Aerojet M-1

One of the largest rocket engines to be designed

The Aerojet M 1 was one of the largest and most powerful liquid hydrogen fueled liquid fuel rocket engine to be designed and component tested. It was originally developed during the 1950s by the US Air Force. The M 1 offered a baseline thrust of 6.67 MN (1.5 million lbf) and an immediate growth target of 8 MN (1.8 million lbf). If built, the M 1 would have been larger and more efficient than the famed F 1 that powered the first stage of the Saturn V rocket to the Moon.

The M 1 traces its history to US Air Force studies from the late 1950s for its launch needs in the 1960s. By 1961 these had evolved into the Space Launcher System design. The SLS consisted of a series of four rocket designs, all built around a series of solid fuel boosters and liquid hydrogen powered upper stages. The smallest model, intended to launch the Dyna Soar, used two solids and an "A" liquid core. To power the "A" booster, Aerojet was contracted to convert an LR 87, used in the Titan II missile, to run on liquid hydrogen. A prototype was successfully tested between 1958 and 1960. Initial studies of the solid were also handed to Aerojet, starting in 1959. The SLS also envisioned a number of much larger designs intended to launch the Air Force's Lunex Project crewed lunar landing. Lunex was a direct landing mission, in which a single very large spacecraft would fly to the Moon, land, and return. In order to launch such a design to low Earth orbit (LEO), a very large booster with a payload would be required. These larger SLS designs followed the same basic outline as the smaller Dynasoar booster, but used much more powerful solids and the "B" and "C" liquid stages. To provide the required power, the liquid stages mounted a cluster of twelve J 2s. To reduce this complexity, the Air Force also had Aerojet start studies of a much larger hydrogen fueled design that would replace the twelve J 2s with only two engines. These initial studies would eventually emerge as the M 1, with a thrust of 1.2 million pounds force. When NASA formed in 1958, they also started planning for a lunar landing. Like the Air Force, their Project Apollo initially favoured a direct ascent profile, requiring a large booster to launch the spacecraft into LEO. Prior to NASA taking over Wernher von Braun's Saturn work for the US Army, they had no large rocket designs of their own, and started a study program known as Nova to study a range of options. Initially, the payload requirements were fairly limited, and the favoured Nova designs used a first stage with four F 1 engines and a payload of about These designs were presented to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 27, 1959. However, the Apollo spacecraft requirements quickly grew, settling on a spacecraft (the CSM) with a three person crew. To launch such a craft to the Moon required a massive payload to LEO. Nova designs of this capability were quickly presented with up to eight F 1 engines, along with much more powerful upper stages that demanded the M 1 engine. Thus, for a brief period, the M 1 was used on the baseline designs for both NASA's and the Air Force's lunar programs. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a person on the Moon before the decade was out. After a brief argument, NASA won the mission over the Air Force. However, Nova would require massive manufacturing capability that did not currently exist, and it was not clear that booster construction could be started in time for a landing before 1970. By 1962 they had decided to use von Braun's Saturn V design, which went through a process of re design to produce a usable booster that could be built in the existing facilities at Michoud, Louisiana.

Over the three year lifetime of the project, a total of eight combustion chambers were built (two of them uncooled test units), eleven gas generators, four oxygen pumps, as well as four hydrogen pumps that were in the process of being completed. Scaled down models of the pumps were used during design/development to 1963.

The M 1 used the gas generator cycle, burning some of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen in a small combustor to provide hot gases for running the fuel pumps. In the case of the M 1, the hydrogen and oxygen turbopumps were completely separate, each using their own turbine, rather than running both off a common power shaft. The hydrogen and oxygen pumps were some of the most powerful ever built at the time, producing 75,000 horsepower for the former, and for the latter. In most American designs, a gas generator engine would dump the exhaust from the turbines overboard. In the case of the M 1, the resulting exhaust was relatively cool, and was instead directed into cooling pipes on the lower portion of the engine skirt. This meant that liquid hydrogen was needed for cooling only on the high heat areas of the engine—the combustion chamber, nozzle and upper part of the skirt—reducing plumbing complexity considerably. The gas entered the skirt area at about , heating to about before being dumped through a series of small nozzles at the end of the skirt. The exhaust added of thrust. The engine was started by rotating the pumps to operating speed using helium gas stored in a separate high pressure container. This started the fuel flow into the main engine and gas generator. The main engine was ignited by a spray of sparks directed into the combustion chamber from a pyrotechnic device. Shutdown was achieved by simply turning off the fuel flow to the gas generator, allowing the pumps to slow down on their own. The use of separate turbopumps and other components allowed the various parts of the M 1 to be built and tested individually.