Pretty cool idea! Of course Aerotech sells much larger engines with hundreds of newton-seconds of total impulse, and somewhere close to 100 pounds of instantaneous thrust when it is first lit! And even if it stays in LEO, this certainly prolongs its life...
What I wonder about is how the 3-axis stabilization on this bird works...I don't see any additional nozzles in the picture and if they use a momentum wheel, they have to unload it at some point. I suppose you could spin it instead of active stabilization, but then you can only use one engine (on the spin axis). As someone commented earlier in another thread, you need two firings to go from one circular orbit to another one at a different altitude.
Thanks for posting!
Burns
Thanks Joe.
What an exciting concept.
Having got really enthusiastic, I thought I would roughly calculate how high one of these little rockets could raise the orbit.
Given that one rocket reload pack has
40 Newtons of thrust and lasts for about one second We have 40 Newton seconds of specific impulse.
The mass flow rate is 18.6g in one second or 0.0168kg/s
So.....the ISP (a bit vague here) is around 219 seconds (ave thrust / mass flow rate / 9.81ms^2)
Which should get a 3.7kg satellite's apogee about..... 40km higher.
So...Not enough for P3E then
Oh well, not so exciting after all. Time for a beer.
73 David G0MRF
In a message dated 17/01/2012 03:56:37 GMT Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
Has anyone seen this. I am surprised a shuttle mission permitted this type of booster. From what I believed, safety concerns prevented most types of boosters.
http://www.rocketryplanet.com/content/view/3706/30/#axzz1jgQ85qx1
-- Joe Leikhim
Leikhim and Associates Communications Consultants Oviedo, Florida
www.Leikhim.com http://www.leikhim.com/
407-982-0446
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End of AMSAT-BB Digest, Vol 7, Issue 30