[HN Gopher] Overview of the New LH2 Sphere at NASA Kennedy Space... ___________________________________________________________________ Overview of the New LH2 Sphere at NASA Kennedy Space Center [pdf] Author : perihelions Score : 30 points Date : 2022-09-03 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.energy.gov) (TXT) w3m dump (www.energy.gov) | jeffrallen wrote: | Here's a nice factoid from it: | | > circa 1970 Accidental production of first glass bubbles at 3M | plant in Guin, AL | | > circa 1975 Cryogenic research testing by G. R. Cunnington and | C. L. Tien at UC Berkeley | avalys wrote: | What's the cost per liter of this tank vs. the one built in the | 1960s? | gardenfelder wrote: | All this heavy duty construction at KSC, which is ~10' above | present sea level, but then, sea level is rising [1] | | [1] | https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/NASASeaLevel/page... | Vecr wrote: | They can build earthworks, it's not too bad. It's similar to | Manhattan Island for example, unless there's a catastrophic | failure of planning and action, they can build a sea wall | around it and put storm surge control devices in the rivers. | jeffrallen wrote: | Also: Methalox rockets are proving to be a better choice than | hydrogen powered rockets, and while you could store methane in | that tank, it's about the most expensive way possible to store | methane per litre. | | More SLS brain damage. | semi-extrinsic wrote: | Methalox can be a better choice _if you are designing a | reusable launch system and you are optimizing for low cost to | orbit_. | | SLS is planned as an expendable launch system that will put | spacecraft far beyond Earth orbit. They need the specific | impulse that hydrogen offers. | | And in related news, liquid hydrogen is going to become just | as mainstream as LNG is today, within a decade from now. All | the major LNG ship builders (KHI, GTT etc.) are building and | testing LH2 transport ships as we speak. Suiso Frontier began | operational sailing more than a year ago. | dotnet00 wrote: | Methalox ends up being preferable because Hydrogen ends up | performing relatively similarly when accounting for the | extra tank mass needed to effectively contain it (both in | terms of thicker walls and larger tanks in general). | Methalox can't achieve Hydrogen ISPs but in exchange it's | much easier to contain, allowing for much lighter and | simpler tanks, resulting in similar deltaV overall. | | On top of that cryo methane and oxygen are at closer | temperatures than hydrogen and oxygen, which simplifies | storage further. | | So effectively the difference is that Hydrogen embrittles | everything and makes development more expensive even | without reuse considerations, making Methane superior | unless you're SLS and being wasteful is a feature. | modeless wrote: | Low cost to orbit is the whole ball game. If you have that, | everything else is dramatically easier. Not optimizing for | that is, as the grandparent comment put it, brain damage. | (AKA politics) | jeffrallen wrote: | The private space industry interprets brain damage as | damage and routes around it. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-03 23:00 UTC)