Reddit reviews Rocket Propulsion Elements

I mean Dragon with a Second stage is on the cover of Rocket Propulsion Elements in the eighth edition
and a F9 Dance Floor on the ninth

that's a kind of big one already

Rocket Propulsion Elements

There are many reasons:

• Hydrogen is nasty to work with. It's colder than lots of other cryogenic propellants. Its vapor pressure varies so rapidly with temperature that either you perfectly thermally isolate it from its surroundings or the liquid will boil and pressurize the Ullage volume. Either you vent off the excess gaseous hydrogen through a check valve, or you make your tanks stronger(and heavy as fuck). Venting is actually already done with other cryogenic propellants as well, but hydrogen requires doing so very quickly depending on how good your tanks are.
  
  
  
• The tanks are heavier. Not only because they have to contain more volume, but because they have multiple layers. Vacuum insulation requires you to cover the surface area(plus some change) twice. (Aside: Longer term storage like you might find on the surface of the planet would also likely have a liquid nitrogen or helium layer as well to collect the radiative heat from transferring into the main hydrogen tank. Think: atmosphere/metal/vacuum/nitrogen/vacuum/hydrogen main tank.)
  
  
  
• Additional turbopumps/inducers required to keep hydrogen from cavitating, increasing the inert mass even further. To keep the turbopump from cavitating, its pressure has to be raised somewhat gradually. If the pumps cavitate not only will performance drop, but the pump will begin to vibrate and possibly induce some unwanted structural dynamics that may break something during launch.
  
  
  
• And of course, as others have mentioned, hydrogen has a tendency to diffuse into stuff. This makes it brittle and more susceptible to fracture.
  
  
  
  tl;dr: Working with liquid hydrogen is actually pretty awful. (We'd use kerosene if we could find it on Mars, but CH4 is manufacturable in situ.)
  
  
  Source: I had to double check lots of this stuff with my copy of Sutton and Biblarz. The inert gas layer thing for the tanks is actually me paraphrasing one of my former professors though; it's not in the book from what I can tell.

FullFrontalNoodly guessed that you're trying to calculate a trajectory of a rocket launch. I'm going to assume he's right, but for the record, this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

is a great resource if you want to learn about rocket performance.

In that case, the general bible for rocketry is Rocket Propulsion Elements, and it's the best place to start working these things out. https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

• Aerodynamics: Anything written by John Anderson. Specifically Fundamentals of Aerodynamics is a good general text. I have every book he's written and they're all pillars of excellent teaching. If you're just looking to get started, I teach incoming freshmen from his Introduction to Flight book which is very easy to pick up regardless of your level of knowledge.
  
  
• Jet Propulsion: Aircraft Propulsion by Saeed Farokhi. Don't let the name scare you away. This book is my engine bible. He's an excellent professor and his book is a labor of love.
  
  
• Rocket Propulsion: Rocket Propulsion Elements by Sutton & Biblarz is the standard and is the reference I keep on hand for rocket data and theory.
  
  
• Aircraft Design: Jan Roskam's Aircraft Design Series (8 books) contain an amazing wealth of information and serve as a 'cookbook' for aircraft design. Some of the information is dated and it's not always easy to read, but it's the only place you'll find a lot of the information. As a second reference, I keep Nicolai's Fundamentals of Aircraft & Airship Design Part 1 on hand as well. It's very easy to read and I feel it's superior in approach and presentation to Raymer's Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach which is what I originally learned from.

Maybe not in the redesign but the old sidebar got the bibles:

• Rocket Propulsion Elements for general rocket engines (more for commercial and launch vehicles)
  
• Modern High Power Rocketry for more DIY and hobby level stuff.
  
• Space Propulsion Analysis and Design for more general aspects
  
  Another great ressource is Nakka Rocketry webiste (http://www.nakka-rocketry.net/) for actual data.
  
  Whatever you do please do not blindly follow popular youtube videos. At best they document decade old techniques that everyone has abandoned because they are unreliable, at worst plain dangerous.

