3D printing, as one innovative technology will help us advance the future of manufacturing. At NASA, the revolution is already under way. At the NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center additive manufacturing is used to create parts for a next-generation rocket that will launch astronauts to the most distant destinations ever.
NASA has spent a lot of time and money resurrecting the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn V back in the 1960s and 1970s, and Ars recently spent a week at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to get the inside scoop on how the effort came to be. But there's a very practical reason why NASA is putting old rocket parts up on a test stand and firing them off: its latest launch vehicle might be powered by engines that look, sound, and work a whole lot like the legendary F-1.
There has never been anything like the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that powered the United States past the Soviet Union to a series of manned lunar landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rocket redefined "massive," standing 363 feet (110 meters) in height and producing a ludicrous 7.68 million pounds (34 meganewtons) of thrust from the five monstrous, kerosene-gulping Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines that made up its first stage.
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NASA has selected small businesses to receive up to $38.7 million in grants for innovative technology developments, including a number of technologies relating to nanosatellite launch vehicles.
Now researchers at MIT have run their own experiments and found that ionic thrusters may be a far more efficient source of propulsion than conventional jet engines. In their experiments, they found that ionic wind produces 110 newtons of thrust per kilowatt, compared with a jet engine’s 2 newtons per kilowatt. The team has published its results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Also see: Performance Characterization of Electrohydrodynamic Propulsion Devices.
