Introduction to Rocket Performance
When we think of rockets, we rarely think of balloons. Instead, our attention is drawn to the giant vehicles that carry satellites into orbit and spacecraft to the Moon and planets. Nevertheless, there is a strong similarity between the two. The only significant difference is the way the pressurized gas is produced. With space rockets, the gas is produced by burning propellants that can be solid or liquid in form or a combination of the two.
One of the interesting facts about the historical development of rockets is that while rockets and rocket-powered devices have been in use for more than two thousand years, it has been only in the last three hundred years that rocket experimenters have had a scientific basis for understanding how they work.
The science of rocketry began with the publishing of a book in 1687 by the great English scientist Sir Isaac Newton. His book, entitled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, described physical principles in nature. Today, Newton's work is usually just called the Principia. In the Principia, Newton stated three important scientific principles that govern the motion of all objects, whether on Earth or in space. Knowing these principles, now called Newton's Laws of Motion, rocketeers have been able to construct the modern giant rockets of the 20th century such as the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. Here now, in simple form, are Newton's Laws of Motion.
- An object remains at rest or continues to move in a straight line with a constant velocity if there is no unbalanced force acting on it.
- Force is equal to the time rate of change of momentum, or in the case of constant mass, force is equal to mass times acceleration.
- For every action there is always an opposite and equal reaction.
As will be explained shortly, all three laws are really simple statements of how things move. But with them, precise determinations of rocket performance can be made.
Newton's First Law
This law of motion is just an obvious statement of fact, but to know what it means, it is necessary to understand the terms rest, motion, and unbalanced force.
Rest and motion can be thought of as being opposite to each other. Rest is the state of an object when it is not changing position in relation to its surroundings. If you are sitting still in a chair, you can be said to be at rest. This term, however, is relative. Your chair may actually be one of many seats on a speeding airplane. The important thing to remember here is that you are not moving in relation to your immediate surroundings (the plane), however you and the plane are moving relative to the earth. If rest were defined as a total absence of motion, it would not exist in nature. Even if you were sitting in your chair at home, you would still be moving, because your chair is actually sitting on the surface of a spinning planet that is orbiting a star. The star is moving through a rotating galaxy that is, itself, moving through the universe. While sitting "still," you are, in fact, traveling at a speed of hundreds of kilometers per second. You can define accelerations and velocities in the following manner
v(chair-absolute) = v(chair-relative to the plane) + v(plane-absolute)
a(chair-absolute) = a(chair-relative to the plane) + a(plane-absolute)
where v(plane-absolute) and a(plane-absolute) represent the velocity and acceleration, respectively, of the plane in relation to the ground, which is considered a "fixed" or inertial frame of reference.
Motion is also a relative term. All matter in the universe is moving all the time, but in the first law, motion here means changing position in relation to surroundings. A ball is at rest if it is sitting on the ground. The ball is in motion if it is rolling. A rolling ball changes its position in relation to its surroundings. When you are sitting on a chair in an airplane, you are at rest, but if you get up and walk down the aisle, you are in motion. A rocket blasting off the launch pad changes from a state of rest to a state of motion.
The third term important to understanding this law is unbalanced force. If you hold a ball in your hand and keep it still, the ball is at rest. All the time the ball is held there though, it is being acted upon by forces (weight, W, and the force exerted by your hand on the ball, N). The force of gravity is trying to pull the ball downward, while at the same time your hand is pushing against the ball to hold it up. The forces acting on the ball are balanced. Let the ball go, or move your hand upward, and the forces become unbalanced. The ball then changes from a state of rest to a state of motion.
In rocket flight, forces become balanced and unbalanced all the time. A rocket sitting on the launch pad is balanced. The surface of the pad pushes the rocket up while gravity tries to pull it down. As the engines are ignited, the thrust from the rocket unbalances the forces, and the rocket travels upward. Later, when the rocket runs out of fuel, it slows down, stops at the highest point of its flight, then falls back to Earth.
