Author Topic: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory  (Read 19448 times)

Offline Apollo 957

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The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« on: June 07, 2016, 02:34:09 PM »
I've come across a few amateur physicists on YouTube who try to prove that rockets don't work in space (vacuum) because of the 'lack of reactionary force' from the surrounding atmosphere. I won't bore you all with the details, but one countering video to these pointed out that the force of the exhaust product would far outweigh the meagre atmospheric pressure surrounding it.

I decided to put some figures on this, and in my layman's terms, came up with;

"The Saturn V weighed 6.5 million pounds at launch. In order to launch it, the rockets must overcome the weight, and the quoted thrust of the first stage was 7.65 million lb/f. It could not be any less than 6.5 million, or else the machine wouldn't leave the ground.

I have no accurate dimension for the diameter of the engine nozzles, but there are pics online of people standing in front of them and they look to be around 8 feet (96 inches) across. There's 5 of them. Formula for area of a circle - pi * radius squared - 3.14 * 48 * 48 each nozzle, and there's five nozzles, so 3.14 * 48 * 48 * 5 = 36000 square inches. I make that 212 ib/f per square inch.

Atmospheric pressure at sea level - 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi)

The Saturn V, on the face of it, is putting out almost 15 times the ambient atmospheric pressure."


At this point, I thought - "that doesn't seem like a lot". I know it would if you descended to a few hundred fathoms, and experienced it in a diving suit on the seabed, but .....

Is the difference made by the rocket exhaust going at supersonic or hypersonic speed, whilst the atmosphere is just exhibiting Brownian motion?

Can anyone put some numbers on this? Hopefully more impressive ones than "times 14" .....

Offline JayUtah

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2016, 06:05:37 PM »
You have two kinds of pressure to discuss.  There is dynamic pressure along the engine axis, which is what we simplistically consider when we estimate thrust.  And there is also static pressure at or about the exit plane, which contributes more or less to thrust but also describes the shape of the exhaust plume with respect to ambient pressure -- in rocketry terms, behavior in a vacuum or during boost upward through an ever-thinning atmosphere.

Dynamic pressure varies across the exit plane, but you can use an average if you want and be within an order of magnitude correctness.  Exhaust moves faster at the center of the exit plane.  In the case of the Rocketdyne F-1, much faster.  The edges of the exit plane are dominated by the film cooling regime in the nozzle extension which, by design, employs a much cooler and much slower flow.  Hence if you want to talk of averages, exclude the outer 2-3 inches as they are not part of the ordinary exit-plane shear regime.

The numbers you're looking for in your estimate are 1,522,000 lbf for sea-level thrust (AS-504 and later) and 148 inches diameter (standard fitted nozzle extension).  But you really also want to look at such things as mass flow rate (5683 lbm/s) and exhaust velocity (9800 f/s), because these will more accurately describe the dynamics of the exhaust hitting the ambient air.  Imagine scouring away dirt from the pavement with your garden sprayer.  You feel the reactive thrust against your hand, and that's measurable.  But the effect of the fluid hitting the pavement in a directional flow is governed by slightly different physical regimes such as kinetic energy.  If you use the numbers above to compute kinetic energy in the exhaust, you'll have a more usable number to describe the effect of it hitting ambient air.  (It is no accident that the formulation for aerodynamic drag -- the force of moving fluid against an object -- is related to fluid kinetic energy.)  Since the "object" in this case is also a fluid, the formulation becomes enormously more complicated (e.g., Navier-Stokes methods) if you want to work out the exact numbers.

The static pressure component doesn't matter much until you talk about thrust in a vacuum.  Canonical atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psia is a measurement of the Brownian effect under those conditions, and ideally you want the exhaust plume to match that level of Brownian motion.  If all the motion is linear, leading to ideal thrust in a vacuum, then the ambient atmosphere will act to constrict the plume and change its shape (overexpanded plume).   The SSME had overexpanded nozzles because it was tuned for optimal thrust at higher altitude, the result being the Mach cone that forms while the engine is operating at sea level.  Nearly all rocket nozzles have a fixed geometry.  At altitude the F-1 nozzle underexpands the plume, leading to plume spread at high altitude.  The static pressure of the plume is greater than ambient.  In a vacuum, static exhaust pressure at the exit plane forms a measurable percentage of thrust, as much as half the thrust produced by the LM DPS.
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Offline Glom

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #2 on: June 07, 2016, 07:14:07 PM »
Basically, Thrust = mass flow * exhaust velocity + exit plane * (exhaust pressure - ambient pressure)

In other words, rockets work better in a vacuum.

That is assuming you the nozzle is designed for proper expansion, which is easier when there is a non-zero ambient pressure so the devil is in the detail.

