Career questions tagged reusablerockets
What is the future of Liquid Rocket Engine Plumbing?
Currently, turbomachinery is the most commonly used system to hydraulically power the plumbing in LREs. As a future college student who will be studying these, I've always wanted to know what others think about the alternatives to the turbine and pump methods. The decreased lifetime of LREs due to these "extra" moving parts provides a challenge to decreasing the costs and increasing the reusability of modern rockets. I figure this is something important to consider before we go further into increasingly complex designs, especially considering the current most advanced systems are using full-flow staged combustion designs, which use two preburners to power the oxide and fuel pumps. There are a few alternatives; however, they all have their own issues, and overall, I am most curious about what innovations would best solve the issues for these other designs that would allow them to be superior.
