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Rutherford is a liquid-propellant rocket engine designed by aerospace company Rocket Lab [8] and manufactured in Long Beach, California. [9] The engine is used on the company's own rocket, Electron. It uses LOX (liquid oxygen) and RP-1 (refined kerosene) as its propellants and is the first flight-ready engine to use the electric-pump-fed cycle.
Its Rutherford engines are the first electric-pump-fed engine to power an orbital-class rocket. [17] Electron is often flown with a kickstage or Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft. Although the rocket was designed to be expendable, Rocket Lab has recovered the first stage twice and is working towards the capability of reusing the booster. [18]
Generally, axial pumps tend to give much lower pressures than centrifugal pumps, and a few bars is not uncommon. Their advantage is a much higher volumetric flowrate. For this reason they are common for pumping liquid hydrogen in rocket engines, because of its much lower density than other propellants which usually use centrifugal pump designs.
Electrical pumps had been used in the secondary propulsion system of the Agena upper stage vehicle. [1] As of December 2020, the only rocket engines to use electric propellant pump systems are the Rutherford engine, [2] ten of which power the Electron rocket, [2] and the Delphin engine, five of which power the first stage of Astra Space's ...
The Rutherford engine uses pumps driven by battery-powered electric motors rather than a gas generator, expander, or preburner. [107] The engine is fabricated largely by 3D printing, using electron beam melting, [108] whereby layers of metal powder are melted in a high vacuum by an electron beam. [109]
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The RS-25 engine consists of pumps, valves, and other components working in concert to produce thrust. Fuel (liquid hydrogen) and oxidizer (liquid oxygen) from the Space Shuttle's external tank entered the orbiter at the umbilical disconnect valves and from there flowed through the orbiter's main propulsion system (MPS) feed lines; whereas in the Space Launch System (SLS), fuel and oxidizer ...
An F-1 engine, on loan from the National Air and Space Museum, is on display at the Air Zoo in Portage, Michigan. [22] An F-1 engine is on a horizontal display stand at Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. [citation needed] F-1 engine F-6049 is displayed vertically at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington as part of the Apollo exhibit.