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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]
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 ]
Engine Origin Designer Vehicle Status Use Propellant Power cycle Specific impulse (s) [a] Thrust (N) [a] Chamber pressure (bar) Mass (kg) Thrust: weight ratio [b] Oxidiser: fuel ratio
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 ...
By October 2014, SpaceX announced that it had manufactured the 100th Merlin 1D engine and that engines were now being produced at a rate of four per week, soon to be increased to five. [ 51 ] [ 52 ] In February 2016, SpaceX indicated that the company will need to build hundreds of engines a year in order to support a Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy build ...
The investigation revealed that the second stage igniter fault induced an interference with the engine controller that caused the data signal corruption for the thrust vector control (TVC) system, straying the vehicle off course. [98] 21 "It's A Little Chile Up Here" 29 July 2021 06:00 [99] Mahia, LC-1A: Monolith Unknown 600 km, 37° LEO: U.S ...
The RS-68 (Rocket System-68) was a liquid-fuel rocket engine that used liquid hydrogen (LH 2) and liquid oxygen (LOX) as propellants in a gas-generator cycle. It was the largest hydrogen-fueled rocket engine ever flown. [3] Designed and manufactured in the United States by Rocketdyne (later Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Aerojet Rocketdyne).