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Sustainability in the Space Industry
Published in Mark W. McElroy, The Space Industry of the Future, 2023
The exhaust cloud during a rocket launch is a visually dominant feature of the event. At first glance to an uninformed observer, the massive exhaust plume may appear to be the primary negative impact on the environment from a launch vehicle. What is not visually apparent during a launch though are the years of complex and energy-intensive design, manufacturing, and certification work that went into the production of the rocket and its payload. These “hidden” impacts on the environment far outweigh those of emissions from the launch itself. Environmental impacts of the space industry are found in several categories: launch emissions, propellant production, hardware manufacturing, and ground services and infrastructure. Each of these categories is discussed in the following sections.
Commercial Space Technologies
Published in Mohammad Razani, Commercial Space Technologies and Applications, 2018
A reusable launch system (RLS, or reusable launch vehicle, RLV) is a launch system which is capable of launching a payload into space more than once.41 This contrasts with expendable launch systems, where each launch vehicle is launched once and then discarded.
How Do We Design Rockets?
Published in Travis S. Taylor, Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering, 2017
As we stated at the beginning of Chapter 2, the cost of a launch vehicle can reach as high as several hundred million dollars and require a small army of people to build, prepare, and fly. And, on top of that, it costs even more to design, build, and test a new design to bring it out of experimental status and up to operational flight status. There must be a good reason to expend such resources on such things; otherwise, people simply would not go to the trouble. So, typically, we start with a need such as putting a particular mass payload in a low Earth orbit at a particular altitude and inclination. Another example might be to send a particular payload mass on an escape trajectory toward the Moon or Mars. Or, perhaps, the need is to place a certain mass to a certain altitude or distance. Whatever the need, we are beginning to create the tools to develop such rockets based on the “requirements” for it.
Numerical study on jet noise suppression with water injection during one-nozzle launch vehicle lift-off
Published in Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics, 2022
Chenglong Xing, Guigao Le, Hanyu Deng
Launch vehicles are space vehicles composed of multi-stage rockets, which can carry payloads such as artificial Earth satellites, manned spacecrafts, space stations and space probes into predetermined orbits. During the ignition and take-off phase of the launch vehicle, the exhaust gas jet from the liquid propulsion engine can cause severe acoustic loads on the ground launch equipment and the launch vehicle (Ahuja et al., 2014; Gao & Fu, 2012; Yu et al., 2014). At the same time, the gas jet impinges on the launch pad, deflector and ground; and the disturbance generated in the impact area as well as the shear layer of the flow field near the wall induces an increase in the acoustic load (Kandula, 2008; Nonomura et al., 2016). This can cause adverse effects such as interference to the astronauts and their precision instruments and equipment in the cabin, and induces launch safety accidents in serious cases. Therefore, reducing the acoustic load is of great significance to improve and enhance launch safety.