PUBLIC TALK Forging an African Space Launch Capability
commercial satellites both South African satellites and those of foreign customers to low earth orbit on a South African vehicle from South African soil in a repeatable and financially sustainable way so during this week we are going to be hosting a series of events those include uh a research seminar for postgraduate students and a stem event on rockets for local schools but this evening it is my privilege to kick the kick the thing kick things off start the ball rolling I guess you could say with this talk which we’ve titled forging and African space launch capability the story of the Aerospace Systems Research Institute so let’s get started for an Institute to function effectively it has to look beyond the boundaries of its host University to the broader society and for an Institute that has commercial Ambitions as azre does it’s important for us to understand the global space economy before we attempt to supply Technology Solutions into that economy so we will begin there and in that process I will attempt to make the case for an independent South African rocket launch capability it’s not possible to have a lecture about Rockets without talking about rocket science and so for a brief detour we’ll look at these uh mighty machines how they work and some of the challenges associated with designing and building them a rocket by itself is not a launch capability there is an entire ecosystem of Technologies and capabilities that have to be developed alongside the vehicle and so after looking at the space launch ecosystem uh I will introduce more formally azri to you our Origins and objectives what we’re all about and our people and then for most of the talk we will focus on the technology programs uh that azre runs in order to achieve our goals the reason there is a space economy in the first place is because of the utility of satellites there are not many people who build rockets for the sake of building Rockets they all do one fundamental thing if they’re orbital vehicles and that is they Place satellites in orbit and you might be wondering if there’s why there is a demand for satellites and I put it to you that our modern lives depend increasingly on spacecraft perhaps in ways that you have not imagined I will give you two quick examples the first is satellite television I’m sure that many of you on a regular basis watch satellite television in South Africa that would be DStv that signal that comes to your decoda first travels from the ground to a satellite it’s an Intel sat satellite stationed at nearly 36,000 kilm above the surface of the Earth in what we call a geostationary orbit it travels at about 11,000 km an hour and it was placed there in 2012 by a European Space Agency rocket called Aran if you don’t want to do without your satellite TV then you need to acknowledge the role of satellites how about Google Maps I’m quite sure that in the last week or two weeks or perhaps month every single person here at some point if they have a smartphone has used that smartphone to get directions well your smartphone uses the GPS system system which is a constellation of satellites located about 20,000 km above the surface of the Earth in what we call a medium earth orbit and those were placed there by a variety of rockets Atlas Rockets Delta rockets and more recently by Falcon 9 rockets and I could give you a whole lot more examples which I’ve noted there on the screen of ways that our lives are dependent on satellites when when we communicate in many cases our communication goes through satellites when you withdraw money from an ATM the chances are if you walk outside and look at the outside of the ATM facility you’ll see a satellite dish that is communicating back to your bank off a satellite weather prediction um looking after the environment monitoring for disasters Water Management crop management improving crop yields the applications are almost endless so at the moment there are 10,000 satellites orbiting active satellites orbiting above our heads and every single one of those got there on a rocket there is no other way at the present time to get a satellite into orbit so before we look more at the value of the space economy I want to just point something out because there’s been a radical transformation of the space economy in the past 30 years and if azri aspires to supply Technical Solutions to that economy this is something that we have to be cognizant of so if I talk to you about the Space Race most people know about the Space Race but they Imagine That Space Race to be the old space race between geopolitical Rivals so the Soviet Union America 1950s 60s ’70s all the way up to the ’90s the space launch industry was dominated by that particular mode and even if you were launching a commercial satellite the chances are it was going to go to orbit on an atlas or Delta launcher maybe on the space shuttle but the early Rockets including the atlas and Delta and many others including all of the Soviet Rockets are actually repurposed missiles they were bought of the Cold War and then sometime around the mid 1990s NASA decided the US government decided that it was important to change the way people and goods were delivered to the International Space Station so they implemented a program which was initially called alternate access and later the commercial orbital transportation services program or cots and they incentivized compan to build Rockets instead of the old familiar defense industry and all of a sudden old space turned into new space so what is new space it’s about being driven by commercial interests it’s about private entrance developing a host of new reusable Rockets not the old Expendable types but rockets that you can fly and put back on the on the pad it’s about agile business models it’s about fast and Innovative manufacturing techniques and above all it’s about something that I’ve