Northrop Grumman Tests Advanced Solid Motor for ULA’s Vulcan Booster
PROMONTORY, Utah, Aug. 13, 2020 (Northrop Grumman PR) – Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) conducted its first ground test of an extended length 63-inch-diameter Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM 63XL) today in Promontory, Utah. This variation of the company’s GEM 63 strap-on booster was developed in partnership with United Launch Alliance (ULA) to provide additional lift capability to the Vulcan Centaur vehicle.
“Our new GEM 63XL motors leverage its flight-proven heritage while utilizing state-of-the-art manufacturing technology to enhance launch vehicle heavy-lift capabilities,” said Charlie Precourt, vice president, propulsion systems, Northrop Grumman. “The GEM 63XL increases thrust and performance by 15-20 percent compared to a standard GEM 63.”
During today’s static test, the motor fired for approximately 90 seconds, producing nearly 449,000 pounds of thrust to qualify the motor’s internal insulation, propellant grain, ballistics and nozzle in a cold-conditioned environment. This test demonstrated materials and technologies similar to the GEM 63 rocket motor that qualified for flight in October 2019.
Northrop Grumman has supplied rocket propulsion to ULA and its heritage companies for a variety of launch vehicles since 1964. The GEM family of strap-on motors was developed starting in the early 1980s with the GEM 40 to support the Delta II launch vehicle.
The company then followed with the GEM 46 for the Delta II Heavy, and the GEM 60, which flew 86 motors over 26 Delta IV launches before retiring in 2019 with 100 percent success. The first flight of the GEM 63 motors will be on a ULA Atlas V launch vehicle planned for fourth quarter 2020, and GEM 63XL motors will support the Vulcan rocket in 2021.
Northrop Grumman solves the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense and cyberspace to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers worldwide. Our 90,000 employees define possible every day using science, technology and engineering to create and deliver advanced systems, products and services.
14 responses to “Northrop Grumman Tests Advanced Solid Motor for ULA’s Vulcan Booster”
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Northrop Grumman solves the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense and cyberspace to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers worldwide. Our 90,000 employees define possible every day using science, technology and engineering to create and deliver advanced systems, products and services.
Yikes, so the Parabolic Arc story is just a copy-paste of a NG press release?
Still, that GEM 63 XL is impressive. It’s almost like using a Minuteman Missile as an SRB!
Makes me wonder how much the NG replacement for the Minuteman ICBM will be based off of the GEM series. Pretty close I’d bet!
Why not the quick and dirty IRBM prototype is evolved from this family of boosters.
The only reason the U.S. ever needed IRBMs was that we could build them and get them operational a bit quicker than actual ICBMs. The Jupiter was pretty much an enhanced V-2 – and a cousin to the Soviet SCUD. Once we had at least one real ICBM in service, the only deployed IRBMs – some Jupiters in Italy and Turkey – were stood down. We got to double-dip on that a bit as the Jupiters constituted a readily-expendable bone we could toss the Soviets as quid pro quo for pulling their IRBMs out of Cuba in 1962. After that, the Jupiters and Thors retired from the military and started launching satellites – plus Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom.
Don’t forget Thor. Thor went a long long way, and lived a long and fruitful life that recently just ended.
IRBM’s are already back in the Pacific. Have been for some time, and I don’t think the number is going anywhere but up for the time being. They will be a new spur of the arms race picking up pace in that region.
I didn’t forget about Thor, I just didn’t think any had ever been deployed. But it seems we put some in the U.K. for a few years. Live and learn.
As they were stood down in 1963, maybe they were also part of the Cuban Missile Crisis quid pro quo – I lack the time or curiosity to confirm that.
IRBMs make sense in the Pacific as their ranges match up pretty well with distances between the DPRK and PRC on the one hand and Taiwan and Japan on the other.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
***** Rule Britannia! ****
British Thor crew were trained at
Tucson International Airport in hangers from WW2 that are still in use today. The timbers are milled from California sequoia. They still look new to this day.
Interesting bit of local Tucson history there. Neat pic too. Like a milk bottle with RAF roundels.
Skybolt, Blue Streak, Thor, and Polaris make for an interesting bit of UK military/political history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
It is fair to call the Redstone an enhanced V2, but Jupiter was much more than that. The history of the Jupiter program is a fascinating look at strategic nuclear warfare in the early years of long range ballistic missiles.
Jupiter belonged a class of American IRBM. The USAF had the Thor program, the USN had Polaris, and the Army had Jupiter. All of those missiles had a range of about 1,500 miles.
The USAF favored ICBM and was aggressively hostile to IRBM; they started up the Thor program to spite Jupiter and ended up with possession of Jupiter when the SecDef gave it to them in 1956.
The original Army plan for Jupiter was as a mobile missile. The USAF ran Jupiter (and Thor) from fixed launch sites. The USN was at one time teamed with the Army to use Jupiter as a submarine launched ballistic missile, but they dropped out to pursue the Polaris program instead.
The Navy was quite correct to abandon Jupiter for Polaris. Polaris was more compact and required no cryogenic propellants. The Soviets had bad enough problems with liquid prop missiles on subs and theirs used room-temp hypergolics.
Yes they were.
Odd the problems the Soviets/Russians seems to have had with solid propellant long range ballistic missiles. Which is particularly troublesome when it comes to SLBM.
Of course the Soviets are also different in other ways when it comes to naval nuclear weapons.
They were always fond of big cruise missiles, which as like as not had nuclear warheads instead of conventional warheads. Such “anti-ship” weapons obviously have a useful dual role as strategic nuclear weapons too, in light of how much of the U.S. population is close to shoreline and the denuding of U.S. Air Defenses from the Nixon period onward. A nuclear armed cruise missile submarine might also have been used for a decapitation strike surprise attack on Washington D.C.
I agree the Soviet difficulties with solid-propellant ICBMs and SLBMs were perplexing. Especially when one considers that the Chinese seem to have had no such problems.
The Topol series mobile ICBMs seem to be the only fairly successful solid-prop design the Soviets/Russkies ever fielded. The Bulava SLBM, which is supposedly a Topol derivative, has had major teething problems for years. Whether said problems have all been chased down yet still seems to be a matter of some speculation.
Solid props, like Mars probes, just seems to be a “Here Be Monsters” area on the Russky aerospace technology map for some mysterious reason.
Solid props, like Mars probes, just seems to be a “Here Be Monsters” area on the Russky aerospace technology map for some mysterious reason.
!!
;-D
Probably not copy-paste. Edited press releases are a significant part of the editorial content of any trade or special-interest publication and it doesn’t matter whether said publication is distributed on dead trees or via the Web. If you find this bit of company self-congratulation off-putting, I suspect there was both more and worse in the original presser. Toning down this sort of thing is a routine part of any editor’s job.
You are quite correct to point out the similarity between these SRBs and ICBMs. In fact the GEM 63XL SRB is 20% longer and half again as heavy as an entire Minuteman III and produces roughly 2.5 times the thrust of a Minuteman III 1st stage.
Just the ability to keep producing SRBs of this general size class is plenty enough to insure that the U.S. industrial base is capable of producing new generations of ICBMs.
There is, in consequence, no military rationale for preserving the ability to produce Brobdingnagian SRBs like those of the erstwhile Shuttle and the current SLS, plus the main stages of the almost-certainly-shortly-to-be-canceled OmegA.