[ExI] specific thrust

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 01:19:57AM -0800, spike wrote:

> Chemical propellant carries all its energy in the propellant itself, but
> uses a hell of lot of it to go anywhere.  The equipment needed to do it is
> very small, light and simple: a tank, a pressurization mechanism such as a
> turbine, a combustion chamber, a nozzle and off ya go.  Solid propellant is
> even simpler still: just a pressure vessel and a nozzle.  But those have
> even lower specific thrust.  High peak thrust.  The highest peak thrust ever
> I think is with solids, but I would need to look that upwards.  Are the
> space shuttle solids higher peak thrust than a Saturn V first stage main
> engine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ballistic_missile

...

Nike X was a US system of two missiles, radars and their associated 
control systems. The original Nike Zeus (later called Spartan) was 
upgraded for longer range and a much larger 5 megatonne warhead 
intended to destroy warheads with a burst of x-rays outside the 
atmosphere. A second shorter-range missile called Sprint with 
very high acceleration was added to handle warheads that evaded 
longer-ranged Spartan. Sprint was a very fast missile (some 
sources claimed it accelerated to 8,000 mph (13 000 km/h) within 
4 seconds of flight—an average acceleration of 100 g) and had a 
smaller W66 enhanced radiation warhead in the 1-3 kiloton range 
for in-atmosphere interceptions.

...

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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