called Fearless innovation in the old space setup because companies were involved with governments and because of the inevitable bureaucracy that comes with that these programs were risk averse so Rockets took a long time to develop and the government bureaucracy was part of that part of that problem but what the modern entrance what the new space players have done and on the screen you see some examples there the most famous example of course is Space X which is run by Elon Musk but there are many examples there’s uh blue origin there’s rocket lab uh rocket Factory alburg or orex there’s a bunch of these guys out there and what they all do is they all Chase rapid development timelines as the definition there says new space is a structural transformation of the space sector associated with the entry of private companies and investors the adoption of new business models and the reorientation of space agencies towards Market oriented policies a completely different way of doing business so if you think of the space economy you likely to think of a rocket launch for obvious reasons and you’re likely to think of the satellite that goes on the top of the rocket and you wouldn’t be wrong but that’s only one element so the traditional way of looking at the economy is in terms of upstream and downstream segments before the rocket gets on the pad it has to be de developed it has to be designed and there has an entire industry Aerospace industry associated with that the satellite has to be manufactured you need ground support equipment you need a LaunchPad you need Telemetry and tracking and if you put all of those things together and you add them all up you have what is termed the Upstream segment because it happens before the launch but now you sit with a satellite in orbit it hasn’t switched on yet it’s just sitting there 10,000 kilm above your head 20,000 whatever it is 400 kilm the moment that satellite starts to broadcast we have the evolution of the down stream economy now we have space operations people who have to keep the satellite healthy if it’s a constellation make sure that all of them are operating deorbit them at the end of their lives move them out of the way if they’re space junk all of that sort of thing and then of course the big thing is products and services when you pay your DStv bll a portion of that money every month goes back to Intel set the third segment generally speaking is spin out Technologies uh and those are technologies that are evolved from the space industry uh for example medical innovations that have used space technology they’re no longer in the space um regime but they are part of the of the spin out process and if you look at that graphic you might be tempted to think because of the way that I’ve drawn it with the nodes on the left you might be tempted to think that the space economy is primarily about the Upstream segment but actually the vast majority of the of the money is in the products and the services in fact over 80% of the space economy is vested in products and services but the great thing about Rockets is that they are gatekeeping Technologies you cannot put a satellite into orbit without a rocket so although they Rockets constitute a relatively minor percentage of the space economy they are essential and if you’re working in that regime or in that area you are always going to have business you just have to make sure that your product uh is better than the competitors azri is concerned therefore with the Upstream segment we’re not concerned with the with the downstream how big is the space economy at the moment it’s estimated to be worth 500 billion us annually but it’s projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2035 and of that portion right now the launch Services segment is worth about $14 billion so what this tells us is that if you have a product that is worth spending money on if you have a successful launch product a rocket capability there is a market out there and in azri we have determined that we need to capture a very small part of that Market to be sustainable satellites of course are increasingly popular and there’s in fact explosive growth in Satellite technology the graphic there talks a little bit about satellites the small satellite a small satellite is anything under 500 kg so 500 kg or less and actually if you look at the graphic you will see that the average projected mass of a satellite between this year and 2032 or last year in 2032 is only about 83 kilog the average mass so what this has done is it’s focused attention on launch vehicles that can get small satellites into orbit yes you can you can send a satellite on a large launch vehicle in collaboration with a whole lot of other satellites you can send a bunch of them up but there’s a market also for small satellite launch vehicles and that’s where azri is interested uh in doing its work in terms of uh our own continent Africa is increasingly interested in Satellite development but we have one problem here which is we don’t have a launch capability so even though we can send satellites to foreign countries for launch there is a price to be paid for that for one thing it adds cost secondly it restricts the orbits you’re going into because you are basically hitching a ride effectively with a whole bunch of other satellites and whatever orbit they going into you’re going to go into that unless you want to buy the entire rocket um but that gets very expensive and thirdly uh the problem with Outsourcing launch is that you often encounter delays and that has been a problem with some of the South African satellites that have been launched in the recent past this is a map of the countries that have a launch capability and it’s divided into three categories those with an advanced capability those with an established capability and those that are developing and you can see where the advant capability is shaded in Gray effectively