SELF-EATING ROCKET COULD HELP UK TAKE A BIG BITE OF SPACE INDUSTRY

[Judi Lynn]

Published: 10 January 2024

New developments on a nearly century-old concept for a ‘self-eating’ rocket engine capable of flight beyond the Earth’s atmosphere could help the UK take a bigger bite of the space industry.

New developments on a nearly century-old concept for a ‘self-eating’ rocket engine capable of flight beyond the Earth’s atmosphere could help the UK take a bigger bite of the space industry.

University of Glasgow engineers have built and fired the first unsupported ‘autophage’ rocket engine which consumes parts of its own body for fuel.

The design of the autophage engine - the name comes from the Latin word for ‘self-eating’ - has several potential advantages over conventional rocket designs.

The engine works by using waste heat from combustion to sequentially melt its own plastic fuselage as it fires. The molten plastic is fed into the engine’s combustion chamber as additional fuel to burn alongside its regular liquid propellants.

This means that an autophage vehicle would require less propellant in onboard tanks, and the mass freed up could be allocated to payload instead. The consumption of the fuselage could also help avoid adding to the problem of space debris – discarded waste that orbits the Earth and could hamper future missions.

More:
https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_1033908_en.html

[hunter]

1. The weight of any rocket is mostly fuel.

How's this different?

Wrap this rocket up in a heat and pressure resistant sleeve and you'll get a conventional hybrid rocket that might not blow up before all the fuel is burned.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid-propellant_rocket

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Since most of it is fuel, any saving on the "sleeve" is a large amount compared to the payload

It would be, I think, particularly advantageous for a final stage. You currently accelerate empty fuel tanks to more or less orbital speed (and maybe an engine that stays with the satellite produces the exact orbit required); save 100 kg on the tank weight, and that's 100kg more payload.