Objects in space also react to forces. A spacecraft moving through the solar system is in constant motion. The spacecraft will travel in a straight line if the forces on it are in balance. This happens only when the spacecraft is very far from any large gravity source such as Earth or the other planets and their moons. If the spacecraft comes near a large body in space, the gravity of that body will unbalance the forces and curve the path of the spacecraft. This happens, in particular, when a satellite is sent by a rocket on a path that is parallel to Earth's surface. If the rocket shoots the spacecraft fast enough, the spacecraft will orbit Earth. As long as another unbalanced force, such as friction with gas molecules in orbit or the firing of a rocket engine in the opposite direction from its movement, does not slow the spacecraft, it will orbit Earth forever.
Now that the three major terms of this first law have been explained, it is possible to restate this law. If an object, such as a rocket, is at rest, it takes an unbalanced force to make it move. If the object is already moving, it takes an unbalanced force, to stop it, change its direction from a straight line path, or alter its speed.
Newton's Third Law
For the time being, we will skip the second law and go directly to the third. This law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you have ever stepped off a small boat that has not been properly tied to a pier, you will know exactly what this law means.
A rocket can lift off from a launch pad only when it expels gas out of its engine. The rocket pushes on the gas, and the gas in turn pushes on the rocket. The whole process is very similar to riding a skateboard. Imagine that a skateboard and rider are in a state of rest (not moving). The rider jumps off the skateboard. In the third law, the jumping is called an action. The skateboard responds to that action by traveling some distance in the opposite direction. The skateboard's opposite motion is called a reaction. When the distance traveled by the rider and the skateboard are compared, it would appear that the skateboard has had a much greater reaction than the action of the rider. This is not the case. The reason the skateboard has traveled farther is that it has less mass than the rider. This concept will be better explained in a discussion of the second law.
With rockets, the action is the expelling of gas out of the engine. The reaction is the movement of the rocket in the opposite direction. To enable a rocket to lift off from the launch pad, the action, or thrust, from the engine must be greater than the weight and drag of the rocket. In space, however, even tiny thrusts will cause the rocket to change direction.
One of the most commonly asked questions about rockets is how they can work in space where there is no air for them to push against. The answer to this question comes from the third law. Imagine the skateboard again. On the ground, the only part air plays in the motions of the rider and the skateboard is to slow them down. Moving through the air causes friction, or as scientists call it, drag. The surrounding air impedes the action-reaction.
As a result rockets actually work better in space than they do in air. As the exhaust gas leaves the rocket engine it must push away the surrounding air; this uses up some of the energy of the rocket. In space, the exhaust gases can escape freely.
Newton's Second Law
This law of motion is essentially an empirically derived statement of a mathematical equation. The three parts of the equation are mass (m), acceleration (a), and force (f), if the mass remains constant. Using letters to symbolize each part, the equation can be written as follows:
f = d (mv)/dt = m (dv/dt) = ma
By using simple algebra, we can also write the equation two other ways:
a = f/m
m = f/a
The first version of the equation is the one most commonly referred to when talking about Newton's second law. It reads: force equals mass times acceleration. To explain this law, we will use an old style cannon as an example.
When the cannon is fired, an explosion propels a cannon ball out the open end of the barrel. It flies a kilometer or two to its target. At the same time the cannon itself is pushed backward a meter or two. This is action and reaction at work (third law). The force acting on the cannon and the ball is the same. What happens to the cannon and the ball is determined by the second law. Look at the two equations below.
f = m(cannon) * a(cannon)
f = m(ball) * a(ball)
The first equation refers to the cannon and the second to the cannon ball. In the first equation, the mass is the cannon itself and the acceleration is the movement of the cannon. In the second equation the mass is the cannon ball and the acceleration is its movement. Because the force (exploding gun powder) is the same for the two equations, the equations can be combined and rewritten below.
m(cannon) * a(cannon) = m(ball) * a(ball)
In order to keep the two sides of the equations equal, the accelerations vary inversely with mass. In other words, the cannon has a large mass and a small acceleration. The cannon ball has a small mass and a large acceleration.