the entire northern hemisphere is like that or the the north the global North so the United States Russia China Japan India the whole of Europe if they need to launch a satellite they have the means to do it the new entrance there are established launch Capa capabilities in New Zealand the most successful small satellite launch vehicle is a New Zealand rocket the koreas Iran and then of course developing countries uh the countries looking to develop launch include Australia Brazil uh and the United Kingdom we have an advantage in South Africa and the advantage is that if you want to get a satellite into Polar orbit you have to first of all clear your airspace because there’s air traffic everywhere so what I’ve done is superimposed in the next Slide the density of air traffic that is generally around and about and it looks like that well if you want to launch from South Africa you have almost no air traffic to get out of the way and you have very little marine traffic and our weather is not bad either compared to the very Northern launch sites in Sweden and uh Norway and some of the UK Islands so we have a natural advantage these small launches have been facilitated they’ve been enabled if you like because they are enable uh customers to tailor their orbits if you want to put a small satellite on the top of a rocket and there are two rockets there for example the leftand rocket is uh rocket rocket Labs electron the most successful small set launcher and the one on the right is a systems Space Systems rs1 those Rockets typically carry about 300 kg 300 to 500 kg of payload into low earth orbit and the main technical enablers that have enabled their development are primarily in the last 30 years advances in computational simulation so you can design Rockets now much more quickly because you have very powerful tools at your disposal uh modeling fluid mechanics modeling structural loads modeling um thermal uh loads as well and all of that can be done much quicker and much more cheaply than ever before advances in microelectronics satellites are getting smaller and finally Advanced manufacturing Advanced composite materials and in some cases additive manufacturing on the left of your screen you see a nice scaled diagram showing the Rockets some of the rockets that are out there commercial rockets and I think the one you might you might be most familiar with is on the far right it’s that giant rocket it’s SpaceX is Falcon 9 that will lug about 22.8 tons of payload into low earth orbit but the price is low so on the right you have a graph there of the launch price or cost per kilogram to launch on that particular rocket and if you look at that data point it seems to be sitting around 2,400 $2,500 us per kilogram but there is a catch unless you are willing to buy the whole rocket 22,800 kg you have to sh share the rocket and if you share the rocket then according to the SpaceX website you pay $6,000 per kilogram and you ride along to orbit with a whole bunch of other guys satellites on the other end of the scale is rocket lab’s electron and you might be shocked to see that the price per kilogram there is about $25,000 which is a lot more expensive so why do people use electron well for the simple reason that it is an on demand service they will launch very quickly after you place the order with them and they will take you to wherever you want to go in a within the cap capacity of the vehicle and so we have here a case where there’s a market for both of these vehicles there’s a market for Falcon 9 and there’s a market for for um electron it’s a little bit like the analogy between cars and buses right if you want to travel from point A to point B exactly you might want to take the car but it costs you more but then you can drive exactly from A to B if you want to pay less you can take the bus but you might have some walking to do and you might not get to exactly where you want to go but cars and buses are part of the economy so we are interested in these small satellite launch vehicles and that’s where the case for a launch capability arises I’ve listed there the reasons why uh we should pursue a South African launch capability and there are a number of those reasons we believe there is a business case for a sustainable launch program there are strategic reasons we want to be independent data Independence we don’t want to be dependent on other countries that can deny you the right to get to orbit if they want you if they don’t want to host your launch your satellite on their vehicle there are Industrial in economic reasons we want to boost South Africa’s Advanced manufacturing sector we want to drive economic growth and aerospace engineering this is a new sector it’s not taking resources from any other we can create employment we can attract foreign income and generate tax revenue by launching foreign satellites on a South African vehicle there are social advantages we need to improve the quality of maths and science that is being taught in our schools and a program like this can act as an incentive in that respect there are Geographic advantages as I’ve explained already where South Africa is located and there is also Legacy infrastructure from South Africa’s previous launch program which was run back in the 1980s which more of a military program but there is still some Legacy infrastructure available to use all right having made a case for launch I want to now go into the subject of rocket science so if you’re a student here you can get your notes out we we’ll have a test in a moment or two no there will be no test but it is important that we explain something about Rockets So that um we are familiar with the challenges because these are these are crazy machines they they operate at the very edge of what is possible and they’re difficult to design a rocket is a self-propelled machine with four components it’s an arrow structure or the airframe it has the