Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, is planning to ramp up production of its latest variant of the venerable RL10 rocket engine at the company’s West Palm Beach, Florida facility. The company also plans to add staff at its South Florida facility to enable the higher pace of manufacturing the engine.
According to Jim Maus, vice president of program execution and integration at AR, the engine is currently undergoing certification. AR also says that the RL10C-X engine will mainly support United Launch Alliance‘s new Vulcan rocket. Vulcan’s first flight is scheduled for December 24, 2023, at the company’s launch facility in Cape Canaveral, using an older design RL10, with the new variant scheduled to come online in 2025.
Todd McConnell from AR stated that the company will be “retooling our existing manufacturing, assembly and test facilities in West Palm Beach to meet the increased demand for our engines. While [we] do not plan to enlarge the existing footprint of our operations, we are hiring additional staff to meet the increased production rate.”
The RL10C-X will be taking advantage of advances in manufacturing, mainly by switching to additive manufacturing for the entire engine thrust chamber. Currently, AR builds the injector plate of the engine using the technology on current versions of the engine. The company expects cost reductions as a result of these changes.
RL10 History
There are few rocket components with a legacy as deep as the RL10. It first debuted some sixty years ago in 1963, long before inventions like the microprocessor, the personal computer, or even the basic forerunners of what eventually became the Internet. The RL10 was the first engine to use a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as its propellants, which result in higher specific impulse — a measure of how fast the burning propellant is ejected out of the nozzle of the engine.
Since then, the RL10 family has launched hundreds of missions, been integrated onto more launch vehicles, and sent more spacecraft to more places than any other rocket engine ever built. George Prueger, Aerojet Rocketdyne Senior Director of RL10 programs, said that “the RL10 has flown on a diverse array of vehicles including Saturn I, Atlas, Titan, Delta and even the DC-X, an experimental suborbital vehicle flown by the Defense Department and NASA that was the first to demonstrate vertical rocket landing.”
One of its key features is the ability to complete multiple restarts in space, vital for specific orbital placement of satellite payloads and on missions beyond orbit. RL10 variants have been a part of the Curiosity and Perseverance Martian rover missions, the New Horizons mission to Pluto (and beyond), and the two Voyager missions, which are, to date, the only human-made spacecraft ever to enter interstellar space.
The RL10C-X features the same basic design today as when it debuted November 27, 1963. “The RL10 has no equal in conventional chemical propulsion,” Prueger said. “The high-performance combination of liquid hydrogen fuel and a liquid oxygen oxidizer generates more thrust per unit of fuel burned than any other propellant combination.”