Let's apply this principle to a rocket. Replace the mass of the cannon ball with the mass of the gases being ejected out of the rocket engine. Replace the mass of the cannon with the mass of the rocket moving in the other direction. Force is the pressure created by the controlled explosion taking place inside the rocket's engines. That pressure accelerates the gas one way and the rocket the other.
Some interesting things happen with rockets that don't happen with the cannon and ball in this example. With the cannon and cannon ball, the thrust lasts for just a moment. The thrust for the rocket continues as long as its engines are firing. Furthermore, the mass of the rocket changes during flight. Its mass is the sum of all its parts. Rocket parts includes engines, propellant tanks, payload, control system, and propellants. By far, the largest part of the rocket's mass is its propellants. But that amount constantly changes as the engines fire. That means that the rocket's mass gets smaller during flight. In order for the left side of our equation to remain in balance with the right side, acceleration of the rocket has to increase as its mass decreases for the case of constant thrust. That may be why a rocket starts off moving slowly and goes faster and faster as it climbs into space.
Newton's second law of motion is especiaily useful when designing efficient rockets. To enable a rocket to climb into low Earth orbit, it is necessary to achieve a speed, in excess of 28,000 km per hour. A speed of over 40,250 km per hour, called escape velocity, enables a rocket to leave Earth and travel out into deep space. Attaining space flight speeds requires the rocket engine to achieve the greatest action force possible in the shortest time. In other words, the engine must burn a large mass of fuel and push the resulting gas out of the engine as rapidly as possible. Ways of doing this will be described in the next chapter, practical rocketry..
Newton's second law of motion can be restated in the following way: the greater the mass of rocket fuel burned, and the faster the gas produced can escape the engine, the greater the thrust of the rocket.
Putting Newton's Laws of Motion Together
An unbalanced force must be exerted for a rocket to lift off from a launch pad or for a craft in space to change speed or direction (first law). The amount of thrust (force) produced by a rocket engine will be determined by the mass of rocket fuel that is burned and how fast the gas escapes the rocket (second law). The reaction, or motion, of the rocket is equal to and in the opposite direction of the action, or thrust, from the engine (third law).
Practical Rocketry
The first rockets ever built, the fire-arrows of the Chinese, were not very reliable. Many just exploded on launching. Others flew on erratic courses and landed in the wrong place. Being a rocketeer in the days of the fire-arrows must have been an exciting, but also a highly dangerous activity.
Today, rockets are much more reliable. They fly on precise courses and are capable of going fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of Earth. Modern rockets are also more efficient today because we have an understanding of the scientific principles behind rocketry. Our understanding has led us to develop a wide variety of advanced rocket hardware and devise new propellants that can be used for longer trips and more powerful takeoffs.
Rocket Engines and Their Propellants
Most rockets today operate with either solid or liquid propellants. The word propellant does not mean simply fuel, as you might think; it means both fuel and oxidizer. The fuel is the chemical rockets burn but, for burning to take place, an oxidizer (oxygen) must be present. Jet engines draw oxygen into their engines from the surrounding air. Rockets do not have the luxury that jet planes have; they must carry oxygen with them into space, where there is no air.
Solid Propellant Rockets
Solid rocket propellants, which are dry to the touch, contain both the fuel and oxidizer combined together in the chemical itself. Usually the fuel is a mixture of hydrogen compounds and carbon and the oxidizer is made up of oxygen compounds. Liquid propellants, which are often gases that have been chilled until they turn into liquids, are kept in separate containers, one for the fuel and the other for the oxidizer. Then, when the engine fires, the fuel and oxidizer are mixed together in the engine.