propulsion or engine system it has a payload and a guidance system most commercial launch vehicles are liquid propellant rockets and you can see an i graphic their courtesy of the folks at Nasa explaining how rocket works you have a tank of fuel you have a tank of oxidizer you pump both of those propellants into the chamber and you ignite them and hopefully the engine survives and then you Propel that gas at very high velocity out the back and at that point physics takes over and by the law of conservation of momentum and Newton’s third law the particles go that way at high velocity and the rocket goes that way at high velocity and it’s that simple trajectories can be either suborbital or orbital you can either go on a rock it up and come straight down again you can go into space and come straight down again or you can go into space and stay there in which case you have to achieve those very high velocities that I mentioned earlier for the Intel sat and the GPS system but chemical Rockets are the only way to get to space there is no other way at present there’s a little graphic to explain the the difference between suborbital and orbital on the left you have the suborbital flight technically a suborbital rocket must get into space and come back down again on the right you have to go up to get into orbit and you have to turn and go sideways so it’s not just about going up it’s about going sideways at that very high orbital velocity and if you do that fast enough and at 400 km you have to travel at about 28,000 km/ hour you can stay in orbit there is an atlas 5 rocket all right so just to give you some idea you can see on the right hand side there’s an exploded view it’s a two-stage launch vehicle it has an atlas booster which yes is actually from based on engine techn in fact um in fact that actually is Russian engine technology believe it or not which the Americans used or bought and put onto the atlas rocket there’s an upper stage called centor and then there’s the payload at the top and what I’m going to do now is I’m going to show you a very good video from United launcher Alliance and I’ve docked the video a little bit um and I’ve added some graphics because we’re going to build this rocket on the pad and we’re going to use the polling procedure which the engineers go through just before launch to do it okay so just before launch if you’ve ever watched one of these before every guy says go no go etc etc and I’m doing this so that hopefully convey to you the the complexity on one of these machines let’s watch status check to proceed with terminal count Atlas systems propulsion go Hydraulics go pneumatics go lo2 go water go Centaur systems propulsion go pneumatics go lo2 go lh2 go has gas go electrical systems Airborne go ground go facility go rfts go flight control go gcq go off support go Tom go umbilicals go go ECS go Red Line monitor go quality go op safety Manager Go Ula safety officer go vehicle system engineer go anomaly Chief go range coordinator clear to proceed launch director launch vehicle is ready to launch mission director you have permission to launch proceeding with the count ALC verify t0 is set for 1247 Zulu verified status check go Atlas go Centaur go silent Parker and O 107 T minus 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 we have ignition 2 1 and liftoff of the United launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket carrying silent Barker NR 107 for the national reconnaissance office and the United States space force SRB chamber pressures continue to climb out we have entered our first throttle bucket for the Rd 1880 complex machines so even if you spend all that time and you develop the rocket even if you get it onto the pad you still don’t really have a launch capability because a launch capability is a entire raft of different capabilities put together not only do you need to develop the rocket you also have to launch it from somewhere so you have to have a launch pad you have to have a space port you have to be able to manage the mission the mission planning capability you have to do all the R&D you have to do the supply chain you have to build the rocket not not easy building a rocket you have to have a business that coordinates all of this so that you do it profitably you need regulatory Frameworks you have to engage with governments insurance issues and and of course you have to have people who are skilled at doing all of this and if you put it all together you have what is called the launch capability and if you take that entire system of systems you have an ecosystem we are concerned in azri with developing that ecosystem so we are not just doing one thing and in this talk I’m going to address five of those areas the human capital development or the development of people skills the launch vehicle itself the Spaceport the R&D and the supply chain so something about our Origins as we began in as azre which was the Aerospace Systems research group in 20 2009 uh we were started um here by my colleague Jean Pau and myself in mechanical engineering and we built the group initially on targeted Aerospace research projects at postgraduate level and very very much inspired by this new space environment that I talked about earlier remember that the new space era only started in the early 2000s SpaceX I think was formed in 2002 or thereabouts it only had its first successful launch in 2008 so this is all in the same sort of era inspired by that we decided to to to develop a group and we changed gears in 2017 we initially started a lot with hybrid rockets and we contined to do that but we we started to look more closely at these small satellite launch vehicles and then in 2022 we were upgraded from a research group to an Institute in December 2022 and we employed our first cohort of engineers in 2023 and we are funded by the department of Science and Innovation and of course the University of quazi Nal we