Angara-5 to become Russia's biggest rocket | Hacker News Reader

Angara-5 to become Russia's biggest rocket

russianspaceweb.com

69 pointsGravityloss36 comments

Does any one know what the toxic propellants are (the Briz-m upper stage)?

Edit: "burning storable propellant combination of nitrogen tetroxide as oxidizer and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine as fuel. The engine had a specific impulse of 328.1 seconds and was designed for eight firings during a mission. "[1]

[1] http://www.russianspaceweb.com/briz.html

Hydrazine is so handy as a rocket fuel. It's room temp, stable, hypergolic, plenty of energy, it can even be a monopropellant. But it's also corrosive, extremely toxic (even in the low-ppm range) and also carcinogenic. It's easily absorbed as a vapor and through the skin, and it'll kill you before you can smell it. There's good reason to not use the stuff in large quantities or in systems that are likely to be handled by humans for more than tanking it up.

And nitrogen tetroxide ain't no picnic either. It's happy to fume, and those fumes will corrode your lungs and you won't know it. Then several hours or even days later, you're dead of pulmonary edema.

LOX and kerosene are mother's milk in comparison.

I work in rocket propulsion research and have worked with, and around, both of these propellants, and I think you exaggerate to the point of being incorrect. You can smell hydrazine long before it's dangerous - it smells a bit fishy, somewhat like ammonia. It has to get really quite bad before your body-mounted gas alarms tell you that you're above recommended limits.

I'm more worried by NO2 but as a fume it's bright orange so one can normally see a cloud of it coming and make plans to head somewhere not downwind. If you do get caught by some, protocol is to lie with your head at the bottom of an inclined plane for several hours, so the the fluid can drain out of your lungs (and you call an ambulance of course).

When propulsion tests are happening on site we keep emergency breathing apparatus under our desks incase there's a containment failure and we need to get out. Usually though we just test when the wind direction would take anything away from the office/workshop.

I'm not bothered about kerosene but I have a healthy respect for LOX; it's as easy to kill yourself with it as with hydrazine. Where breathing apparatus and chem suits will keep you safe from hydrazine pretty much, LOX doesn't forgive any dirtiness, grease, human hair, or the wrong choice of o-ring material, especially when pumped at high speeds and pressures. Different risks but LOX is arguably more likely to bite you.

Here's an often-cited LOX safety video of the sort you probably couldn't make today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QioE_OX4vP8

After reading the precautions you folk take - I hardy think the OP is exaggerating. Emergency breathing apparatus under our desks pretty much sums it up. With respect.

We use hydrazine in US rocketry, too. As nasty as the stuff is, if I were still in the missile business, I'd use it. It's a strong, well-proven technology.

Yes, Russia used it in their long- and medium-ranged ballistic missiles. After a series of agreements between the US and Russia were reached both countries agreed to reduce their arsenal ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I ). As a result Russia has an excessive amount of Hydrazine in storage. It's expensive to store it because it's a very toxic and corrosive substance. At the same time it's pretty difficult to get rid of it.

At least in case of Angara they burn it at a high altitude.

>Yes, Russia used it in their long- and medium-ranged ballistic missiles.

oh, yea, donning these suits (during summer sunny day) before [imaginary] filling up your missile. Whatever militaristic enthusiasm, if any, we may have harbored (ROTC students, so not much to start with (ROTC in Russia is a way to avoid military, not to get into it:)), it'd definitely disappear half way through it and that even without having the real dangerously toxic and corrosive stuff present.

The Briz upper stage is an existing design, it wasn't purpose built for Angara, it's been flying with various other rockets.

Storable propellants are good for upper stages that need to do long coast periods and many stops and starts. Apollo used them.

But there are multi-restart versions of lox-hydrogen stages. The RL-10 engine in Delta and Atlas can do it.

We shouldn't indefinitely rely on strong, well proven technologies if those have known serious drawbacks.

Even now there are alternatives. IMO, better ones.

The US space shuttle also used hydrazine (not for primary propulsion, obviously) which is why it was met with people wearing hazmat suits on the runway.

That reads like a who's who of Pipeline's "not going to work with" segment.

Video of the launch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsQOpD4TIZM

How does this have any hope competing with SpaceX and their upcoming fully reusable rockets? If they can do it SpaceX will be at least 10x cheaper than everyone else. It says of the Angara-A5: "the payload section had a mass of 25,766 kilograms", which is a bit more than the Falcon Heavy GTO payload, but does not detail how much of that is payload and rocket.

Well, the Falcon Heavy has yet to launch, and SpaceX has yet to reuse a rocket. Someday, SpaceX may be 10x cheaper, but until then...

Good point.

