Re: XCOR engines

In article <1130245327.718834.141000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
=?iso-8859-1?q?R=FCdiger_Klaehn?= <rudi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>They are a commercial company, and you are a potential customer. So I
>am sure they will be more willing to provide you personally with specs
>such as ISP and T/W than to reply on the news group. Maybe they will
>fax you a NDA or something.

There may be ITAR issues with disclosure of anything that some stupid
bureaucrat might consider in-depth technical information. Ick.

>I really hope that the current boom in suborbital space flight will
>lead to more specialization. Why does every single rocket technology
>startup have to build their own engines?

Historically, relatively few of them have built their own engines.
Kistler (which is still alive, although only just) is using Russian
engines, as were Kelly and Pioneer. Rocketplane is going to buy rather
than build, last I heard, as is TGV. Rutan didn't build his own engines
either, although he had them custom-built by others.

A lot of the X-Prize competitors planned to build their own engines simply
because they were shoestring operations and couldn't afford to buy
off-the-shelf engines. The dominant problem for most of the X-Prize teams
was money, not technology. Rutan won mostly because he managed to land a
rich sponsor and nobody else did.

Sometimes people build their own simply because what they want isn't
available off the shelf. Nobody sells liquid rocket engines at the sort
of garage-technology level that Microcosm wants for their Scorpius
launchers, and nobody sells big hybrids (as standard, off-the-shelf
catalog products, rather than as custom engineering) at all. Even
Armadillo, although they certainly are having fun with engine work, began
building something (big peroxide engines) that simply wasn't available
commercially.

And a few startups do it deliberately, because they see competitive
advantage in not using commodity engines, and think the difficulty of
engine development is exaggerated.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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