-wide (3.8 meter) Apollo powerhouses launched the space agency's Saturn V rockets on voyages to Earth orbit and to the moon.
 
Between 1967 and 1973, a total of 65 F-1 engines were launched, five per flight, on 13 Saturn V boosters.
 
To develop the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next generation heavy-lift rocket, engineers are dissecting, refurbishing and re-firing components from the remaining F-1s to gain a better understanding of how the engine was designed and worked. Even four decades later, the F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed. [Graphic: Saturn V Moon Rocket Explained]
 
For these tests, which included a 20-second hot fire on Jan. 10, the team removed a gas generator from an F-1 engine that was stored at Marshall and another in almost pristine condition from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
 
From display stand to test stand
 
"Being able to hold the parts of this massive engine that once took us to the moon, restoring it, and then seeing it come back to life through hot firings and test data has been an amazing experience," Kate Estes, a NASA liquid propulsion systems engineer, said in an agency release.
 
The team decided to take apart the gas generator, the part of the engine responsible for supplying power to drive the giant F-1's turbopump, because its component parts were small enough to be tested in Marshall's laboratories. The gas generator is often one of the first pieces designed on a new engine because it is a key part for determining the size of the final engine assembly.
 
Once they had the artifacts-turned-test-samples in hand, Marshall's team used a novel technique called structured light 3D scanning to produce three-dimensional computer-aided design drawings of the gas generator.
 
"This activity provided us with information for determining how some parts of the engine might be more affordably manufactured using modern techniques," Estes said. "We decided that using modern instrumentation to measure the generator's performance would provide beneficial [data] for NASA and industry."
 
The engineers then used a digital manufacturing technique called selective laser melting to quickly produce the metal parts they needed for the test and to determine the hot gas temperature and pressure inside the test article.
 
Old pad, new tricks
 
The series of hot-fire tests were conducted on Test Stand 116 in the Marshall Space Flight Center's East Test Area.
 
"We modified the test stand to accommodate a single kerosene gas generator component," test conductor Ryan Wall said. "These tests demonstrate the stand's new capabilities, which will be beneficial for future NASA and industry propulsion activities."
 
The most noticeable aspect of these firings is the sheer power when the gas generator ignites and creates roughly 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms) of force. When the original F-1 lit up, the gas generator powered the enormous turbomachinery that pumped almost three tons of propellant each second into the thrust chamber and accelerated through the nozzle, creating an incredible 1.5 million pounds (680,000 kg) of thrust.
 
"Modern instruments, testing and analysis improvements learned over [the past] 40 years, and digital scanning and imagery techniques are allowing us to obtain baseline data on performance and combustion stability," said Nick Case, an engineer from Marshall's propulsion systems department. "We are even gathering data not collected when the engine was tested originally in the 1960s."
 
Since NASA conducted this work in-house, the data that was collected is not proprietary. It will be shared with the agency's industry partners and academic researchers.

More F-1 tests on the horizon
 
"This effort provided NASA with an affordable way to explore an engine design in the early development phase of the SLS program," said Chris Crumbly, manager of the SLS Advanced Development Office.
 
The larger, evolved SLS vehicle will require an advanced booster with more thrust than any existing U.S. liquid- or solid-fueled booster. Last year, NASA awarded contracts aimed at improving the affordability, performance, and the reliability of the rocket's advanced booster.
 
Dynetics Inc. of Huntsville, Ala., in collaboration with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of Canoga Park, Calif. — the same company that developed the F-1 engine — will use these early tests as a springboard for more gas generator testing at Marshall. Then, they will use modern manufacturing to build a new gas generator injector that also will be hot fired in Test Stand 116 and then compared to the baseline data collected during the earlier test series.
 
Additionally, Dynetics plans to fabricate and test several other F-1 engine parts, including turbine blades, leading to the testing of an entire F-1B powerpack including the gas generator and turbopump, the heart of engine operations.

http://news.yahoo.com/blast-past-nasa-fires-historic-engine-parts-rocket-121859630.html

Is there a rocket scientist in the house?

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA testing vintage engine from Apollo 11 rocket
By JAY REEVES | Associated Press – 8 hrs ago.. .

 
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — Like vinyl records and skinny ties, good things eventually come back around. At NASA, that means looking to the Apollo program for ideas on how to develop the next generation of rockets for future missions to the moon and beyond.
 
Young engineers who weren't even born when the last Saturn V rocket took off for the moon are testing a vintage engine from the program.
 
The engine, known to NASA engineers as No. F-6049, was supposed to help propel Apollo 11 into orbit in 1969, when NASA sent Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts to the moon for the first time. The flight went off without a hitch, but no thanks to the engine — it was grounded because of a glitch during a test in Mississippi and later sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it sat for years.
 
Now engineers are learning to work with technical systems and propellants not used since before the start of the space shuttle program, which first launched in 1981.
 
Nick Case, 27, and other engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on Thursday completed a series of 11 test-firings of the F-6049's gas generator, a jet-like rocket which produces 30,000 pounds of thrust and was used as a starter for the engine. They are trying to see whether a second-generation version of the Apollo engine could produce even more thrust and be operated with a throttle for deep-space exploration.
 
There are no plans to send the old engine into space, but it could become a template for a new generation of motors incorporating parts of its design.
 
In NASA-speak, the old 18-foot-tall motor is called an F-1 engine. During moon missions, five of them were arranged at the base of the 363-foot-tall Saturn V system and fired together to power the rocket off the ground toward Earth orbit.
 
Thursday's test used one part of the engine, the gas generator, which powers the machinery to pump propellant into the main rocket chamber. It doesn't produce the massive orange flame or clouds of smoke like that of a whole F-1, but the sound was deafening as engineers fired the mechanism in an outdoor test stand on a cool, sunny afternoon.
 
The device produced a plume that resembled a blow torch the size of two buses and set fire to a grassy area, which was quickly extinguished.
 
"It's not small," Case said. "It's pretty beefy on its own."
 
And just like during the Apollo days, people in north Alabama heard rockets thundering in the distance during tests at Marshall.
 
"My wife and daughter were in our front yard and she said they could hear it, which was pretty cool," Case said after an earlier test. "We live about 15 miles away."
 
A single F-1 engine can produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust using a fuel composed of liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, which was not used in the space shuttle.
 
The tests were conducted at Marshall in a project conducted with Dynetics Inc. and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, which are studying NASA's possibilities for deep-space missions years from now. The space agency plans to use commercial launches to reach low Earth orbit; larger rockets are required to escape the planet's gravity.
 
R.H. Coates, an engineer who works with Case in Marshall's liquid propulsion office, said young engineers can learn a lot from the work done by predecessors using slide-rules in the 1960s, but no one wants to simply rebuild the old Saturn V engine.
 
"This wouldn't be your daddy's F-1," Coates said. "We'd use new materials and try to simplify it, update it."
 
Case started at Marshall as a high school intern in 2002 and has been working there since graduating from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2008. He said today's technology allows things that weren't possible during the 1960s, but he has been impressed by what he learned taking apart the unused Apollo 11 engine.
 
Engine No. F-6049 didn't fit properly on the Apollo 11 rocket, but it is invaluable now as a testing tool. Coates said a total of 85 F-1 engines were used on 17 Apollo flights without a single failure.
 
About a dozen F-1 engines remain in Huntsville, Ala., home of NASA's main propulsion center, and others are located elsewhere. Most are on display. Case said engineers used engine No. F-6049 for the tests because it was the most complete.
 
"It is really an excellent booster," he said. "The guys in Apollo had it right."

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-testing-vintage-engine-apollo-11-rocket-222445500.html