UK Space Conference part 4
Part 1: http://cesy.livejournal.com/173972.html
The fourth talk was by Joe Engle, a NASA astronaut and test pilot. He talked about the X-15, precursor to the Space Shuttle, which broke several speed records (Mach 4, Mach 5, etc.). It would be dropped from a B-52, fire the rocket and then glide back to land. He showed us lots of photos and videos and told us about the flights that worked and the few disasters. It was surprising how many crash-landings resulted in the pilot coming out unscathed, or at least recovering to fly again, and the aircraft were rebuilt and mended.
The next bit of the talk was by Nigel Henbest, who gave us a whirlwind tour of the history of astronomy, from Stonehenge, Babylon and the ancient cultures of Latin America, right through Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus and so on up to the present day.
I was too busy listening to take proper notes for either of these. They had some very good photos.
The fifth talk was on Black Knight. Due to technical issues, a friend of the speaker (Roy someone? I couldn't catch his name) stood up to talk about his involvement first. Black Knight was a UK rocket programme, run on a low budget of less than £2 million a year. Their largest motor was the Rook, with a 17 inch diameter. This was a solid fuel motor. The de-energised version, Raven, was used for the Skylark sounding rocket. The Rook was larger than any previous motor, and needed bigger buckets to make large enough quantities of propellant! Eventually they changed to liquid propellant. They looked at "acquired" V2 documentation for ideas and information. BK03 was single stage. Eventually they changed to 2-stage. In earlier versions, they had speeds of 12,000 feet/second. The heat-resistant coating they used, called Durestos, was cheap and nasty and had asbestos in. You're not allowed to make it nowadays. When watching a flight, you could see the blue streak of re-entry in the sky before you hear the sonic boom. They were heading towards 17,000 feet/second when the Blue Streak programme was cancelled by the government.
Nick Hill then stood up to speak, having fixed the projector. He told us that Black Knight launched from Woomera, Australia, with a Cuckoo motor, which was the Rook with half of it chopped off. They then used liquid propellant, hydrogen peroxide (called HTP in rocketry) with a silver-plated nickel gauze as catalyst, and kerosene. This fuel is very dense compared to others, so the fuel tank was small. There's a risk of suck-back at altitude, so they had spring-loaded flaps to prevent it. BK02 never flew. BK03 picked up a stray radio signal and misinterpreted it as a self-destruct command. BK04 worked well. As well as the site at Woomera, they had a site near Cowes on the Isle of Wight, called the High Down site, within sight of the Needles. Black Knight used 4 Gamma motors. The Gamma 301 had higher thrust and a better mixture than the 201 (24,000 pounds thrust). The Cuckoo motor has a 6-pointed star shaped hole in the centre, which means it burns from the inside out rather than bottom up the way most solid motors do, so the burning area stayed constant. BK08 was the first two-stage version: first stage liquid, second stage Cuckoo. For rocketry it's important to have the centre of gravity in front of the centre of pressure. One rocket went wrong, hit the ground at Mach 3 and went in 13 feet. They had to keep it quiet so the Australians didn't come along and try to dig it up. The rocket had a 36 inch diameter. They planned to move to a 54 inch version, but then the funding was cut off.
Black Knight would have made a good second stage for Blue Streak as a satellite launcher. It would take up 1 tonne. It was planned a few months before Sputnik. The government gave them a couple of hundred thousand pounds for studies, but no more, so the Russians got there first. This method was called Black Prince. There was also a plan called Black Arrow to strap on boosters and launch satellites directly from the Black Knight.
There would be several challenges for any potential revival of the Black Knight programme: no infrastructure (all the companies building the parts have moved on); no 'know-how' - most of the knowledge has been lost as everyone who worked on it retires; no launch site - Woomera is no good any more, for some reason that wasn't explained, and the north of Scotland/Inverness would be possible but very difficult; no money - you'd need £40 million of so, and the Treasury has a long memory of Black Knight being expensive; no payload - modern satellites are too big to fit.
[It did occur to me to wonder whether SSTL's microsatellites would fit, but you'd still have the rest of the challenges.]
John Scott-Scott then spoke. In 1933, Walter were thinking of using HTP for submarine engines. They won the speed record for submarines in the 1940's using it. The technology came from Westcott. 'Cold' burning means no kerosene, just decomposing HTP. 'Cold' is still 5000 degrees. He showed us OHP slides of the Gamma motors with lots of technical detail. You can swivel the motors to steer so you don't actually need fins.