| A solid-propellant rocket has the simplest form of engine. It has a nozzle, a case, insulation, propellant, and an igniter. The case of the engine is usually a relatively thin metal that is lined with insulation to keep the propellant from burning through. The propellant itself is packed inside the insulation layer. Many solid-propellant rocket engines feature a hollow core that runs through the propellant. Rockets that do not have the hollow core must be ignited at the lower end of the propellants and burning proceeds gradually from one end of the rocket to the other. In all cases, only the surface of the propellant burns. However, to get higher thrust, the hollow core is used. This increases the surface of the propellants available for burning. The propellants burn from the inside out at a much higher rate, and the gases produced escape the engine at much higher speeds. This gives a greater thrust. Some propellant cores are star shaped to increase the burning surface even more. |  |
Solid Propellant Cross-Sections and Their Burntime Histories
To fire solid propellants, many kinds of igniters can be used. Fire-arrows were ignited by fuses, but sometimes these ignited too quickly and burned the rocketeer. A far safer and more reliable form of ignition used today is one that employs electricity. An example of an electrically fired rocket is the space shuttle's SRM (see picture below-right). An electric current, coming through wires from some distance away, heats up a special wire inside the rocket. The wire raises the temperature of the propellant it is in contact with to the combustion point.
Other igniters are more advanced than the hot wire device. Some are encased in a chemical that ignites first, which then ignites the propellants. Still other igniters, especially those for large rockets, are rocket engines themselves. The small engine inside the hollow core blasts a stream of flames and hot gas down from the top of the core and ignites the entire surface area of the propellants in a fraction of a second.
To see how this works, you can experiment with a garden hose that has a spray nozzle attachment. This kind of nozzle does not have an exit cone, but that does not matter in the experiment. The important point about the nozzle is that the size of the opening can be varied. Start with the opening at its widest point. Watch how far the water squirts and feel the thrust produced by the departing water. Now reduce the diameter of the opening, and again note the distance the water squirts and feel the thrust. Rocket nozzles work the same way.
As with the inside of the rocket case, insulation is needed to protect the nozzle from the hot gases. The usual insulation is one that gradually erodes as the gas passes through. Small pieces of the insulation get very hot and break away from the nozzle. As they are blown away, heat is carried away with them.
Liquid Propellant Rockets
The other main kind of rocket engine is one that uses liquid propellants. This is a much more complicated engine, as is evidenced by the fact that solid rocket engines were used for at least seven hundred years before the first successful liquid engine was tested. Liquid propellants have separate storage tanks - one for the fuel and one for the oxidizer. They also have pumps, a combustion chamber, and a nozzle.
The fuel of a liquid-propellant rocket is usually kerosene or liquid hydrogen; the oxidizer is usually liquid oxygen. They are combined inside a cavity called the combustion chamber. P&W HIGH PRESSURE TURBOPUMPS provide an example of the rocket engine. Here the propellants burn and build up high temperatures and pressures, and the expanding gas escapes through the nozzle at the lower end. To get the most power from the propellants, they must be mixed as completely as possible. Small injectors (nozzles) on the roof of the chamber spray and mix the propellants at the same time. Because the chamber operates under high pressures, the propellants need to be forced inside. Powerful, lightweight turbine pumps between the propellant tanks and combustion chambers take care of this job.
With any rocket, and especially with liquid-propellant rockets, weight is an important factor. In general, the heavier the rocket, the more the thrust needed to get it off the ground. Because of the pumps and fuel lines, liquid engines are much heavier than solid engines.
One especially good method of reducing the weight of liquid engines is to make the exit cone of the nozzle out of very lightweight metals. However, the extremely hot, fast-moving gases that pass through the cone would quickly melt thin metal. Therefore, a cooling system is needed. A highly effective though complex cooling system that is used with some liquid engines takes advantage of the low temperature of liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen becomes a liquid when it is chilled to -253o C. Before injecting the hydrogen into the combustion chamber, it is first circulated through small tubes that lace the walls of the exit cone (look at the 5 main engines of the Saturn shown below-right, or the engine being test fired below-right). In a cutaway view, the exit cone wall looks like the edge of corrugated cardboard. The hydrogen in the tubes absorbs the excess heat entering the cone walls and prevents it from melting the walls away. It also makes the hydrogen more energetic because of the heat it picks up. We call this kind of cooling system regenerative cooling.
Exhaust Gases' Diamond Pattern
Did you ever wonder why a diamond pattern forms in the exhaust gases when a rocket lifts off or when high performance aircraft like the SR-71 Blackbird takes-off or the Bell X-2 was dropped from the belly of her mother ship? Did you ever wonder why the exhaust gases of the shuttle billow out at high altitude and not at low altitude? Well here is an explanation.
