[AR] Re: Mulready on Engine Development at P&W (was Re: SSTO
- From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2018 20:44:52 -0700
On 3/18/2018 6:40 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sun, 18 Mar 2018, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
I wish I'd read this before I walked into project-managing a
tech-demonstrator engine for NASA. ...it certainly would have eased
the pain, knowing others had been through the same customer ordeals
before.
If you want customer ordeals, wait for the SSME chapter. :-(
Mulready mentions in an early chapter how NASA took P&W's high-pressure
staged-combustion technology and handed it to an unnamed competitor
(Rocketdyne, of course) for the SSME contract.
I expect much more deja vu when I get to that chapter, yes.
The NASA XCOR methane lander-engine demo was schizophrenic that way.
It started out with NASA having no problems whatsoever with our having
reserved rights to our tech in the original contract. Our winning was
apparently regarded as a fluke of poor RFP wording, to be endured till
they could get a *real* rocket engineering house on the next round, and
our claimed tech performance likely a figment of our imaginations.
Then the test results started coming in, and denial ensued - we *must*
have some problem with our measurements to get efficiency and stability
results that good.
Then once we prove the measurements were good, after a bit of time for
it to sink in they started trying for all they were worth to weasel out
of - or just ignore - the "our tech coming in remains OURS" contract
clauses. I spent a lot of hours watching for and swatting evasion
efforts in the last few months of that program.
It never occurred to them to just ask us how much for a limited
non-exclusive license to the tech. I expect it would have been
stunningly affordable, by their lights. But apparently that simply
wasn't a thinkable thought in their institutional culture. All Your
Tech Are Belong To Us, period.
The followon RFP essentially mandated giving up to NASA all proprietary
tech involved. We therefore didn't bid. (Aerojet then built them the
film-cooled motor NASA thought they wanted, and by dint of turning down
the film-cooling to where the motor was seriously eroding, managed to
show combustion efficiency only ~3% short of ours and ~2% short of the
NASA 355 second projected Isp spec.)
Henry V
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