Beck said Rocket Lab's Electron Launch Vehicle project aims to lower the cost of launching a satellite from $132 million to about $5m.
An inexpensive new process can increase the strength of metals such as steel by as much as 10 times, and make them much more resistant to corrosion. If the modified metals pass field testing, the new process could go on to make bridges and other infrastructure last far longer; it could also make cars lighter and therefore more fuel-efficient.
Rocket Moonlighting has "open sourced" the design of their PR56 igniter. Included is a drawing and a document describing operation.
The aim of TGALS is the same as that of ALASA: to create a space launch system for small satellites that replaces the first stage booster rocket with a conventional aircraft. In its current form, ALASA uses a F-15 fighter jet, which provides a lot of speed, altitude, and vertical thrust.
Project Earendel is an effort to make space available to everyone through open source hardware. The first step is a project to build, fly, and release drawings for a liquid powered suborbital rocket. To this effect so far we have build and tested an igniter and released the documentation necessary to build and test it. We are currently working on a Kickstarter to fund our building of the suborbital rocket.
A conceptual design was performed for a 6-U cubesat for a technology demonstration to be launched on the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) test launch EM-1, to be launched into a free-return translunar trajectory. The mission purpose was to demonstrate use of electric propulsion systems on a small satellite platform. The candidate objective chosen was a mission to visit a Near-Earth asteroid. Both asteroid fly-by and asteroid rendezvous missions were analyzed. Propulsion systems analyzed included cold-gas thruster systems, Hall and ion thrusters, incorporating either Xenon or Iodine propellant, and an electrospray thruster. The mission takes advantage of the ability of the SLS launch to place it into an initial trajectory of C3=0.
ABSTRACT: Although steel has been the workhorse of the automotive industry since the 1920s, the share by weight of steel and iron in an average light vehicle is now gradually decreasing, from 68.1 per cent in 1995 to 60.1 per cent in 2011 (refs 1, 2). This has been driven by the low strength-to-weight ratio (specific strength) of iron and steel, and the desire to improve such mechanical properties with other materials. Recently, high-aluminium low-density steels have been actively studied as a means of increasing the specific strength of an alloy by reducing its density3, 4, 5. But with increasing aluminium content a problem is encountered: brittle intermetallic compounds can form in the resulting alloys, leading to poor ductility. Here we show that an FeAl-type brittle but hard intermetallic compound (B2) can be effectively used as a strengthening second phase in high-aluminium low-density steel, while alleviating its harmful effect on ductility by controlling its morphology and dispersion. The specific tensile strength and ductility of the developed steel improve on those of the lightest and strongest metallic materials known, titanium alloys. We found that alloying of nickel catalyses the precipitation of nanometre-sized B2 particles in the face-centred cubic matrix of high-aluminium low-density steel during heat treatment of cold-rolled sheet steel. Our results demonstrate how intermetallic compounds can be harnessed in the alloy design of lightweight steels for structural applications and others.
