Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne’s (PWR) RS-68, the world’s largest hydrogen-fueled booster rocket engine, roared off the SLC-37 launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station yesterday, boosting Boeing’s Delta IV with its GOES-N payload. Following booster cutoff, PWR’s RL10 continued the mission by propelling the GOES-N into a parking orbit, and later into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne is a unit of United Technologies Corp..
This was the fifth time an RS-68 has successfully boosted a Delta IV, and the fifth time an RL10 has completed the upper-stage task. Both the RS-68 and the RL10 performed as expected.
The RS-68, which generates nearly 17 million horsepower and consumes a ton of propellants per second, is America’s newest large, liquid-fueled rocket engine. One of the 663,000-pound-thrust engines is used in the Delta IV’s single “common booster core” (CBC) configuration, while three are employed with the “heavy” Delta IV type that combines a trio of CBCs.
In its original configuration, the RL10 was the first American engine to use hydrogen as a propellant when it was introduced in 1963. Since that time, it has built a mission success record unmatched in the industry.
Byron Wood, president of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, highlights the fact that: “With the enormous power and flexibility of using the RS-68 and RL-10, our Boeing customer has tremendous access to space capability for their heavy payloads.”
There are three more Delta IV launches currently on the manifest in coming months. The June and October missions will be Delta IV “medium” configurations, each with a single RS-68 booster, while a January mission will employ a “heavy” version with three RS-68s boosters — a combined thrust of nearly two million pounds. The RL10 will provide the upper stage propulsion on all three vehicles.
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Inc., a business unit of Pratt & Whitney, offers a complete line of propulsion products, from boosters to upper stage engines. These have been used in a wide variety of government and commercial applications, including the Main Engines for the Space Shuttle and propulsion systems for the Atlas and Delta expendable launch vehicles. Pratt & Whitney is a part of UTC, a diversified company based in Hartford, Conn., that provides high technology products and services to the building industry and the military and commercial aerospace industry. Pratt & Whitney is a world leader in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft engines, space propulsion systems and industrial gas turbines.
