Liquid rocket

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A liquid rocket engine has fuel and oxidizer in liquid form, as opposed to a solid rocket or hybrid rocket or gaseous propellant.

Rockets are classified by the propellant used in their engines. The two main types of engines are solid fuel and liquid fuel. Liquid rockets are one of the major types of rocket. Liquids are mainly used rather than gases because of their high density, which permits high mass fractions, since the tankage is relatively light; tankage fractions of 100 can be achieved.

A liquid rocket could be monopropellant (using a single type of propellant), bipropellant (combining two types of propellants, such as hydrogen and oxygen) or tripropellant (using three types of propellant).

[edit] History

The idea of liquid fuel rocket as understood in the modern context first appears in the book Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами (The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices), by Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky. This seminal treatise on astronautics was published in 1903.

The first flight of a liquid-rocket powered vehicle occurred March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts USA by American professor Robert Goddard and his rocket, which used oxygen and gasoline as propellants. The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid-fueled rockets were possible.

Liquid-fueled rockets powered the first generation of modern ballistic missile weapons beginning with the German A4 SRBM in 1942, principally due to the higher energy-content of liquid fuels compared to their solid fueled cousins at the time.

[edit] External links

• An online book entitled ”How to Design, Build, and Test Small Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engines”

[edit] See also

• Solid rocket