Fastrac was a turbo pump-fed, liquid

rocket engine A rocket engine uses stored rocket propellants as the reaction mass for forming a high-speed propulsive Jet (fluid), jet of fluid, usually high-temperature gas. Rocket engines are reaction engines, producing thrust by ejecting mass rearward, i ...

. The engine was designed by

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as part of the low cost X-34 Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) and as part of the Low Cost Booster Technology (LCBT, aka Bantam) project. This engine was later known as the MC-1 engine when it was merged into the X-34 project.

Design

The turbopump engine was designed to be used in an expendable booster in the LCBT project. As a result this led to the use of composite materials because of their significantly lower costs and production speed; this also reduced engine complexity since the fuel was not used for nozzle cooling. Based on knowledge and experience from the

Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program na ...

's Reusable Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM) and the Solid Propulsion Integrity Program (SPIP), a

Silica Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula , most commonly found in nature as quartz and in various living organisms. In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is o ...

/phenolic material was chosen for the

ablative In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. ...

liner with carbon/epoxy structural overlap. The engine fuel was a mixture of

liquid oxygen Liquid oxygen—abbreviated LOx, LOX or Lox in the aerospace, submarine and gas industries—is the liquid form of molecular oxygen. It was used as the oxidizer in the first liquid-fueled rocket invented in 1926 by Robert H. Goddard, an a ...

and

kerosene Kerosene, paraffin, or lamp oil is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from el, κηρός (''keros'') meaning " wax", and was reg ...

(

RP-1 RP-1 (alternatively, Rocket Propellant-1 or Refined Petroleum-1) is a highly refined form of kerosene outwardly similar to jet fuel, used as rocket fuel. RP-1 provides a lower specific impulse than liquid hydrogen (LH2), but is cheaper, i ...

). These propellants are used by Saturn F1 rocket engine. Kerosene does not have the same energy release as hydrogen, used with the

, but it is cheaper and easier to handle and store. Propellants were fed via a single shaft, dual impeller LOX/RP-1 turbo-pump. The engine was started with a hypergolic igniter to maintain a simple design. Kerosene was injected and the engine was then running. The propellants were then fed into the gas generator for mixing and thrust chamber for burning. The engine uses a

gas generator A gas generator is a device for generating gas. A gas generator may create gas by a chemical reaction or from a solid or liquid source, when storing a pressurized gas is undesirable or impractical. The term often refers to a device that uses a ...

cycle to drive the turbo-pump turbine, which then exhausts this small amount of spent fuel. This is the identical cycle used with the Saturn rockets, but much less complex than the Space Shuttle engine system. The engine used an inexpensive, expendable, ablatively cooled

carbon fiber Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (American English), carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (Commonwealth English), carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics, carbon-fiber reinforced-thermoplastic (CFRP, CRP, CFRTP), also known as carbon fiber, carbon compo ...

composite nozzle and produced 60,000 lbf (285 kN) of thrust. After use nearly all of the engine's parts are reusable. During the research phase in 1999 each Fastrac engine was costed at approximately $1.2 million. Production costs were expected to drop to $350,000 per engine.

History

Engine system level testing started in 1999 at the

Stennis Space Center The John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC) is a NASA rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi, United States, on the banks of the Pearl River at the Mississippi–Louisiana border. , it is NASA's largest rocket engine test facility. T ...

. Earlier tests were on individual components at the

Marshall Space Flight Center The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), located in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama ( Huntsville postal address), is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. As the largest NASA center, MSFC's first ...

. NASA started full-engine, hot-fire testing in March, 1999, with a 20 second test to demonstrate the complete engine system. The engine was tested at full power for 155 seconds on July 1, 1999. A total of 85 tests were scheduled for the rest of 1999. As of 2000, 48 tests had been conducted on three engines using three test stands. The first engine was installed on the X-34 A1 vehicle that was unveiled at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on April 30, 1999. The Fastrac program was cancelled in 2001. After FASTRAC, NASA tried to salvage this design for use in other rockets such as

Rotary Rocket Rotary Rocket Company was an aerospace company in the late 1990s. Its founders were among the first to recognize that the end of the Cold War represented a significant shift away from the militarization of space, to a new civilian-led, commerci ...

's Roton and

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's X-34 project. The designation of the rocket engine was changed from the Fastrac 60K to Marshall Centre - 1 (MC-1). The MC-1 project was closed by July, 2009, after the X-34 project was terminated in March, 2009.

Components

NASA collaborated with industry partners to meet the principal objective to use commercial, off-the-shelf components. Industry partners included Summa Technology Inc., Allied Signal Inc., Marotta Scientific Controls Inc., Barber-Nichols Inc., and Thiokol Propulsion.

Legacy

A similar set of technical solutions that reduce the cost of the engine was implemented in the SpaceX's Merlin 1A engine, which used a turbopump from the same subcontractor. The Merlin-1A was somewhat larger with a thrust of versus for Fastrac. The same basic design was capable of much higher thrust levels after upgrading the turbopump. Variants of the Merlin-1D achieve of thrust as of May, 2018, though the combustion chamber is now regeneratively cooled.

Specifications

*Vacuum thrust: *Vacuum specific impulse: 314 s (3.0 kN·s/kg) *Chamber pressure: 633 psi *Total mass flow: 91.90 kg/s *Gas generator pressure: 39.64 bar *Gas generator temperature: 888.89 K *Throat diameter: 0.22 m *Fuel: RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene) *Oxidizer: Liquid oxygen

References

;Note * * Ballard, R.O.; Olive, T.: Development Status of the NASA MC-1 (Fastrac) Engine; AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, 2000 Huntsville, AL, AIAA 2000-3898

External links

NASA Fastrac Overview. 1999
{{Rocket engines Rocket engines using kerosene propellant Rocket engines using the gas-generator cycle Rocket engines of the United States