Next part: http://cesy.livejournal.com/174869.html
The fourth talk was by Joe Engle, a NASA astronaut and test pilot. He talked about the X-15, precursor to the Space Shuttle, which broke several speed records (Mach 4, Mach 5, etc.). It would be dropped from a B-52, fire the rocket and then glide back to land. He showed us lots of photos and videos and told us about the flights that worked and the few disasters. It was surprising how many crash-landings resulted in the pilot coming out unscathed, or at least recovering to fly again, and the aircraft were rebuilt and mended.
The next bit of the talk was by Nigel Henbest, who gave us a whirlwind tour of the history of astronomy, from Stonehenge, Babylon and the ancient cultures of Latin America, right through Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus and so on up to the present day.
I was too busy listening to take proper notes for either of these. They had some very good photos.
The fifth talk was on Black Knight. Due to technical issues, a friend of the speaker (Roy someone? I couldn't catch his name) stood up to talk about his involvement first. Black Knight was a UK rocket programme, run on a low budget of less than £2 million a year. Their largest motor was the Rook, with a 17 inch diameter. This was a solid fuel motor. The de-energised version, Raven, was used for the Skylark sounding rocket. The Rook was larger than any previous motor, and needed bigger buckets to make large enough quantities of propellant! Eventually they changed to liquid propellant. They looked at "acquired" V2 documentation for ideas and information. BK03 was single stage. Eventually they changed to 2-stage. In earlier versions, they had speeds of 12,000 feet/second. The heat-resistant coating they used, called Durestos, was cheap and nasty and had asbestos in. You're not allowed to make it nowadays. When watching a flight, you could see the blue streak of re-entry in the sky before you hear the sonic boom. They were heading towards 17,000 feet/second when the Blue Streak programme was cancelled by the government.
Nick Hill then stood up to speak, having fixed the projector. He told us that Black Knight launched from Woomera, Australia, with a Cuckoo motor, which was the Rook with half of it chopped off. They then used liquid propellant, hydrogen peroxide (called HTP in rocketry) with a silver-plated nickel gauze as catalyst, and kerosene. This fuel is very dense compared to others, so the fuel tank was small. There's a risk of suck-back at altitude, so they had spring-loaded flaps to prevent it. BK02 never flew. BK03 picked up a stray radio signal and misinterpreted it as a self-destruct command. BK04 worked well. As well as the site at Woomera, they had a site near Cowes on the Isle of Wight, called the High Down site, within sight of the Needles. Black Knight used 4 Gamma motors. The Gamma 301 had higher thrust and a better mixture than the 201 (24,000 pounds thrust). The Cuckoo motor has a 6-pointed star shaped hole in the centre, which means it burns from the inside out rather than bottom up the way most solid motors do, so the burning area stayed constant. BK08 was the first two-stage version: first stage liquid, second stage Cuckoo. For rocketry it's important to have the centre of gravity in front of the centre of pressure. One rocket went wrong, hit the ground at Mach 3 and went in 13 feet. They had to keep it quiet so the Australians didn't come along and try to dig it up. The rocket had a 36 inch diameter. They planned to move to a 54 inch version, but then the funding was cut off.
Black Knight would have made a good second stage for Blue Streak as a satellite launcher. It would take up 1 tonne. It was planned a few months before Sputnik. The government gave them a couple of hundred thousand pounds for studies, but no more, so the Russians got there first. This method was called Black Prince. There was also a plan called Black Arrow to strap on boosters and launch satellites directly from the Black Knight.
There would be several challenges for any potential revival of the Black Knight programme: no infrastructure (all the companies building the parts have moved on); no 'know-how' - most of the knowledge has been lost as everyone who worked on it retires; no launch site - Woomera is no good any more, for some reason that wasn't explained, and the north of Scotland/Inverness would be possible but very difficult; no money - you'd need £40 million of so, and the Treasury has a long memory of Black Knight being expensive; no payload - modern satellites are too big to fit.
[It did occur to me to wonder whether SSTL's microsatellites would fit, but you'd still have the rest of the challenges.]
John Scott-Scott then spoke. In 1933, Walter were thinking of using HTP for submarine engines. They won the speed record for submarines in the 1940's using it. The technology came from Westcott. 'Cold' burning means no kerosene, just decomposing HTP. 'Cold' is still 5000 degrees. He showed us OHP slides of the Gamma motors with lots of technical detail. You can swivel the motors to steer so you don't actually need fins.
Next part: http://cesy.livejournal.com/174869.html