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	<title>SpaceBuild</title>
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	<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1</link>
	<description>Spacecraft technology</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:59:53 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Spaceports &amp; launch sites</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/general/402/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/general/402/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:38:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Resources]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[facilities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fuelling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[launch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[site]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[spaceport]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=402</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Spaceports New / Potential Launch sites The Scottish National Party is calling for an RAF airbase in Moray to become the UK&#8217;s first commercial spaceport. The base has already been identified by Virgin Galactic as a possible location for a commercial space enterprise. Speaking earlier this month, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn said that wealthy space tourists could be blasting off from RAF Lossiemouth within the next five years, but that another Scottish airbase and one in south west England were also suitable. RAF Lossiemouth Commercial Launch sites Civilian Aerospace Test Center &#8211; Mojave desert Southwest Regional Spaceport &#8211; New Mexico * New Mexico will be home of the X Prize Cup, the annual rocket festival conceived as a follow-up to the Ansari X Prize. British-based Starchaser Industries already has opened an office in New Mexico and plans to begin flying suborbital space vehicles there as early as 2006. Southwest Regional Spaceport, Upham, New Mexico, will be the launch base for the new SpaceShip Two commercial venture jointly run by Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic. Officials from Virgin Galactic and from the State of New Mexico announced that they have reached an historic agreement which will see the building of [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Launch vehicles (Multi-stage)</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/systems/301/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/systems/301/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:55:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Systems]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vehicle design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[launch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[multi-stage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[telematics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=301</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the lower stages of a multi-stage rocket vehicle are discarded before the machine leaves the atmosphere, the upper stages and the spacecraft they carry, if there is a distinction, need to operate in space. Such &#8220;space vehicles&#8221; generally need &#8220;restart-able&#8221; rocket engines that can be turned on or off, which is a somewhat tricky problem because under &#8220;zero-gee&#8221; conditions the propellants do not tend to flow to the bottom of the tanks. To change its orientation, a space vehicle also needs a &#8220;thruster&#8221; systems, which are small rockets fitted into vehicle to control its roll, pitch (nose up and down), and yaw (nose side to side) orientation, as well as precision acceleration and braking for tasks such as space rendezvous. In addition, a practical rocket vehicle must contain a number of support systems, such as a radio &#8220;command and telemetry&#8221; system to allow ground controllers to send commands to the vehicle and receive operating status; sensors and diagnostic systems (telematics) to indicate the vehicle&#8217;s health; and a &#8220;self-destruct&#8221; system to blow the vehicle out of the sky should it suddenly go off course and threaten to fall on a populated area.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/systems/301/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Project Prometheus – Nuclear Electric Engines</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/242/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/242/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:57:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prometheus]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=242</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This project is a NASA / JPL attempt to develop a more heavily instrumented craft travelling farther from the Sun. The concept would need to power its ion thrusters with a nuclear fission reactor and a system for converting the reactor&#8217;s heat to electricity. This could give the craft more than 100 times more power than a non-fission system of comparable weight. Below is a conceptual design for the Prometheus 1 spacecraft would place a large array of heat-shedding radiator panels between the spacecraft&#8217;s power source and ion-propulsion thrusters. In order to explore the distant reaches of the solar system, new technologies must be developed. These technologies would allow spacecraft to travel further and conserve more energy until they reach their destination. Developing a safe nuclear power capability would enable NASA to meet its scientific goals for the next several decades and more thoroughly explore the outer edges of the solar system. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter Mission would demonstrate that a nuclear fission reactor can be developed for use in deep space, flown safely, and operated reliably on long-duration missions in the deep space environment to return valuable science. A nuclear fission reactor could produce unprecedented amounts of electrical [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Project Orion – Nuclear Pulse Units (NPU)</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/238/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/238/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:54:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[npu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[project orion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=238</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the US and the Soviet Union were beginning work on NTR systems, a group of American researchers also considered a more direct and dramatic way to use nuclear power to propel a spaceship: detonate small atomic bombs behind it. The ORION project, as it was named, seems to have originated with Dr. Theodore B. Taylor, well-known nuclear weapons designer. In 1957, he was working at General Atomic, a branch of the General Dynamics conglomerate, in San Diego, California, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first Earth satellite. General Atomic was promoting the peaceful uses of atomic power, and Taylor thought that America could catch up with the Soviets by building a really big spacecraft, a true &#8220;spaceship&#8221;, powered by atomic bombs. The idea of a spaceship powered by atomic bombs had been around for a few years, but nobody had done any more than some conceptual paper studies of the idea. Taylor did some paper studies of his own and came to the conclusion that the bombs would be small as such things went, with only a few kilo-tonnes of explosive yield. Even at that size, they would be about a million times more powerful than a [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Solar Thermal Rocket (STR)</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/solar-propulsion/240/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/solar-propulsion/240/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:56:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Solar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sotv]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[str]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=240</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ultimately, the unsolved problem of radioactive fallout killed ORION for good. Any ORION launch would have led to public protests, and the Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty, signed in August 1963, basically made an ORION launch illegal. ORION was finally canned for good in December 1965. It remains an interesting footnote to a time when people were crazy about space, crazy about the atom, and thought they could accomplish anything. ORION proved to be a dead end, but NTR remains attractive. It is basically a simple idea, involving no more than heating up a gas to use for an exhaust jet. The biggest drawback is that the means that it uses to heat up the gas, nuclear power, is unfashionable these days. NASA has considered an alternative approach that is much trendier, in which solar power is used to heat up a propellant instead of a nuclear reactor. The idea is not new, having been proposed by German-American space flight engineer Krafft Ehricke in 1956, but little was done on the concept until recently. In 1997, NASA launched a study of such a &#8220;solar thermal rocket (STR)&#8221; engine named &#8220;Shooting Star&#8221;. Shooting Star was envisioned strictly as a test system, using a [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/solar-propulsion/240/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Gas Core Nuclear Rocket (GCNR) Engines</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/236/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/236/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:54:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gcnr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plasma]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=236</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have also considered another interesting NTR propulsion scheme, known as a &#8220;gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR)&#8221;. In a GCNR, hydrogen is pumped into one end of a cylindrical reaction chamber, with an exhaust at the other end. The hydrogen expands as it passes through the chamber, and not all of it goes out the exhaust, instead flowing back up the chamber. This creates a toroidal vortex of hydrogen gas that can be used for fission reaction containment. Dust-sized particles of uranium are injected into the toroid and accumulate at its center. A number of long cylinders are mounted on the interior of the reaction chamber outside the toroid. These cylinders normally absorb radiation emitted by the uranium, but they can be rotated to reflect it, initiating a fission reaction. The cylinders are the equivalent of control rods in an Earth-based reactor and were apparently featured in earlier NTR designs. Once fission begins in the center of the hydrogen gas toroid, the high temperatures heat the gas into a plasma, which flies out the exhaust at high velocity to provide thrust. A small magnetic nozzle could be used to ensure that the uranium remains [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/236/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Birth of a new hybrid</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/172/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/172/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:31:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Hybrid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parrafin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pentane]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=172</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Although hybrids have been in development over the last 50 years, they have not made it into mainstream commercial applications because they did not produce as much thrust as liquid and solid systems. “Hybrid rockets tend to be sort of anaemic in their ability to produce thrust,” Cantwell said. This is because the fuel burns too slowly, relying on a process limited by the rate at which fuel evaporates and mixes with oxidizer. By contrast, the fuel and oxidizer are forced together in liquid systems and pre-mixed in solid systems. In 1995, the U.S. Air Force began to address this problem with a new type of hybrid fuel — a simple hydrocarbon, pentane, frozen using liquid nitrogen. The pentane burned three to four times faster than conventional fuels. The Air Force engineers explained their results by saying that less heat was required to gasify the pentane than was needed for conventional solid fuels. Cantwell and Karabeyoglu felt that this explanation was inadequate in light of the “blocking effect,” which limits the amount by which fuel