The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines | Hacker News Reader

The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

everydayastronaut.com

261 pointsJarlakxen48 comments

This is a great compilation, very cleanly presented. If you'd like to learn more, in a much more verbose format, the "Rockets and People" four volume series of books by Boris Chertok (Korolev's right hand man) has been translated, courtesy of Nasa, and is available on archive.org

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Chertok%2C...

Vol 4, The Moon Race: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4110/vol4.pdf

They provide tremendous insight into running such ambitious development programs in a complex political, human and economic landscape.

The aerospace industry in the URSS was privileged beyond belief. They were top of the list for scarce resources, including housing, materials and even people. Hard to recruit engineers and workers to a new launch site to be built from scratch in the middle of nowhere in remote Kazakhstan ? Triple the pay, convince the wives by adding an extra room to their state-provided apartments for life, and setting up an airline to Moscow with free tickets every month and private entry to the best department shops. There, done.

The three main "classical" engine design companies in USSR were Energomash, headed by Valentin Glushko, KBKhA, headed initially by Semyon Kosberg, and KBKhM, headed by Alexey Isayev. Of course there is Kuznetsov's bureau, but that was doing many different things, like aircraft engines and later gas pumping machines for natural gas pipes. This video shows works of Energomash and KBKhA, but no works of Isayev's KBKhM are shown - they concentrated on spacecraft engines - and that's a pity, as KBKhM had a lot of results in pushing the envelope in rocket engines technology.

So... waiting for the next chapter?

https://www.gazeta.ru/science/2021/08/27_a_13919672.shtml Here is an article in Russian about the effects of sanctions on RD-180 engines (these were powering the Atlas rockets run by ULA). it mentions a few interesting details: Energomash is loosing a third of its income, they will likely have to close down production of that engine, and that they won't be able to resume production of the engine in the future. This means that we, as a space faring species, are likely to loose the know-how for the RD-180, just like we lost the know-how for the F-1 engine of the Saturn-V.

What's notable is that the Russians were not able to exploit the huge lead that they had built in rocket engine technology. The RD-170 series of engines (RD-180, RD-190, etc) were so ahead of their time. Imagine if they had focused on reusability instead of aping NASA's foolish shuttle ideas.

A reusable Zenit or Energia would have been a real game-changer back in the 80s. Russian launches would have cost a fraction of what they were in the west. With cheap launch costs, MIR would likely have been maintained and expanded; maybe even to this day. The ISS would likely not exist since one of its primary goals was to engage the Russian space industry and prevent it decaying away to nothing. With Russian primacy in space, perhaps we'd see more of the 'exotic' Russian space ideas realized... like Kliper, TKS & Polyus.

> A reusable Zenit or Energia

There is a great episode on Energia/Buran vehicle that goes in depth and interviews the key players. It's in Russian, but the "auto-translated" subtitles are quite good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1WV5KzAUS8

Zenit was reusable. The reusability elements were later removed because nobody demanded them.

The most critical piece of technology in an oxygen-rich staged combustion engine like the RD-180 is reportedly the metallurgy for an oxidizer-rich preburner.

But the required metallurgy is no longer exclusive to Russian engineers -- SpaceX's Raptor (which is a full-flow staged combustion engine) has an oxidizer-rich preburner on the oxidizer side of the engine.

The really interesting stuff is the metallurgy necessary to have an oxidizer-rich pre-burner run the turbopumps without having the hot oxidizer burn through the engine. Western engineers thought it was pure fiction when they first heard about it.

The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department but were absolute masters at the materials sciences. To some extent this is still the case today.

> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department

To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small anecdote:

[An] American asked: ".. how were you able to perform such an enormous amount of computing with your weak computers" to which the Russian responded: "we used better algorithms".

There is some truth to that, besides maximum flow, similar stories can be told about linear programming, data structures (e.g. AVL-trees), numerical computing, etc. The hardware may have been sloppy, but the algorithms-research was top notch.