It's intended to be a textbook for the next generation of space systems engineers. The old books like Sutton mostly cover how to design conventional rockets. I felt like a more comprehensive book was needed.

Well the best place would be to start from technical side of things.
RPE by Sutton
https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

And Taming liquid hydrogen shows the problems of hydrolox that had to be solved to make lunar flight possible with rocket as small as SaturnV

https://www.history.nasa.gov/SP-4230.pdf

Russian N1 relied on kerosine and had only 1/2 the power of Saturn for TLI trajectory and that forced the design of their single person lander.

The historical perspective on the race is well shown in here https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Space-Race-Apollo/dp/0813026288

The list provided by david is good, and I'm just going to point out two that are really good for understanding rockets and spaceflight:

One is Rocket Propulsion Elements, which I hear is great if you actually want to build your own engine. The other is Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, which helps to explain orbital mechanics, controls, and some other important facets of spaceflight like how we track a satellite from the ground.

It's a big topic, and rocket engineering can't be summed in a reddit post. Buy yourself some books.

If you want more knowledge on the design and analysis of rockets, get a copy of Rocket Propulsion Elements By Sutton. (http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462063371&sr=8-1&keywords=rocket+propulsion+elements) - You don't have to buy the newest edition, thermodynamics hasn't changed.

I believe for vehicle design the best reference is SPAD (Space Propulsion Analysis and Design) (http://www.amazon.com/Space-Propulsion-Analysis-Design-Website/dp/0077230299/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1462063423&sr=8-2&keywords=space+propulsion+analysis+and+design) - Wow, that's more expensive than I thought.

Both books are intended for upper level college courses so you will need to learn other stuff too - like thermodynamics. But if you are interested in the subject then It will keep you motivated to learn the prerequisites as you go.

To start, learn the rocket equation, if you don't know it already. It is easy to do your first order analysis with just that, and add ~1km/s for air + gravity drag. Also, Wikipedia has an astounding amount of information. /u/danielravennest Wrote this wikibook, I haven't read it myself but he is always raving about it so you might find it useful.

Feel free to PM me. I am currently the lead engineer on a small bipropellant in-space propulsion system which is in early development.

While the above is nice, if you are at all interested in rockets, get Rocket Propulsion Elements. Read it and love it, it is pretty much the bible of rocket engines and serves as a good foundation

I can surely suggest you some books which cover a vast field of rocket science.

• Rocket Propulsion Elements by George P. Sutton, Oscar Biblarz
  
• Fundamentals of Astrodynamics by Roger R. Bate, Donald D. Mueller, Jerry E. White
  
• International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by S. Isakowitz, J. Hopkins, J. Hopkins Jr
  
• Elements of Propulsion: Gas Turbines and Rockets by J. Mattingly, H. von Ohain
  
  These are the same books which Elon musk used for self learning Rocket science.
  
  source: http://qr.ae/TUGfdA

Establish the properties you know and those you care about finding - Viscosity, thermal conductivity, molecular diffusion coefficient, fuel/oxidiser requirements (i.e. mass conservation) for example.

Here's a few things to think about:

• When analysing the working fluids, you'll care about properties such as temperature, pressure, specific volume, and enthalpy. You might need a pump/turbine to deliver your fuel or oxidiser, and worry about enthalpy throughout the cycle. See thermodynamic cycle of a reaction engine.
  
  
• When sizing your nozzle and throat area you'll probably at some point want to know you characteristic velocity C, which is the (chamber pressure)(throat area)/(mass flowrate). Chamber pressure is very much related to the heat of combustion and it would be nice to model this, either steady state or transient.
  
  
• To a mechanical engineer, the combination of pressure and temperature dictates how you design your chamber (thermal expansion near to joints/component interfaces, principal stress, oxidation, creep properties, are all important). You will be thinking about how to keep the walls of the chamber and nozzle cool - see how the Saturn V rocket engines (F-1 engines) routed their fuel around the nozzle, which pre-heats the fuel, and cools the nozzle so that it can survive the high temperature exhaust. Some engines might need thermal barrier coatings or ablative coatings. It would be interesting to analyse whether any of this extra thermal protection is necessary.
  