evaporation can be increased simply by increasing the rate of heating. The effect occurs because the increasing evaporation pushes the flame away from the surface and blocks heat transfer even as the heating rate [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/172/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Hybrid rocket engine gels</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/174/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/174/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:20:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Hybrid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[butadiene]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hydrazine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kerosene]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parrafin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[propellant gel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=174</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The major weakness of the solid-fuel rocket is the fact that, once lit, it burns to completion, and the only thing that can be done is to divert the thrust when it is no longer needed. The lack of burn control for solid-fuel rockets has led to the development of “hybrid” rockets that use a solid-fuel core along with a liquid oxidizer. The solid fuel component in a hybrid rocket is not impregnated with large quantities of an oxidizer material, which makes the rocket much safer to handle and store since it cannot burn efficiently on its own. Lockheed Martin has static-tested a hybrid motor with a butadiene &#8211; type solid fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. Lockheed Martin has also investigated the use of paraffins as propellants; “paraffins” in this case of course refers to the American usage of the term, meaning candle waxes and related solid hydrocarbons, and not the British usage of the term, which is what Americans call kerosene. Burt Rutan’s famous commercial suborbital manned spacecraft,  “ Spaceship One”, uses a hybrid propulsion system, with a butadiene-type solid fuel and nitrous oxide oxidizer. In this case, the propulsion system is designed for low cost and ease of handling instead of optimal thrust levels. Spaceship One is probably the first [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/174/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) Engines</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/234/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/234/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:53:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[irgit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nerva]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ntr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pbr]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=234</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The idea of using atomic power as the basis for a rocket engine pre-dates the First World War, but at that time neither liquid rocket engines nor atomic power were realities, and these concepts were essentially speculations about speculations. However, by the end of World War II, both large liquid-fuel rocket engines and atomic reactors were working technology. In 1946, Douglas Aircraft performed the first formal study of the use of nuclear power for rocket propulsion, followed by a study performed in 1947 by Dr. Hsue-Shen Tsien, then at MIT. With enthusiasm for space exploration and nuclear power rising in the 1950s and into the 1960s, interest in using &#8220;nuclear thermal rockets (NTR)&#8221; reached a high pitch. An NTR is very simple in concept. A light propellant, usually hydrogen, is pumped through a reactor core, which heats it to high temperatures, on the order of 2,500 degrees Celsius, and spews it out as a high-velocity exhaust. An NTR provides twice the exhaust velocity and about 3.5 times the specific impulse of LOX-RP propulsion. However, the improved mass ratio is partially cancelled by the mass of the reactor, and particularly the mass of the reactor shielding. For this reason, many NTR [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/nuclear-propulsion/234/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Paraffin based Hybrid engine technology</title>
		<link>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/170/</link>
		<comments>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/170/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:07:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Hybrid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aluminum]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ammonium perchlorate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parrafin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[solid]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/?p=170</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Paraffin was previously thought to be weak, easily broken and unsuitable for use as rocket fuel. But Cantwell’s team found that it is quite strong — at least twice as strong as conventional solid propellants. The paraffin they use as rocket fuel is the same material used as hurricane candles and sculptor’s wax. “Paraffin” is a generic name for a family of simple hydrocarbons with carbon chain lengths, ranging from 20 to 40. Different group members are suited to different applications. Safer, cheaper Paraffin fuel can contribute significantly to making it safer and cheaper to get into space. “If that were accomplished, human access to space would become more routine, and the ability to do scientific studies and commercialize the use of space would also increase dramatically,” Cantwell said. For example, scientists could undertake as many missions as necessary to clean up accumulated debris in our near-space environment. Conventional rocket fuels are either solids or liquids, but paraffin fuels are used in a hybrid system combining solid and liquid materials. An oxidizer such as oxygen or nitrous oxide is generally used with all fuel types to aid burning. Solid fuels include a rubberized material incorporating the oxidizer and other additives such as aluminum or ammonium perchlorate. The fuel &#8211; [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.spacebuild.net/s1/propulsion/hybrid-propulsion/170/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
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