have aims three formal aims one is to become a global center of excellence in Aerospace propulsion to support South Africa’s Space Engineering economy and to develop people we like to say in azri we build rockets and we build rocket scientists because without the people you can do nothing we have a range of objectives I won’t go through all of those you can see them on the screen there but the first of those is to support the development of a sovereign launch capability for South Africa to put it in a nutshell we are building a South African launch C capability ecosystem in terms of our people uh the The Institute has three directors myself Professor Jean Pon and Professor Glenn sneden and we employ 13 Engineers uh five senior Engineers eight engineers and a financial administrator and at present we have around 18 or 19 postgraduates at the PHD and Master’s level so something about our people as I said we interested in developing not just Technologies but people as well and without that human ecosystem Sovereign launch will not happen we estimate that we need somewhere around 50 to 60 skilled experienced Engineers to launch rockets from South Africa on a sustainable basis and we have we are on our way to creating that pool of talent uh within azri we also have what we call a Talent pipeline program and the Talon pipeline program encompasses all the student related supervision support and mentorship activities that happen in azri and that Talent pipeline also ensures a constant stream of incoming talent to help build that sustainable launch capability there are some pictures of our people uh some postgraduate students undergraduate students in the business of in the process of building Rockets testing them we prioritize community outreach we’re very aware of the fact that in a country like ours if you propose to build a rocket program there will be questions about that and it’s important that people firstly understand how important satellites are to their everyday lives and secondly that there is a business case for launch so we uh do a lot of public engagements we do a lot of stem events in the past year we have reached over 1 and a half thousand uh school students School pupils at schools across South Africa we present talks we do activities Stomp Rocket we build stomp Rockets uh we invite students to attend launches of the little Phoenix rockets and we partner with the South African National Space Agency and non-governmental organizations to make that all happen so to the technical program azri has four main areas of work we work in suborbital launch systems and low altitude Rockets these are Phoenix hybrid Rockets uh and a new sounding rocket that we’re developing that will get two space on a suborbital trajectory but the main work is focused on in the in the second area which is orbital launcher development that’s the small satellite launch vehicle excuse me and that is sapphire powered by Sapphire engine and we call that small uh launch vehicle small satellite launch vehicle clv or the commercial launch vehicle we’re also active in Turbo Machinery research and propellant so a word about Phoenix Phoenix Rockets are powered by hybrid Motors and this is a training program for us this allows our Engineers to learn how to design and fly Rockets without dealing with very big complicated expensive systems but the great thing about a hybrid rocket is it has a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer so it’s halfway to a full liquid propellant rocket and that’s really good news because it allows us to to teach or to train our our Personnel on how to build the the flow control systems Etc that are all part of a liquid propellant rocket and we have made substantial incremental um advances with the Phoenix rockets in the area of the arrow structures um lightweight nozzle casings and so on there’s a picture of a phoenix 1C rocket it’s about 5 A2 M long and there’s a cutaway in the lower diagram there and you can see that the motor is on the left that’s contains the solid fuel wax that is the the fuel for the for the for the for the motor and in the middle the big blue tank is a PVC lined pressure vessel that houses or contains the nitrous oxide that is the oxidizer and then on the far right is the parachute Bay and the payload Bay for the Phoenix rocket there is um Advanced manufacturing I talked earlier about the supply chain that’s part of the ecosystem so we have partnered with a company Petra well who are adapt at making uh filament wound components so there’s a nose cone being wound on the right with fiberglass and on the left a an oxidizer tank for Phoenix rocket being manufactured from carbon fiber and that is very very advanced technology once you’ve built the rocket you have to test it I’m going to show you a video now of the Phoenix rocket motor being tested this is um for safety reasons we had to drag this out onto a field far away from from anybody for safety reasons obviously and uh well it’s on a sports field and the grounds keeper wasn’t too happy about it afterwards but we can talk about that in a moment as you can see we left our Mark that’s a cutaway of the Phoenix motor as I said it contains wax ordinary candle wax nothing special uh and a nozzle of course and the nitrous oxide is injected into that and combusts with the wax to form the hper pressure gas that is then expelled through the nozzle we have to do a whole lot of other tests before we launch one of these Phoenix Rockets so here’s another little video showing the retraction of one of the umbilical connectors so a phoenix rocket has got fluid in it it’s got propellant in it and you need to fuel it up when it’s on the Launchpad and you can’t have people near there because for safety reasons it’s high pressure and it’s unsafe so here’s a little test just to show you how we retract the little umbilical connector that’s a Pneumatic retraction process so once the Rocket’s