Abstract
The environmental impacts of emissions, especially from transportation, have become a well-known and very important issue in the world recently. The effects of these emissions, climate change, and global warming, for example, are accepted by many as very real and devastating effects which come from these high emission rates. One such method of emission that is not often thought about is space travel, and more specifically, launching things into space. Rocket launches make up very little of the emissions from the transportation industry in comparison to industries like aviation, which produce nearly 50 times as many emissions currently. However, the rate of growth of the rocket industry is staggering, with fewer than 100 launches a year changing to hundreds in less than 5 years. This near-exponential growth of the industry is also causing an extreme increase in the emissions caused by these launches, but it is not addressed by any legislation. The rocket industry is currently growing at a remarkable pace and producing groundbreaking technologies and innovations, but its negative impacts on the environment are not addressed at all, and many are completely unaware of them.
In order to address the growing rate of emissions from rockets using a technical viewpoint, my capstone project focused on the creation of a hybrid rocket motor using a new technology, 3D printed resin injectors. A hybrid motor works using a solid fuel alongside a liquid oxidizer in combustion to help increase the control and efficiency of the reaction. The solid fuel is easily manufacturable and cheap through 3D printing and can be made in various shapes to help improve the efficiency of the rocket. This makes the rocket more efficient than a typical liquid fuel rocket because the fuel designs can be made specifically to combust in a way that maximizes the thrust of the rocket while simultaneously minimizing the emissions. Similarly, with a 3D printed resin injector, it is much easier to make more complex injector designs, which help with mixing the fuel and oxidizer to make a more complete combustion occur and make the reaction itself more efficient. These complex injectors are usually very difficult and expensive to make using traditional manufacturing methods, but with our new 3D printed resin injectors, it is much easier and cheaper to manufacture them.
Another way to address the growing emissions from rockets would be to spread awareness about them and try to create legislation to regulate future launches. There is currently no legislation in place because the public is not focused on the environmental impact of these launches and is mainly looking at private space corporations as a benefit because of the new technologies they bring with them. This viewpoint of these private companies has caused there to be no emphasis on regulating these companies because nobody is focused on the negative impacts caused by their products. These private rocket corporations would need to face some form of regulation in order to help reduce the emissions from launches and prevent the rise of an unsolvable problem in the future with regard to the emissions from space travel and exploration. The new technologies and new discoveries that come along with space travel and the development of new rocket technologies are very important achievements, but the negative effects that space travel has on the environment can not be ignored.
This year, my capstone group successfully completed the build of our rocket engine and has been testing it, and the results of both the rocket and the resin injectors have been very good. The testing itself has had some hiccups because of difficulties with the Department of Environmental Health and Safety needing to be there to watch our first tests and scheduling regarding that, but overall, the project has been very successful. In the future, people may want to create more complex nozzle designs and attach our motor to an actual rocket, and in order to do this, a lot of additional funding would be needed to purchase quality materials.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Technical Advisor: Chloe Dedic
Technical Advisor: Daniel Quinn
STS Advisor: Kent Wayland
Technical Team Members: Sean Dunn, Ved Thakare, Jack Spinnanger, Mannix Green, Harsh Dhayal, Zach Hinz, Silas Agnew, Darsh Devkar, James Dalzell, Taka Suzuki, Dominic Profaci, Gavin Miller, Joshua Bird, Harrison Bobbitt, Thomas DeCanio, Alexander Gorodchanin, Isaac Tisinger, Adis Gorenca