As the rocket lifts off the pad, you can see several things happen to the rocket nozzle's exhaust plume. First, if you look closely as the engines initially fire up to reach lift-off thrust conditions, a diamond pattern can be seen to exist at the exit of the rocket nozzle. Then as the rocket goes higher and higher, the rocket's exhaust plume seems to become wider and wider. These two effects occur because of the design of the rocket nozzle.
The rocket's nozzle (see diagram below) is designed to be efficient at altitudes above sea level, and, at engine start, the flow is overexpanded, that is, the exhaust gas pressure, pe, is higher than the supersonic isentropic exit pressure but lower than the ambient pressure, pa. This causes an oblique shock to form at the exit plane (A) of the nozzle. To reach ambient pressure, the gases undergo compression as they move away from the nozzle exit and pass through the oblique shock wave standing at the exit plane. The flow that has passed through the shock wave will be turned towards the center line (2). At the same time, the oblique shock wave, directed toward the center line of the nozzle, cannot penetrate the center plane since the center plane acts like a streamline. This causes the oblique shock wave to be reflected outward (B) from the center plane. The gas flow goes through this reflected shock and is further compressed but the flow is now turned parallel (3) to the centerline. This causes the pressure of the exhaust gases to increase above the ambient pressure.
The reflected shock wave (see diagram below) now hits the free jet boundary called a contact discontinuity (or the boundary where the outer edge of the gas flow meets the free stream air). Pressure is the same across this boundary and so is the direction of the flow. Since the flow is at a higher pressure than ambient pressure, the pressure must reduce. Thus, at the reflected shock wave-contact discontinuity intersection, expansion waves of the Prandtl-Meyer (P-M) type are set up (C) to reduce the pressure to pa. These expansion waves are directed towards the centerline of the nozzle. The gas flow passing through the Prandtl-Meyer expansion waves turn away from the centerline (4). The Prandtl-Meyer expansion waves in turn reflect from the center plane towards the contact discontinuity (D). The gas flow passing through the reflected Prandtl-Meyer waves is now turned back parallel to the centerline but undergoes a further reduction of pressure.
The reflected Prandtl-Meyer waves (see diagram directly above) now meet the contact discontinuity and reflect from the contact discontinuity towards the centerline as Prandtl-Meyer compression waves (E). This allows the gas flow to pass through the Prandtl-Meyer compression waves and increase its pressure to ambient pressure, but passage through the compression waves turns the flow back towards the centerline (6). The Prandtl-Meyer compression waves now reflect from the center plane as compression waves (F) further increasing the pressure above ambient, but turning the flow parallel to the nozzle centerline (7). The flow process is now back to when the flow had just passed through the reflected shock wave (B), i.e., the flow pressure is above ambient and the flow is parallel to the centerline (3). This process of expansion-compression wave formation begins anew and continues until the pressure of the gases are the same as the ambient pressure and the flow is parallel to the centerline of the nozzle. These expansion and compression waves that interact with each other, leads to the diamond patterns seen. Ideally, this process would continue without end; but a turbulent shear layer created by the large velocity differences across the contact discontinuity will dissipate the wave patterns (see the diamond pattern for the SR-71 Blackbird at the beginning of this section).
At very high altitudes where the ambient pressure is less than the exhaust pressure of the gases, the flow is underexpanded (see diagram below) -- the exhaust gases are exiting the nozzle at pressures below the supersonic isentropic exit pressure which is also the ambient pressure. Thus, the flow (3 below) is at the same condition (pexhaust > pa) as the flow was after it passed through the reflected oblique shock wave when the rocket was at sea level (see above, A). To reach ambient pressure, (waves between sections 3 and 4 below) , the exhaust gases expand via Prandtl-Meyer expansion waves . This expansion occurs by the gases turning away from the centerline of the rocket engine (4). Therefore, the exhaust plume is seen to billow out from the rocket nozzle. The rest of the process (4-5-6-7, below) is the same as the 4-D-5-E-6-F-7 process explained above for the overexpanded nozzle.
