1 / 20

In Defense of External Tanks

ilya
Download Presentation

In Defense of External Tanks

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

    1. In Defense of External Tanks By Chris Y. Taylor 42nd AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference July 11, 2006

    2. External Tanks on Aerospace Vehicles a.k.a. drop tank, tip tank, belly tank, expendable tank

    6. R&D costs must be lowered! Launch costs >$1000/lb. payload to LEO with current development & flight rate even if all recurring costs are zero! How can RD(Gnr/a) be lowered?

    7. SSTO vs. SSTO+ET Pure SSTO low hardware costs low operations costs high development costs! Adding E.T. lowers development cost a lot, for a little more hardware & ops cost

    8. RocketCost.xls (beta)

    9. SSTO+ET Specific Cost vs. ET Size

    10. Range of SSTO+ET Tech Levels

    11. SSTO+ET vs. SSTO+SRB Specific Cost

    12. SSTO+ET Conclusions Adding external tanks to an SSTO reduces development cost At existing conditions external tanks are more economical than SRBs for boosting SSTOs Conditions where pure SSTOs are cheaper than SSTO+ET aren’t likely to happen soon. If you are dreaming of an SSTO, consider adding external tanks to it.

    13. R&D costs must be lowered! Launch costs >$1000/lb. payload to LEO with current development & flight rate even if all recurring costs are zero! How can RD(Gnr/a) be lowered?

    14. Using Identical Stages for Reduced Development Cost

    15. Reusable Bimese + ET Adding an ET to a bimese reduces orbiter ?V requirement substantially for small additional development cost.

    16. Expendable Bimese + ET Adding an ET to a bimese reduces system cost even if bimese vehicles are completely expendable!

    17. Reusability is for Lower Stages

    18. Expendable Tank on Lower Stage

    19. Conclusions Adding ETs to SSTO designs lowers specific cost for most current and likely future design conditions. Adding ETs to a bimese design lowers the systems specific cost, even if the bimese vehicles are fully expendable. Partially reusable lower stages using expendable tanks and reusable engine pods will become economical before fully reusable stages. By any name, external tanks are still a useful feature in aerospace conceptual design.

More Related