on the pad there’s no one near it there’s no one to go and pull out the plug it has to be done remotely and automatically the Phoenix launch system comprises a mobile rocket launch uh platform which you see in the center all of the propellants are brought to the pad connected up everything is controlled by computer lab view automatic uh sequencer system controls the countdown controls the ignition everything is done on computer where do we do these launches well you cannot launch a phoenix rocket in a builtup area these Rockets can go all the way up to 18 19 20 kilm that’s 6 or S kilometers above a commercial jet airliner so you have to be very careful we do all of our testing at the denell overberg test range which is in the Western Cape and uh there’s a picture of that you can see the launch pad there lpoa and we tend to launch these rocket out to sea so that they don’t go Inland they stay away from Human settlement but this is also the launch facility where a clv orbital launch vehicle would eventually um go to low earth orbit from since 2014 we have launched six of these Phoenix Rockets every one of them are training exercise and uh five out of the six were successful uh there’s a little data table you can also Al see the progression there if you look at the very last line in that table the apog is the height that the rocket reached when we started out with Phoenix 1A we got to the princely height of 2,500 m 2 and a half kilm we increased that with Phoenix 1B mark one 11 km and then the record that we set the African altitude record for hybrid Rockets is just under 18 kilm but you can see also the the dry mass of the vehicle has actually decreased so the Rockets are getting more efficient they’re going higher but they weigh less when we go to one of these launch campaigns we take teams and that team um process the team building process allows us to train the students and our Personnel in how to launch rockets and even though these are little Rockets the same principles apply to the small rockets that apply to the big Rockets So we have teams for Vehicle Assembly payload and recovery and so on so here is the first Phoenix rocket that we ever launched this is back in 2014 4 3 2 it’s a lot smaller than the atlas 5 it’s only a little low altitude rocket but it uh it was successful it didn’t go as high as we’d hoped now if you’re going to build Rockets you have to accept that sometimes you get it wrong not everything is a success and we have had our share of failures but the important thing in engineering and not just in rocketry but in Engineering in general is to learn from your failures so that you don’t make the same mistake twice um you can judge for yourself about the mistake here 4 3 2 1 Z we have [Music] laun now that was a failed launch but actually it taught us something it taught us a couple of important things first of all the cause of that failure are there any computer scientists here it was a soft a bug it was actually a coding mistake we wrote the wrong code that controls the little oxidizer valve and as soon as it the motor lit closed so the motor perform beautifully but unfortunately the rocket came back down to earth the other thing we learned is that hybrid Rockets are really safe look at that scene that you see on the screen there that launch trailer has been hit by a live rocket if that rocket had been a solid propellant rocket rocket or a liquid propellant rocket there would be nothing left all that happened in this particular case is that the nitrous oxide pressure vessel burst and nitrous oxide if you’re not aware is actually laughing gas I mean this was no laughing matter but it’s laughing gas it just vaporizes so there is a safety angle and that is one of the reasons why we choose to work with hybrid Rockets fortunately we haven’t had any failures like that again this is the record setting altitude flight of Phoenix 1B Mark 2R and this is the side view of the same flight and there are some photos taken from the top of that Rocket’s flight and even though it’s nowhere near space it looks like it is because the atmosphere is so the density has dropped so low that there isn’t enough air to scatter the lights and make it blue so so it appears dark black almost and that was the third highest at the time in uh March 2021 it was the third highest altitude achieved by any University anywhere with a hybrid rocket 2023 another launch campaign and this is some nice video here as well [Music] we spin the rocket because it stabilizes the rocket so that’s intended and then it gets to its apery and you can see it kind of Falls over and starts to head back down again Phoenix is great it’s a good training program but we have our sight set on a much more high performance vehicle and this is called the suborbital test vehicle with a nice acronym steep so Steve is a liquid propellant rocket engine powered vehicle so this is not a hybrid rocket motor this is now a sapphire engine powering a sounding rocket that we hope will get to 100 kilm by the way the technical definition of space is what happens at 100 kilometers or above so that’s about the distance from Duran to hock that’s how close space is but it’s deceptive because to get a vehicle into space is very hard and to get it to stay there at 28,000 km an hour you need enormous amounts of energy chemical energy inside that vehicle and you have to control the chemical energy that’s what the engine does so space is close but space is not easy to to achieve we hope to fly Steve in 2026 and we will keep everybody posted on that development there’s a cutaway showing Steve it’s a liquid propellant vehicle so it has an oxidizer tank it has a fuel tank and it has a payload module in addition to a single Sapphire engine at the back but this is really what azri is all about I said at the beginning that we have as our primary ambition the development of a satellite launch capability for South Africa