Rocket Controls
Engine Thrust Control
Controlling the thrust of an engine is very important to launching payloads (cargoes) into orbit. Too much thrust or thrust at the wrong time can cause a satellite to be placed in the wrong orbit or set too far out into space to be useful. Too little thrust can cause the satellite to fall back to Earth.
Liquid-propellant engines control the thrust by varying the amount of propellant that enters the combustion chamber. A computer in the rocket's guidance system determines the amount of thrust that is needed and controls the propellant flow rate. On more complicated flights, such as going to the Moon, the engines must be started and stopped several times. Liquid engines do this by simply starting or stopping the flow of propellants into the combustion chamber.
Solid-propellant rockets are not as easy to control as liquid rockets. Once started, the propellants burn until they are gone. They are very difficult to stop or slow down part way into the burn. Sometimes fire extinguishers are built into the engine to stop the rocket in flight. But using them is a tricky procedure and doesn't always work. Some solid-fuel engines have hatches on their sides that can be cut loose by remote control to release the chamber pressure and terminate thrust.
The burn rate of solid propellants is carefully planned in advance. The hollow core running the length of the propellants can be made into a star shape. At first, there is a very large surface available for burning, but as the points of the star burn away, the surface area is reduced. For a time, less of the propellant burns, and this reduces thrust. The Space Shuttle uses this technique to reduce vibrations early in its flight into orbit.
Although most rockets used by governments and research organizations are very reliable, there is still great danger associated with the building and firing of rocket engines. Individuals interested in rocketry should never attempt to build their own engines. Even the simplest-looking rocket engines are very complex. Case-wall bursting strength, propellant packing density, nozzle design, and propellant chemistry are all design problems beyond the scope of most amateurs. Many home-built rocket engines have exploded in the faces of their builders with tragic consequences.
Stability and Control Systems
Building an efficient rocket engine is only part of the problem in producing a successful rocket. The rocket must also be stable in flight. A stable rocket is one that flies in a smooth, uniform direction. An unstable rocket flies along an erratic path, sometimes tumbling or changing direction. Unstable rockets are dangerous because it is not possible to predict where they will go. They may even turn upside down and suddenly head back directly to the launch pad.
Making a rocket stable requires some form of control system. Controls can be either active or passive. The difference between these and how they work will be explained later. It is first important to understand what makes a rocket stable or unstable.
All bodies, regardless of size, mass, or shape, has a point within the body called the center of mass (CM). The center of mass is the exact spot where all of the mass of that object is perfectly balanced. You can easily find the center of mass of an object such as a ruler by balancing the object on your finger. If the material used to make the ruler is of uniform thickness and density, the center of mass should be at the halfway point between one end of the stick and the other. If the ruler were made of wood, and a heavy nail were driven into one of its ends, the center of mass would no longer be in the middle. The balance point would then be nearer the end with the nail.
The center of mass is important in rocket flight because it is around this point that an unstable rocket tumbles. As a matter of fact, any object in flight tends to tumble. Throw a stick, and it tumbles end over end. Throw a ball, and it spins in flight. The act of spinning or tumbling is a way of becoming stabilized in flight. A Frisbee will go where you want it to only if you throw it with a deliberate spin. Try throwing a Frisbee without spinning it. If you succeed, you will see that the Frisbee flies in an erratic path and falls far short of its mark.
In flight, spinning or tumbling takes place around one or more of three axes. They are called roll, pitch, and yaw. The point where all three of these axes intersect is the center of mass. For rocket flight, the pitch and yaw axes are the most important because any movement in either of these two directions can cause the rocket to go off course. The roll axis is the least important because movement along this axis will not affect the flight path. In fact, a rolling motion will help stabilize the rocket in the same way a properly passed football is stabilized by rolling (spiraling) it in flight. Although a poorly passed football may still fly to its mark even if it tumbles rather than rolls, a rocket will not. The action-reaction energy of a football pass will be completely expended by the thrower the moment the ball leaves the hand. With rockets, thrust from the engine is still being produced while the rocket is in flight. Unstable motions about the pitch and yaw axes will cause the rocket to leave the planned course. To prevent this, a control system is needed to prevent or at least minimize unstable motions.