[1] http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~dinitz/Papers/Dinitz_alg.pdf

This is true, and one of the reasons why I feel that we have come too far too fast in the hardware department, the degree to which Moore's law has enabled sloppy and wasteful programming should not be underestimated.

Is there any kind of index of software inefficiency? Something like "number of operations required by the software stack to display a sentence on screen", with a trend over time.

Input latency's one potential convenient proxy for this, once you adjust for display latency. "How long does it take the computer to do pretty much the most basic operation an interactive computer system performs?"

Considering an IBM 8088 did way better on that than modern computers, with like 1/5,000 of the processing power (figure ass-pulled but probably not far off), indicates to me that the trend is really damn bad.

That is a good one! And pretty easy to measure as well.

This is very much application dependent, so you'd have to take a 1980's application, say Visicalc and extrapolate to today, say Office 365 or Google Sheets.

This you can then do for different application domains, and both in absolute terms (# cycles wasted) as well as relative terms (%age of cycles wasted).

While not unknown in the west in the past, "better algorithms" are in a way a dying breed in aerospace - these days a student will easily have a CFD package brute force through the problem overnight and be done.

My father, upon taking over his promotor's office in Warsaw Institute of Technology, found among other things a book in Russian that described analytical, symbolic methods allowing "good enough" approximated results for many airfoil/wing design tasks that are now exclusively done through CFD.

As described, in 30 minutes with pen & paper you had maybe a more coarse, but valid and in desired precision result that takes overnight run in ANSYS CFX.

CFD only looks like brute force when compared to purely analytical methods. In practice, you can't brute force a chaotic system as you quickly hit the wall. Anything complex pretty much requires you to get clever with simulation just like it did before computers with analytical approach, and/or rely on experimentation. It's especially true for rocket engine design; there's a reason why nobody made a practical RDE yet.

True, but for a large class of problems in aviation, the analytical methods can provide faster iteration before going into CFD for deep optimization, at least that's my understanding (I'm the computer science person in the family, not aerodynamic physicist :) )

Past a certain minimum grid size it certainly looks like brute force to me, am I missing something?

Sometimes you can't get that grid size ;)

Popularizing astroengineering means kids watching YouTube today are going to be making rockets in the future. It's exciting to see the enthusiasm for moonshot industries reach a wide audience. Enough people sharing a wild dream slowly turns the impossible into reality.

I enjoyed reading about the early exploits of rocketry.

As an American I grew up seeing Robert Goddard and his famous first liquid fuel rocket everywhere in various books on the history of rocketry.

As I got older and read more I became more impressed with the fledgling rocket club (Verein für Raumschiffahrt) that Werner von Braun was famously a member of in post-WWI Germany. You couldn't help but see parallels to closed vs. open collaboration as Goddard, always secretive, seemed to get stuck on developing the necessary fuel pump while von Braun and collaborators were able to move forward to develop the high-speed, one-shot turbine that ultimately delivered the goods.

I am not sure if it was Willy Ley's classic ("Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel") or maybe even Arthur C. Clarke's book ("The Promise of Space") where I got that sense. Both books are oldies but excellent.

YouTube is absolutely amazing for kids if it’s curated properly (admittedly perhaps not that easy). There’s a huge amount of content like this that is aimed at adults, but can be roughly understood by a 5-6 year old.

I'd love some way to expose an allow-list-restricted subset of YouTube to my 7 y.o. nephew. A couple of days ago, he noticed that his twisty balloons get cold when they deflate, which opened up a huge learning opportunity for adiabatic compression/expansion, Sterling cryocoolers, etc. YouTube search is broken on Grandpa's smart TV and as soon as Grandpa handed him the tablet to do a YouTube search, he was off watching a group of Australians competing to see how many weather balloons they could pop by throwing various items at them.

This person had the exact same issue with their child, developed an app for this and got banned from play store: https://habr-com.translate.goog/ru/post/421451/?_x_tr_sl=aut...