this is the vehicle that will achieve that it’s called somewhat unimaginatively a commercial launch vehicle or clv until we give it a better name it is a two-stage rocket the first stage is powered by nine of those Sapphire engines and the upper stage is powered by a single engine it’s about 20 M tall and it is designed to carry about 200 kg into low earth orbit from South Africa it’s also sized for the majority of South Africa and Africa’s payloads but it will be marketed to International customers as well once it’s on the pad so our current focus is on the sapphire liquid rocket engine and what I’m showing you there is just a cad render flying around the rocket you can see the top end is where you keep the satellite so there’s the satellite the payload we call it and that’s the upper stage of the rocket below that is the is the engine it’s a vacuum engine a sapphire vacuum engine and below that of course is the main fuel and oxidizer tank for the booster stage much bigger because they’re now nine engines that have to fire all at once um and then the engine cluster at uh the bottom of the rocket so we are spending a lot of time in azre developing Sapphire this is the engine that will power that and you can see a graphic of the engine on the screen there it’s a low cost low comp lexity engine specifically designed to power clv and of course the single engine Steve suborbital rocket it’s a locks kerosene engine so it’s liquid oxygen and effectively jet fuel and it is driven by electrically powered pumps it’s an atively cooled engine though so the engine cooling is done by ablating a material that lines the inside of that engine we have have developed the engine in fact in about 6 weeks four four to 5 weeks time we’re going to be doing the first Hot Fire test of one of these engines Under Pressure fed conditions so no pumps but just pressure fed uh Sapphire engine and you can see there a video playing of our industrial partner petrell um filament winding one of the casings for the sapphire engine part of the engine is an injector this is another very complicated piece of the engine this is the component that takes the fuel and the oxidizer brings it together mixes it atomizes the sprays and ensures stable combustion so we do a lot of work also on the development of injectors and you can see in the picture there that is an injector undergoing a cold flow test that is liquid oxygen issuing from the the little holes in the face plate of that injector VOR so where are we in the sapphire program we started with a test engine which we called able a blaive blowdown liquid engine that’s on the far left of your screen AEL was a prototype it was never going to fly anywhere it was a battleship engine big and heavy and designed to withstand a test campaign the next step is the sapphire engine which you can see in the second block the third is of course manufacturing that and we have done that now and that is a fullscale sapphire engine being held by one of our senior engineers and if you take nine of those engines and you put them together in a cluster on the back of clv you have what is represented by the render on the right hand side and for scale a human in the picture this is a small rocket AEL was a successful test we tested this engine back in 2021 at overberg test range uh it was a training engine we needed to understand how to build liquid propellant rocket engines and we met all our objectives in that test and I’m going to show you a video now of this engine firing of course nobody anywhere near it we’re all sitting in a block house some way away the test the engine test is controlled by computers everything is started up remotely um and uh and here is the engine firing there was a fire unit on hand to put out the the fire of course to test a rocket engine you also have to have a test facility and th those containers that you see there are ukzn’s mobile liquid rocket engine test facility which we built so actually when you when you build a rocket engine it’s complex enough to build the engine but it’s also very complicated to test it because you can’t afford for the engine to you know it has to be tested under very strict conditions you have to be able to control the flow rates going into the engine you have to be able to measure the thrust measure pressures temperatures and all sorts of other parameters um so again part of the ecosystem that azri is developing uh is this ability to test interestingly enough Abel was at the time the second most powerful University developed liquid rocket engine in history as far as we’re aware and uh that’s a little unofficial ranking of at the time 20 21 of the most powerful liquid rocket engines developed by universities throughout the world and you can see that ukn is up there in second place so part of the development of of part of az’s development plan is to develop facilities it takes a lot of facilities to build rockets and Rocket engines we have an assembly and integration facility in the mechanical engineering discipline on Howard College campus that we’ve put together this is where we build a lot of the components we have a propellant laboratory propellant are the things that make rockets go and we are very interested in novel non-toxic monopropellant for satellite applications in addition to what we’re doing with clv we’re also interested in on orbit uh propulsion systems and we have a team working on that one of the things that team is looking at is gel propellant so normally in a rocket a liquid rocket you have liquid Fuel and liquid oxidizer but there are certain advantages to be had by jelling those liquids and turning them into a gel for one thing they don’t slush around in tanks when you are launching the rocket they are more containable if they spill so one of our postgraduate students has just completed a project building a test rig to look at the injection of gels into a rocket combustion chamber