Aerojet Rocketdyne President Replaced
GenCorp CEO Scott Seymour has replaced Warren Boley as president of subsidiary Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Boley’s departure was effective immediately, said GenCorp spokesman Glenn Mahone.
Seymour announced the news in a statement to employees on Friday, telling them he remained confident in the company’s ability to deliver results for customers, shareholders and employees.
Sources familiar with the company said Boley and Seymour had had differences about the company’s future.
“It was time for a change. There had been differences about the company’s direction,” said one source who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Read the full story.
16 responses to “Aerojet Rocketdyne President Replaced”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Did Rocketdyne innovate anything significant in liquid rocket technology in last 35 years? I cannot remember to anything important, but it may my flaw. However, it seems that now Rocketdyne is even outdistanced by complete newcomers in the field as SpaceX and BlueOrigin. Has the replacement something to do with these observations?
“Seems” is the operative word as neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have a working engine yet to offer as an alternative. SpaceX’s Merlin engine works well enough but is underpowered as evidenced by the fact that it takes nine of them to power the medium lift Falcon 9 while the heavy lift Falcon Heavy will require 27 of them for just the first stage.
I have to believe that Rocketdyne’s reliance on Russian-made engines is a bad decision and both SpaceX’s Raptor engine and/or Blue Origin’s engine might become the market standard in the future. However, right now Rocketdyne still has the expertise and the time to develop domestic engines and keep themselves viable.
“Rocketdyne still has the expertise and the time to develop domestic engines and keep themselves viable.”
You mean the AR-1, which is a kerolox engine that is designed to compete with equivalent Russian engines. The AR-1 project is at least 5 years into the future and that is a future that has no customers as yet. Basically Aerojet Rocketdyne have no products that launch companies want. Raptor and BE-4 are methalox whereas AR-1 is kerolox – AR-1 is tens years late even before it starts.
Of course, Merlin is perfectly powered for a rocket that is required to land propulsively. Raptor is designed to be used as an engine for a much larger rocket that is designed to land propulsively. Launch vehicle first stages built with 1 or 2 “large” engines are designed to be expendable. As such the tone of your comment entirely misses the point.
Years ago I thought: “What for a mess, this large number of nine engines in Falcon 9 first stage”, but now my opinion is changed by the good reliability of the system and cleverness behind it (use of propulsive landing). However, 27 engines are not a small number, in my view reliability shall decrease significantly, but I may wrong again.
To Rocketdyne, a big brand and name, which I admired in former times. But time has changed.
The added genius of the multiple engine configuration is that it provides for additional flight experience. If they do not fail, then you have increased confidence that the design and manufacturing process is good. This leads to an increase in potential reliability, not a decrease. The idea that one engine should be more reliable than nine is logically and statistically flawed.
Indeed, as evidenced by SpaceX now having flown 100 Merlin 1Ds with 100% success. By the end of the year, barring a bad day, they’ll have more than doubled the number of RD-180s and tripled the number of RS-68s flown.
Another interesting point, if SpaceX does pull off first stage landings and has another CRS-1 type engine-out incident, they can learn a great deal more from examining the engine itself after landing (assuming it isn’t the center engine that fails) than they can from just telemetry.
Well, to be precise, before flying this one hundred, they had a failure of the vacuum Merlin 1C and I think they had some minor issues with other engines.
Having said that, their reliability is better than many expected and regained engines will deliver a lot of data (including a better estimation how many times they can be actually used, be it 1 :D, 3, 5 or 10…)
“…they had a failure of the vacuum Merlin 1C…”
I was not aware of this. When did this happen?
http://spacenews.com/32775s…
However, that was not an earlier shutdown as said in article, it was an explosion.
Yes, I know about that, but Aegis specifically mentioned “a failure of the *VACUUM* Merlin 1C”.
With regard to the first stage incident, I don’t know that it was quite the “explosion” we have assumed it to have been. SpaceX/Musk said that it had already been shutdown before those bits fell off in such dramatic style. Also, it was an operational validation and proof of concept of the multi-engine design, for which part of the reasoning is engine failure redundancy.
Maybe Aegis is referring to the failed relight of the upper stage when it launched the CASSIOPE satellite? That was the first launch of F9 v1.1.
Yep, that’s the only thing I can think of, and that was labelled beforehand as a test.
“Rocketdyne’s reliance on Russian-made engines is a bad decision” you mean Aerojet’s reliance. Rocketdyne had nothing to do with the decision of purchasing Russian made engines. That was Aerojet’s forte until 2012 when Aerojet bought Rocketdyne from Pratt and Whitney. Rocketdyne has naturally been mislabeled with that decision. Rocketdyne has been building and processing space shuttle main engines for 35 years now and more recently are adapting to RS-25 engines for NASA’s SLS rocket. Their expertise and knowledge base far exceeds both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
The development of RS-68 was a failure, because the use of LH2/LOX engines for lower stages is proven as not cost effective already long time ago.
the RS-68 engine starts, and runs to mission completion.
That is not a failure.
I meant: The whole Delta IV, its LH2/LOX-stage incl. RS-68 was as a failure in terms of cost.