Well, it would be worth establishing 10 times cheaper than what. I mean, it would be very naive to believe that SpaceX will charge 10% of what customers pay elsewhere to get their stuff into space.

The simple counter to that is: volume.

If my competition earns $1 per X, and I earn $0.10 per X, but I'm selling ten times as many of X, then I'm not particularly upset about my circumstances.

It's the Walmart retail model. Yes it takes them $476 billion in sales to reach $16 billion in profit, but they still do it.

SpaceX's reusable rocket cost is divided by hundreds of rocket-launches rather than a single launch when a disposable rocket is used.

The Falcon 9 is already 5x - 10x cheaper than the competition.

Can you please explain where this came from. Soyuz-U 7 ton payload to LEO is about $50 mil. Falcon 9 with 13 ton payload to LEO Wikipedia lists as $61.2M cost per launch. http://www.astronautix.com/articles/costhing.htm

I was comparing with ULA, and should have clarified I meant Falcon 9h ($85 million). The domestic competition for that is Delta 4 Heavy ($435 million).

I noticed that they didn't specify a limit on the payload mass too.

Wikipedia says the entire family of Angara are to launch between "3,800 and 24,500 kg into low Earth orbit". There isn't a definite listing of the GEO orbit capacity, but we know it's going to be a fraction of the mass to LEO.

It seems the Falcon Heavy will have more capacity to GTO.

Wikipedia lists Angara A5 as 5.4 t to GTO in one configuration (Briz-M), and 7.5 t in another configuration. Falcon Heavy is listed at 21.2 t GTO.

For cost, couldn't find estimates for Angara, but to compare Falcon Heavy with Proton (same GTO payload capacity as Angara, ancient tech): Falcon Heavy: $85M per launch for up to 6,400 kg to GTO Proton/Block DM: $95M per launch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_%28rocket_family%29 http://www.astronautix.com/articles/costhing.htm

I don't think it needs to compete with SpaceX, the Russians want a reliable heavy lift capability, the Proton is an older generation rocket so they bring it up to date. Unlike the US (who was willing to give up all human launch capability to a third party) I don't see the Russians as a country that would leave a capability niche unfilled by a local source.

That said, I'm a bit surprised they haven't integrated some of the same things SpaceX is doing (like N+1 capability in the engines vs single engine boosters) as those seem to be generally solid advancements in the state of the art of rocketry.

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Russians were experimenting with multi-engine boosters back in the 1950's - 1960's. The planned and canned (in 2011) Rus-M vehicle was to use 3 x RD-180 engines for the first stage, but the complexity seemed to be not worth the gains.

>"We have come to the conclusion that we do not need a new rocket, we can continue using those we already have," said Vladimir Popovkin, head of Russia's space agency [1]

I love that rocket development seems to be one of the areas where safety is a balance between redundancy and simplicity. If you put 3 highly-explosive engines with a low probability of failure next to each-other, you don't get redundancy unless you really control the failure modes :-)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus-M

That's a question for practically every existing launcher family, and none of them have yet to express a decent plan to handle SpaceX. Angara, perhaps, can survive as the "Russian launcher", for national payloads that they don't want to rely on an American company for.

Angara's RD-191 apparently can throttle down to an impressive 30%, so perhaps they could manage to "hover-slam" land their stages similarly to Falcon (though it'd be harder). But Russian speed in aerospace development isn't high right now, so it'd take a while.

Yeah look, I get all the criticism. Point is, can this mutherfucker hover and land ass-down? That's all we want to see.

A few questions: Is there any comparison (price/performance) with the SLS ? Is the second stage identical to the boosters of the first stage ? I was wondering if the SLS could also have four boosters instead of two as shown recently when they tested Orion ?

What you saw launching the Orion was a Delta vehicle, not the SLS(Which has yet to fly). The SLS will not support more than two first stage boosters.

The Angara family of rockets is not meant to compete with the SLS and they're entirely different classes of rockets. The SLS could be described as a super-heavy lifter, and the Angara as a heavy lifter.

The most primitive form of the SLS (without any additional boosters) is planned to be able to put 70 metric tons into low earth orbit.

The most beefed-up form of the Angara is planned to be able to put only 23 metric tons into low earth orbit. Its most primitive form puts only 3.8 metric tons up there.

A proposed Angara variant would be able to orbit 100 tons. It would require a larger core stage using RD-180, and so be a substantial new development. The existing cores would function as strap-on boosters. It's not likely.

Not sure if the Russians provide stats and this is the first launch for the A5, so probably only estimates available.

The middle core that looks like the boosters (assuming that's what you mean by second stage) is the same according to wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angara_%28rocket_family%29#Anga... - it's just throttled down after launch so that the external 4 boosters run out of fuel/oxidiser faster.

