Yes and if put simply, keep the small work to solids and big/heavy lifting
to liquids. The Russians have a pretty good record. Yes I know they lack
the infrastructure to build large solids but if it was that important they
would change that. Thinking back to those 5" HIVAR rocket cases we loaded
with Galcite asphalt, as reliable as they were, even they had a blowout
disc in the center of the 8 port cluster nozzle in case of a cracked grain
which would blow the wing off a F4 or F86.Not 100% but perhaps 99.99%
reliable.
On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 10:14 AM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2020, ken mason wrote:
...I'd like to bring up some interesting observations on the topic of
solid rocket reliability...
One thing to bear in mind: small solids and big solids are different
worlds. The small solids have a rather better record. (As witness the
way that big-solid enthusiasts like to quote reliability averages over all
solids rather than just over big ones. :-) ) Big solids tend to add
complications like thrust vectoring and segmented construction, are costly
enough that developers are tempted to skimp on testing, and are terribly
sensitive to handling errors, small casting flaws, and flexing of the
large fuel masses under load.
Henry