  I've just added a Reference Library with a few books on rocket engines.
  
  

• How to Design, Build, and Test Small Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engines (alternate link) - enthusiast primer on liquid-fuel rocket engine design, containing some basic math.
  
  
• Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines (NASA SP-125) - NASA design document originally written in 1967 detailing nearly every design consideration for large payload liquid-fuel rocket engines, containing empirically derived equations and advanced math.
  
  
• Rocket Propulsion Elements (George Sutton) - rocket design text which includes sections on hybrid rocket design, containing empirically derived equations and advanced math.
  
  

What you seem to be not understanding is that using a simulator is far and away the quickest, easiest, and because it is completely free, the cheapest way to learn how rocket science really works. Using a simulator will save you countless hours when it comes to making a rocket over just shoving some chemicals into a tube and crossing your fingers. And speaking of fingers, it just might save you some of them, too. Because people do lose fingers playing with rockets.

Since you seem to be familiar with electronics, I'll make a comparison with LTSpice. Instead of spending hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on a parts library and expensive test gear you test all of your designs on a tool that is completely free.

This isn't gatekeeping. It is exactly the opposite. It is enabling.

As to sources to learn, one of the best resources is linked right in the sidebar:

https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

There is even a copy available on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/RocketPropulsionElements8thEditionByOscarBiblarzGeorgeP.Sutton

This is also something that gets mentioned almost daily in discussions here. Pretty much any thread on motor construction has referenced it.

And has already been mentioned numerous times in this thread, Nakka's website is
pretty much the de-facto standard when it comes to sugar propellants. But seriously, any google search on sugar propellants should bring that up so it really shouldn't even need to be said in the first place.

tl;dr: Yes. You gain additional velocity from a spinny Earth by launching east from the equator versus launching from Cape Canaveral, which either means you can use a rocket with less propellant (cheaper) or put more mass in orbit.

Yes. Dig this latitude map. I'm not sure when what we're talking about becomes actual Rocket Science, but we're close.

Check out this link regarding the Delta V (that's delta vee and not delta five, which makes googling for this stuff suck beyond imagination). The idea is that by launching east at the equator you get more of a velocity boost from the rotaty Earth than you do elsewhere. I compared the numbers I linked to in my (Sutton)[http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303169914&sr=8-1] and they disagreed, so I won't quote them. You can feed the difference in velocity gained launching east from the equator versus Cape Canaveral back into the Tsiolkovsky equation (and you can google that shit all day long) and eventually work out how much more mass you could've put into orbit if you launched from the equator versus Cape Canaveral.

You might also check out Wikipedia's article on Delta Vee and work to gain your own understanding of this, since I am absolutely not a rocket scientist.

i think thats actually not possible. I believe thats because you need to expand the flow to derive thrust and making the "bell" long enough to align the (now atmospheric pressure) flow exactly with the slipstream is impractical (it weighs too much). It might be possible if you were building a test article (ie. a rocket that didnt actually go anywhere, so it had no thrust/weight requirement). In any other configuration, whatever bell size you choose will be suboptimal in some regime. (ie. underexpanded at sea level, or overexpanded at altitude, etc.)
(there are variable geometry nozzles, and in fact thats what the aerospike is supposedly "better" at), but doing that in metal is quite expensive in weight.

I remember working this out for myself while reading Sutton about 10 years ago, but i cant remember why now.

Another fun little thought exercise is the "ice rocket" (the one that actually produces ice in the exhaust becuase of the expansion). This apparently can actually occur.

I hope you have a background in basic calculus and physics, at the very least.

Obtain this book and read it cover to cover before you even think about it. It's expensive but should be available at an engineering library.
https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

If you're okay with PDF, here you go:
http://www.ewp.rpi.edu/hartford/~ernesto/S2013/EP/MaterialsforStudents/Lee/Sutton-Biblarz-Rocket_Propulsion_Elements.pdf

> Rocket Propulsion Elements
https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutton/dp/0470080248

This book?