The app is available as a standalone APK now: https://channelwhitelist-tilda-ws.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=a...

Unfortunately i could not find sources, but it works rather well and has English UI as well

An allow-list feature would get me to let my kids on Youtube (despite the ads—it'd be really convenient to be able to just use the site/apps) rather than YouTube-dl-ing the videos. Even just a channel allow-list would be huge, but also being able to allow individual videos would be nice, too.

Of course, parents have been asking for this instead of the shitty "YouTube kids" garbage for... ever? Basically? So clearly Google just doesn't want to do it, for whatever reason. Probably doesn't let them extract as much money from advertising to kids, somehow.

Unfortunately the only metric that youtube cares about is watch time, so they're never going to introduce a feature that could reduce that. They _want_ to suck people into meaningless trivial nonsense since thats what keeps them watching more.

Not sure its that obvious it'd reduce watch time. If you could let your kid watch YouTube with less supervision, presumably some people would allow their kids to watch more YouTube, and more YouTube would be watched.

FWIW, I've tried to do that for my almost-5-yo by starting with an account for him only: unfortunately, even with family-controlled account (whatever their terminology is), I wasn't able to do that (at least not with a non-gmail address). Google kept throwing weird errors after attempting to validate the account with 2FA through SMS on my phone number. Yes, I even tried "family link" or whatever using an Android phone (I originally tried using only a computer).

It seems it might be related to legislation surrounding account ownership by minors, but I have no idea how to confirm it, esp since it's supposed to work when a parent controls the account.

Heh. I know exactly what videos you're talking about and I quite easily get sucked into watching them.

Fantastic work by Tim here, a true labour of love over 2 years.

I heard that originally the Russians wanted to fuel their rockets with pure alcohol. But they abandoned that when they discovered the fuel would too often disappear before launch...

One of the perks of being in a Tu-22 unit in the 1960s was having access to the large supply of 40% ethanol used for the cockpit air-conditioning system.

The Mig-25 Foxbat also used alcohol for cooling - those PVO (Soviet Air Defence) units stationed in the cold could keep themselves warm.

Oh, they didn't drink it (not the vast majority of it, at least). Alcohol was a de-facto currency.

Many airplane radar systems used alcohol in evaporative cooling system, "dipping into stores" was apparently a common problem.

The V2s used alcohol (from potatoes) and liquid oxygen.

Yes, but they had access to better booze.

This was a real issue with the V2 rocket as related in Irving's book 'The Mare's Nest'.

Often before lunch.

Maybe of interest to others, I'm building up a spreadsheet of Rockets, focused on new space ventures but just added a placeholder to move in Tim's work:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13VikMGN0WsVOKp43W-1M...

Comments welcome and interested in potential collaborators!

The famous problem with the N1 was plumbing all of those engines to the fuel tanks without leaks. But SpaceX uses a similar design (lots of small engines) - how have they solved the plumbing problem?

Control systems and manufacturing and simulation were already mentioned, but a more critical issue is that N1, due to various design issues, had no way to do static tests that other rockets went through, meaning many issues were found when the rockets underwent Rapid Unplanned Disassembly in flight or on pad.

SpaceX built a much smaller, simpler rocket - and had a way to do the testing before flying.

I think a lot of the answer is just really good engineering. Precision manufacturing and computer simulation have come a long way in the past 50 years.

It's more accurate to ascribe it to better manufacturing processes, really. They're the result of engineering, but orthogonal to what you'd think of as engineering practice.

I wouldn't say that plumbing was the biggest issue. A big limiting factor was the control systems available then. I believe a couple of the N1 failures were caused by control system failures. With modern controls you can monitor and control each engine with much more granularity.

As Tim covers, none of the N1's engines that were flown were tested. That's not the case with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy or Starship.

Being the second to take a bite at the problem must be a part of it - I mean the example of the issues was there to learn from.

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