WASHINGTON — A new version of a 60-year-old rocket engine, with performance and cost improvements, is expected to make its debut in 2025 on the Vulcan Centaur rocket.
At a Nov. 27 briefing, executives with United Launch Alliance and Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, said they expected that the RL10C-X engine, the latest upgrade to the RL10, to make its first flight on a Vulcan launch some time in 2025.
A major change for the RL10C-X is how it is manufactured. “It relies heavily on additive manufacturing,” said Jim Maus, vice president of program execution and integration at Aerojet. The current RL10 uses additive manufacturing to produce its injector, but the RL10C-X will use additive manufacturing to produce the entire thrust chamber.
That change offers cost reductions “that has been one of the enablers for us continuing to be viable in the marketplace,” he said, but did not quantify those reductions.
The engine also uses a carbon-silicon nozzle that he said improves its specific impulse, a measure of efficiency. Other elements of the engine, including its turbomachinery, are unchanged from existing versions of the RL10.
Maus said the RL10C-X is going through certification now, and he expected it first fly on a Vulcan Centaur some time in 2025. Gary Wentz, vice president of government and commercial programs at ULA, confirmed that timeline. “We are targeting in the 2025 timeframe,” he said, “subject to integrating it with the vehicle and assigning a mission to it.”
ULA selected the RL10C-X in 2018 to power the Centaur upper stage on Vulcan in what it described at the time as a “competitive procurement,” although versions of the RL10 have been used on Atlas and Delta launch vehicles for decades. ULA ordered 116 RL10C-X engines in 2022 for future Vulcan launches.
Aerojet has a contracted backlog of “north of 150” RL10 engines, Maus said, including the RL10C-X and older versions. While that…
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