In addition to center of mass, there is another important center inside the rocket that affects its flight. This is the center of pressure (CP). The center of pressure exists only when air is flowing past the moving rocket. This flowing air, rubbing and pushing against the outer surface of the rocket, can cause it to begin moving around one of its three axes. Think for a moment of a weather vane. A weather vane is an arrow-like stick that is mounted on a rooftop and used for telling wind direction. The arrow is attached to a vertical rod that acts as a pivot point. The arrow is balanced so that the center of mass is right at the pivot point. When the wind blows, the arrow turns, and the head of the arrow points into the oncoming wind. The tail of the arrow points in the downwind direction.
The reason that the weather vane arrow points into the wind is that the tail of the arrow has a much larger surface area than the arrowhead. The flowing air imparts a greater force to the tail than the head, and therefore the tail is pushed away. There is a point on the arrow where the surface area is the same on one side as the other. This spot is called the center of pressure. The center of pressure is not in the same place as the center of mass. If it were, then neither end of the arrow would be favored by the wind and the arrow would not point. The center of pressure is between the center of mass and the tail end of the arrow. This means that the tail end has more surface area than the head end.
It is extremely important that the center of pressure in a rocket be located toward the tail and the center of mass be located toward the nose. If they are in the same place or very near each other, then the rocket will be unstable in flight. The rocket will then try to rotate about the center of mass in the pitch and yaw axes, producing a dangerous situation. With the center of pressure located in the right place, the rocket will remain stable.
Control systems for rockets are intended to keep a rocket stable in flight and to steer it. Small rockets usually require only a stabilizing control system. Large rockets, such as the ones that launch satellites into orbit, require a system that not only stabilizes the rocket, but also enable it to change course while in flight.
Controls on rockets can either be active or passive. Passive controls are fixed devices that keep rockets stabilized by their very presence on the rocket's exterior. Active controls can be moved while the rocket is in flight to stabilize and steer the craft.
Passive Control Systems--Past and Present
The simplest of all passive controls is a stick. The Chinese fire-arrows were simple rockets mounted on the ends of sticks. The stick kept the center of pressure behind the center of mass. In spite of this, fire-arrows were notoriously inaccurate. Before the center of pressure could take effect, air had to be flowing past the rocket. While still on the ground and immobile, the arrow might lurch and fire the wrong way.
Years later, the accuracy of fire-arrows was improved considerably by mounting them in a trough aimed in the proper direction. The trough guided the arrow in the right direction until it was moving fast enough to be stable on its own.
As will be explained in the next section, the weight of the rocket is a critical factor in performance and range. The fire-arrow stick added too much dead weight to the rocket, and therefore limited its range considerably.
An important improvement in rocketry came with the replacement of sticks by clusters of lightweight fins mounted around the lower end near the nozzle. Fins could be made out of lightweight materials and be streamlined in shape. They gave rockets a dartlike appearance. The large surface area of the fins easily kept the center of pressure behind the center of mass. Some experimenters even bent the lower tips of the fins in a pinwheel fashion to promote rapid spinning in flight. With these "spin fins," rockets become much more stable in flight. But this design also produces more drag and limits the rocket's range.
Active Control Systems
With the start of modern rocketry in the 20th century, new ways were sought to improve rocket stability and at the same time reduce overall rocket weight. The answer to this was the development of active controls. Active control systems included vanes, movable fins, canards, gimbaled nozzles, vernier rockets, fuel injection, and attitude-control rockets. Tilting fins and canards are quite similar to each other in appearance. The only real difference between them is their location on the rockets. Canards are mounted on the front end of the rocket while the tilting fins are at the rear. In flight, the fins and canards tilt like rudders to deflect the air flow and cause the rocket to change course. Motion sensors on the rocket detect unplanned directional changes, and corrections can be made by slight tilting of the fins and canards. The advantage of these two devices is size and weight. They are smaller and lighter and produce less drag than the large fins.