Offline bknight

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #3 on: June 07, 2016, 08:45:25 PM »
Basically, Thrust = mass flow * exhaust velocity + exit plane * (exhaust pressure - ambient pressure)

In other words, rockets work better in a vacuum.

That is assuming you the nozzle is designed for proper expansion, which is easier when there is a non-zero ambient pressure so the devil is in the detail.
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Offline JayUtah

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #4 on: June 07, 2016, 10:44:47 PM »
In other words, rockets work better in a vacuum.

Dramatically, in most cases.

Quote
That is assuming you the nozzle is designed for proper expansion, which is easier when there is a non-zero ambient pressure so the devil is in the detail.

Exactly.  In practice you can't make a deLaval nozzle that achieves zero static pressure at the exit plane.  But since static pressure contributes to thrust in a vacuum, it doesn't matter much.
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Offline Bob B.

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #5 on: June 07, 2016, 11:34:34 PM »
In other words, rockets work better in a vacuum.

That is assuming you the nozzle is designed for proper expansion, which is easier when there is a non-zero ambient pressure so the devil is in the detail.

Depends on what you mean by "work better".

Let's say we have two engines that are identical in all ways expect for their expansion ratios.  At sea level, the one with the low expansion ratio will produce greater thrust than the one with the high expansion ratio.  And in a vacuum, the one with the high expansion ratio will produce greater thrust than the one with the low expansion ratio.  But both engines will produce greater thrust in a vacuum then they do at sea level.

So we could say the low expansion ratio engine "works better at sea level" because it is the better of the two engines in that particular environment.  But we could also say the low expansion ratio engine "works better in a vacuum" because to produces more thrust in a vacuum than it does at sea level.

Offline VQ

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #6 on: June 07, 2016, 11:44:45 PM »
Exactly.  In practice you can't make a deLaval nozzle that achieves zero static pressure at the exit plane.

Emphasis added. Can you in theory?

Offline ka9q

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #7 on: June 08, 2016, 08:13:39 AM »
Yes, if you make the nozzle infinitely long.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #8 on: June 08, 2016, 11:37:06 AM »
...whereupon a variant of Poiseuille's Law would reduce exhaust momentum to zero.
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Offline ka9q

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #9 on: June 08, 2016, 01:54:24 PM »
How? The longer the nozzle, the greater the momentum thrust and the smaller the pressure thrust. The former increases faster than the latter decreases, so overall thrust increases. But the effect rapidly reaches diminishing returns.

Offline onebigmonkey

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #10 on: June 08, 2016, 02:18:30 PM »
See that over there, way over in the distance, that's my comfort zone...

Offline JayUtah

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #11 on: June 08, 2016, 04:33:31 PM »
How?

On second thought it wouldn't, because in addition to being infinitely long, the ideal nozzle has an infinite expansion ratio, which disqualifies the Poiseuille regime.  I was thinking of infinite length for a given expansion ratio, which would result essentially in a tube of infinite length.  Real-world rocket nozzles don't offer much resistance to flow, which was the limiting factor I was imagining.
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Offline smartcooky

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #12 on: June 08, 2016, 11:12:13 PM »
In other words, rockets work better in a vacuum.

That is assuming you the nozzle is designed for proper expansion, which is easier when there is a non-zero ambient pressure so the devil is in the detail.

Depends on what you mean by "work better".

Let's say we have two engines that are identical in all ways expect for their expansion ratios.  At sea level, the one with the low expansion ratio will produce greater thrust than the one with the high expansion ratio.  And in a vacuum, the one with the high expansion ratio will produce greater thrust than the one with the low expansion ratio.  But both engines will produce greater thrust in a vacuum then they do at sea level.

So we could say the low expansion ratio engine "works better at sea level" because it is the better of the two engines in that particular environment.  But we could also say the low expansion ratio engine "works better in a vacuum" because to produces more thrust in a vacuum than it does at sea level.

So I guess that designers of multi-stage rockets take that into account when designing rocket motors for each stage?
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Offline ka9q

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #13 on: June 09, 2016, 12:47:44 AM »
Yes, definitely. Take a look at the two different models of the Merlin RP-1/LOX engine on the Falcon 9. I don't know of a picture that shows them together, but the vacuum model has a much longer nozzle.

An even better illustration: a Delta II with 9 SRBs. Six are lit on the ground and the other three in the air at about T+60 sec, and the air-lit (vacuum-lit, actually) solids have noticeably longer nozzles.

Offline JayUtah

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Re: The 'rockets don't work in space' hoax theory
« Reply #14 on: June 09, 2016, 11:50:10 AM »
Indeed, nozzle design is an art.  Which is to say, a very enriched science.  Also, solids tend to use conical nozzles.  This is not because of math but because of heat rejection.  Most are built of and/or lined with ablative cooling materials; the conical shape is easier to deal with.
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