The team of engineers who designed and developed the new Fastrac rocket engine that will be used for the first powered flight of NASA's X-34 technology demonstrator is being honored for helping NASA achieve its goal of low-cost access to space.
On May 18, NASA's Office of Aerospace Technology will present the Fastrac engine team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., with an award for developing technology aimed at reducing the cost to launch a pound of payload from $10,000 to $1,000 by 2010.
The award will be presented at the "Turning Goals Into Reality" conference in Huntsville. The conference, May 18-19 at the Marshall Center, will focus on recent aerospace accomplishments by NASA and its industry partners, and consider the future of air and space transportation technology.
Fastrac is a 60,000-pound-thrust engine fueled by a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene. It's less expensive than similar engines because of an innovative design approach that uses commercial, off-the-shelf parts and fewer of them. Common manufacturing methods are used, so building the engine is relatively easy and not as labor-intensive as manufacturing typical rocket engines. Each Fastrac engine will initially cost approximately $1.2 million -- about one-fourth the cost of similar engines.
"The Fastrac team challenged and reinvented the traditional design process used for engine development," said Dr. Row Rogacki, director of the Space Transportation Directorate at the Marshall Center. "Engineering and test activities have been streamlined. State-of-the-art modeling and analysis techniques and crisp, effective communication enhanced the design and development of the Fastrac engine."
As the first engine developed in house by engineers at the Marshall Center, Fastrac leapt from the drawing board to full-engine testing in less than three years -- a much faster than usual design cycle for rocket engines.
Full-engine, hot-fire testing began in March 1999 at NASA's Stennis Space Center, Miss. In May 1999, the complete engine system was tested for the first time at full power for 150 seconds, the length of time it will be required to perform during an X-34 flight. System level testing is being conducted now at Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, Calif., while component testing continues at the Marshall Center.
NASA's industry team for design, development and manufacture of the Fastrac engine includes Summa Technology Inc. of Huntsville, which builds components such as the gas generator, propellant lines, ducts and brackets and assembles the engines; Allied Signal Inc. of Tempe, Ariz., and Marotta Scientific Controls Inc. of Montville, N.J., which supply valves; Barber-Nichols Inc.of Arvada, Colo., which builds the turbopump; and Thiokol Propulsion, a division of Cordant Technologies Inc. of Salt Lake City, Utah, which builds the chamber nozzle.