and you can see some high-speed footage there on the right hand side that’s an attempt to understand what that PL what that um injection process looks like in terms of on orbit propulsion we are putting together a satellite Thruster system because also there is commercial opportunity in that area as well and we will use these non-toxic propellants as an advantage over the conventional hydrazine which is usually used in Rockets which is extremely toxic dangerous uh to People’s Health so two of the propellants that we’re looking at are Han and ADN and there’s a little picture render on the right hand side of a little satellite thrust it’s very small we put the spoon in there for for for context and for scale we have a subscale test facility at mechanical engineering and this is used to test small liquid bipropellant rocket engines hybrid Rocket Motors small motors not big ones monopropellant thrusters and ignition devices uh it’s a reinforced test cell and it’s uh run uh remotely by computer as well for safety this year we begin work on a major project and that is our permanent uh liquid rocket engine test facility and this is to be built again it’s too big to be built here at the University we will build that at overberg test range in the Western Cape and that con consists it’s a it’s a project funded by the department of Science and Innovation and it consists of three test cells you can see one of the sapphire engines represented in one of those test cells it includes a vertical test stand so that’s not a launch Gantry that’s a vertical test stand where we can put a rocket a full stack sub orbital rocket and fire the engine to see uh how it performs we obviously have to supply propellant to this facility that’s a kerosene Bay there’s an instrumentation Bay and around the other side is a liquid oxygen Bay for the other half of the propellant mix that um facility we hope to get going in the next 3 to six months and it is a funded project as I said by the department of Science and Innovation we also have a new suborbital launch Gantry in development and it’s actually under construction as we speak also at overberg test range so when you saw those pictures early of the Phenix rockets launched off the trailer that trailer we will retire and we will move to this Gantry which is much bigger and allows us to launch bigger suborbital Rockets including the suborbital test vehicle uh Steve and that uh Gantry is is currently in development it has a rail length of 15 M and it can handle a rocket up to 2 and a half uh tons in mass that includes the foreign NASA and European Space Agency sounding Rockets So This is this will enable us we hope to bring foreign sounding Rockets to South Africa for scientific missions it’s not just about orbital launch we’re trying to do the other things as well ladies and gentlemen that is come brings me to the end of the of the of the talk and I’m going to conclude now and I want to take you back to this idea of the space launch ecosystem azri as an Institute is committed to developing the entire ecosystem we are looking at the launch vehicle but we are also interested in people we put a lot of time in a lot of effort into developing our people right now in South Africa there are probably only about 25 or so experienced liquid propellant engineers and I would say pretty much all of them are right here at UK it in we are looking at space port development the human capital development the supply chains it’s difficult to build Rockets we need to work with our industrial Partners to do this uh in a variety of ways we’re looking at the R&D progress the R&D map if you like uh to build all these components uh and make sure that azri in the end is able to conduct these tests get a rocket on the pad on the pad and we hope the first CRV launch vehicle um by perhaps 2028 or thereabouts before I conclude finally I just want to um acknowledge um our stakeholders and we have a lot of stakeholders uh in developing this launch capability I first want to acknowledge the executive the staff and students of the University of qual unel of course the department of Science and Innovation that funds the R&D aspect of of our research and the South African National Space Agency which works with us in human capital development programs and a range of other issues as well and also a long list of industrial partners and academic Partners uh I want to thank all of them for uh contributing to the success of azre and to walk the path with azri towards this independent satellite launch capability for South Africa thank you for your attention thanks very much Mike um before I call on our dean of research to do the closing remarks does anyone have any questions for Prof Brooks
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PUBLIC TALK
Forging an African Space
Launch Capability
– the Story of the Aerospace Systems
Research Institute
by
Professor Michael Brooks
Director: ASRI, UKZNUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Michael Brooks is the founding
Director of the Aerospace Systems Research Institute and an associate
professor in UKZN’s Mechanical Engineering discipline. His undergraduate
degree is from the University of Natal and he holds MScEng and PhD
degrees from Stellenbosch University. His research interests include
thermal management systems, solar radiometry and rocket propulsion.
Professor Brooks is a member of both the South African Institution of
Mechanical Engineering (SAIMechE) and the Aeronautical Society of
South Africa (AeSSA), and is a registered Professional Engineer. He cofounded ASRI’s forerunner, the Aerospace Systems Research Group in 2009 and is a former
programme manager of the ASReG Phoenix Hybrid Rocket Programme. He is a senior member
of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a Fulbright scholar and a
Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
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