Other active control systems can eliminate fins and canards altogether. By tilting the angle at which the exhaust gas leaves the rocket engine, course changes can be made in flight. Several techniques can be used for changing exhaust direction.
Vanes are small finlike devices that are placed inside the exhaust of the rocket engine. Tilting the vanes deflects the exhaust, and by action-reaction the rocket responds by pointing the opposite way.
Another method for changing the exhaust direction is to gimbal the nozzle. A gimbaled nozzle is one that is able to sway while exhaust gases are passing through it. By tilting the engine nozzle in the proper direction, the rocket responds by changing course (one of the gimballing motors is in the top center of the picture below bracketted by the rising, gaseous Liquid Oxygen, LOX).
Vernier rockets can also be used to change direction. These are small rockets mounted on the outside of the large engine. When needed they fire, producing the desired course change.
In space, only by spinning the rocket along the roll axis or by using active controls involving the engine exhaust can the rocket be stabilized or have its direction changed. Without air, fins and canards have nothing to work upon. (Science fiction movies showing rockets in space with wings and fins are long on fiction and short on science.) The most common kinds of active control used in space are attitude-control rockets. Small clusters of engines are mounted all around the vehicle. By firing the right combination of these small rockets, the vehicle can be turned in any direction. As soon as they are aimed properly, the main engines fire, sending the rocket off in the new direction. On the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), shown above on the left, attitude control rockets were used to change the attitude of the LEM as it returned from the moon's surface to the Apollo command module (carried by the Saturn V rocket, shown above right) into space. The attitude control rockets, placed in groups of 4, are visible against the black area on the left of the picture, about 1/4 inch above the gold base of the LEM. Other groups of 4 rockets can also be found on the right side of the LEM and in the center.
Rocket Performance: Mass
Mass
There is another important factor affecting the performance of a rocket. The weight of a rocket can make the difference between a successful flight and just wallowing around on the launch pad. As a basic principle of rocket flight, it can be said that for a rocket to leave the ground, the engine must produce a thrust that is greater than the total weight of the vehicle. It is obvious that a rocket with a lot of unnecessary weight will not be as efficient as one that is trimmed to just the bare essentials. For an ideal rocket, the total weight of the vehicle should be distributed following this general formula:
- Of the total weight, 91 percent should be propellants; 3 percent should be tanks, engines, fins, etc.; and 6 percent can be the payload.
Payloads may be satellites, astronauts, or that part of the spacecraft that will travel to other planets or moons.
In determining the effectiveness of a rocket design, rocketeers speak in terms of mass fraction (MF). The mass of the propellants of the rocket divided by the total mass of the rocket gives mass fraction:
MF = (Mass of Propellants) / (Total Mass)
The mass fraction of the ideal rocket given above is 0.91. From the mass fraction formula, one might think that an MF of 1.0 is perfect, but then the entire rocket would be nothing more than a lump of propellants that would simply ignite into a fireball. The larger the MF number, the less payload the rocket can carry; the smaller the MF number, the less its range becomes. An MF number of 0.91 is a good balance between payload-carrying capability and range. The Space Shuttle has an MF of approximately 0.82. The MF varies between the different orbiters in the Space Shuttle fleet and with the different payload weights of each mission.
Large rockets, able to carry a spacecraft into space have serious weight problems. To reach space with proper orbital velocities, a great deal of propellant is needed; therefore, the tanks, engines, and associated hardware become larger. Up to a point, bigger rockets fly farther than smaller rockets, but when they become too large their structures weigh them down too much, and the mass fraction is reduced to an impossible number.
A solution to the problem of giant rockets weighing too much can be credited to the 16th-century fireworks maker Johann Schmidlap. Schmidlap attached small rockets to the top of big ones. When the large rocket was exhausted, the rocket casing was dropped behind and the remaining rocket fired. Much higher altitudes were achieved by this method. (The Space Shuttle follows the step rocket principle by dropping off its solid rocket boosters and external tank when they are exhausted of propellants.) The rockets used by Schmidlap were called step rockets. Today this technique of building a rocket is called staging. Thanks to staging, it has become possible not only to reach outer space but the Moon and other planets too.