The SLS probably can't do exactly the same because the solid fuel boosters aren't the same as the core which uses cryogenic liquids. However, if the vehicle can take the stress of 4 solid fuel boosters (they're really powerful) then I suppose it could be done.

There's a good history of scaling to evolve rocket families - e.g. the Saturn I -> Saturn V, and Falcon 1 to Falcon 9/9-Heavy etc. Actually now that I think about it, the odd one out here is the STS/Space Shuttle, which never really could do that with it's funny Orbiter-on-the-side design. Pity.

Delta IV and Atlas V were designed to use 1 or 3 identical cores, so they are a more basic version of the "universal rocket core" idea. Only Delta IV has flown with a 3 core configuration. Atlas V has all the hardware so it should be able to do it if needed, but the US government hasn't seen the need to spend the money. (No commercial uses for such large payloads.)

Incidentally, Atlas V uses the RD-180 engine, which as two chambers. It is derived from the Soviet RD-170 engine with four chambers, the world's most powerful rocket engine. The RD-170 series was used by Buran (as boosters) and in the Zenit rocket (Sea Launch, also Boeing involvement) that still flies.

The RD-190 used in Angara is a one chamber derivative of RD-170.

So you could say that Angara 1 is a "half of Atlas V" or "quarter of Zenit". Angara 5 then would be "2.5 times Atlas V" or "1.25x Zenit".

But the staging improves payload, so it's better than linear.

The Russians have been wanting to do such "universal rockets" since the dawn of the space age. They only managed to build one, so it wasn't much of a modular system: Proton (The UR in UR-500 is from Universal Rocket). The first stage has six engines attached to six oxidizer tanks. But storable propellants were perhaps not such a good idea after all. There were big battles between Chelomei and Korolev about this. Proton has not been used for manned launches.

Angara seems like a very good ideal compromise design. Engines are small enough so it can be modular. It uses nontoxic propellants so it can be used for manned launches. Yet it still puts to good use the fantastic RD-170 engine technology, into which massive investments were made back in the day.

Reusability and competition with SpaceX: Russia has proposed to make the universal boosters of Angara reusable. Add a scissor wing and a jet engine to the nose and you get Baikal. http://www.russianspaceweb.com/baikal.html It seems like a coherent design to me. It will add some mass though, but might be operationally flexible if the boosters can fly long distances. It would be costly to develop, but they have indigenous expertise on these subjects.

Europe hasn't been willing to put money in big liquid engines, so they've needed the solid boosters for Ariane V (which was oversized, since it was designed for the Hermes mini shuttle). Seems they are going further down that road, to all-solids. No hopes of reusability. Or manned flights either. Maybe geopolitical reasons or lack of money.

SLS: it's problematic because it's so big and inflexible. There's no money to fly something so big so often. So it will have high fixed costs. Better than Ares though. None of the solids or engines of SLS will be used for commercial use anywhere else.

Saturn I to Saturn V. There wasn't much commonality, just the S-IVB stage (second in Saturn Ib and third in Saturn V). First stages were completely different, in structure and engines. Saturn I had to be whipped up quickly to test Apollo hardware and train, it was a kludge. There were plans to migrate Saturn Ib to use F-1 engines later, instead of the eight H-1.

I am curious why they are launching the rocket from an area so up north, especially in the middle of winter.

Because they already had a partly-completed heavy launch pad (originally meant for a Zenit-2) there--the only one within Russia proper. It was originally an ICBM base, but it's suitable for polar and Molniya launches. Definitely suboptimal for equatorial trajectories--but it was there and the Russians are nothing if not practical.

They're building a new facility in Vostochny, at a much better latitude, but that'll be a few years yet.

>They're building a new facility in Vostochny, at a much better latitude, but that'll be a few years yet.

well, for anybody knowing the geography of this territory and Russian cultural references like "new Vasyuki" that wouldn't bring any hope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostochny_Cosmodrome#Economic_a...

"Architect Dmitry Pshenichnikov has stated that the city is to become a "one-of-its-kind scientific and tourist space town with a unique design and a beautiful landscape""

and immediately below

"In November 2012, press reports indicated that the Russian government is having difficulty in finding a good use for the new spaceport, and that other government ministries have been avoiding the project while "calling the project a 'dolgostroy', which is Russian for an endless construction boondoggle"."

I mean Baikonur is bad (yet at least it has a history), but that is much worse. And in the article they do mention some probe by Deputy Prosecutor General - things seem to be as usual in Russia :)

The Vostochny spaceport project was lobbied in government at the time by those guys who helped to draft Roskosmos charter in early 1990's. The implementation can suffer, of course, but there are good reasons behind the idea itself.

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