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The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula

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Stoke Space successfully conducted a vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) developmental test flight of their reusable second stage rocket (www.stokespace.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] anindefinitearticle 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From the wiki page linked here, this looks like a toroidal spike. I wonder what sort of gas they use for the base bleed.

Several versions of the design exist, differentiated by their shapes. In the toroidal aerospike the spike is bowl-shaped with the exhaust exiting in a ring around the outer rim. In theory this requires an infinitely long spike for best efficiency, but by blowing a small amount of gas out of the center of a shorter truncated spike (like base bleed in an artillery shell), something similar can be achieved.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure those are several small distinct engines, but at high altitude with a large expansion ratio it will kind of work like an aerospike