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Soviet Moon Rocket
TestBoy writes "There is a decent article about the Soviet Union's moon rocket and why it was doomed to fail. From one of the pictures on the website, you realize how large just one of its multiple engines were."
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From the University of Texas website:
N-1 Stages
30 NK-33 LOX/kerosene engines; 10.1 million lb. total thrust.
8 NK-43 LOX/kerosene engines; 3.1 million lb. total thrust.
4 NK-39 engines; 360,800 lb. total thrust.
1 NK-31 engine; 90,200 lb. thrust; trans-lunar boost stage.
1 engine; 19,200 lb. thrust; lunar orbit insertion & initial lunar descent stage.
Why didn't they use fewer, but more powerful engines? Was it a matter of money, or engineering?
From one of the pictures on the website, you realize how large just one of its multiple engines were
The photo shows the base of the N1, inside which were housed 30 smaller motors. The Soviet philosophy for building large rocket boosters was to take existing stuff that worked and cluster them together, rather than to invent whole new, larger motors as the US did. This worked well - up to a point, as they discovered with the N1. Even today, most Russian space boosters are variations on the old Vostok booster that put Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit in the early 60's. The US tends to invent whole new technologies but even today tried-and-true designs from the early part of the Cold War are still in widespread use: American Atlas and Titan boosters originated as missiles and the Delta booster has been around forever.
Rocketboy
Although they lost interest in landing on the moon after Apollo 11, along with the N-1 failure, but they still managed to land the first automated rovers I saw a backup Lunokhod 2 rover last weekend. it looked like a tractor, but was still pretty impressive for early 1970's technology.
The article does say that, but the article is wrong. The N-1 actually had a pretty ingenious system for balancing the thrust of those engines, with engines on opposite sides of the vehicle linked together in terms of fuel feed and control. If one shut down, its mate on the opposite side automatically shut down to balance the thrust. (The Saturn V had similar control logic.) Although the number of engines made it a bit of a plumbing nightmare.
The real problem with the N-1 was (probably) pogo oscillation, which is the result of a feedback loop between engine thrust and rate at which fuel flows into the engine (influence by acceleration). The Saturn V was plagued with this in its early development too, since it's a problem that only shows up in flight.
-- Alastair
In short, it was a tortoise and hare race. In terms of the space race, the US took a nap after WWII and the USSR got to work. Once the hare woke up it was just a question of how much of a head start the hare had. For the moon race, it wasn't enough of a head start.
Still, don't think I'm disrepecting the USSR space effort. They did great things and I hope Russians today are proud when they think of the Soviet space program.
-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
The decline of NASA started with the moon landings. After that, NASA could not justify itself to the public, because the Russians had been beaten, and the race was over.
Thus NASA had to become more "cost effective" (the moon landing was done by crash-program techniques such as paying for several alternatives and selecting the best one after it is developed). So NASA sold the concept of the Space Shuttle as an inexpensive way to get mass into orbit. In order to justify it, they also had to make it the launcher for military payloads, so they connived to force the military into fitting their payloads into the shuttle, and defunding their own launch capabilities.
The problem with the shuttle is that is far more expensive that projected (big surprise). A primary reasonis that it is man-rated, which greatly adds to cost.
In order to continue to justify their existence, NASA needed a mission. The environmental movement came along just in time for them - they could devote their resources to studying the environment, and get government bucks to put up space-borne systems to do that. But, to justify continuing the shuttle, they needed a big, manned project... and thus was born the International Space Station.
But the ISS caused NASA to put almost all of their money into one bucket, leaving little else for other research. And ISS is not a particularly good way of doing most things - because most things don't need a manned space station, they can get by with a much less expensive non-manned launch.
Furthermore, NASA did its best to quash competition in the space launch business - again to keep justifying the money for the shuttle. After the Challenger disaster and subsequent grounding, NASA had to allow the military to use its own launchers for critical payloads, but they still have not been nice to little guys.
As a result, we have a small fleet of aging shuttles, that launch at an average cost of $500,000 per mission, at a mission rate a fraction of what they were supposed to be able to do.
One solution is not to give more money to NASA. It is to create incentives for private enterprise to get into the game.
As an example, what would happen if there was a $30 billion prize to the first company to land humans on mars and bring them back successfully? Hopefully, it would lead to some pretty innovative work.
Another approach that might work is to stimulate the public with some historic vision (like Kennedy did with the moon landing) and get public support for a truly imaginative leap.
The only good weather is bad weather.
-- Tom Hanks, Apollo 13
I remain hopeful that one day we will "decide to go" yet again. Among other things, the Moon is an important waystation on the road to the rest of the Solar System. If the reports of ice deposits on the Moon are accurate, that's a very valuable resource; ice can be electrolyzed, using readily available solar power, into hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be burned as rocket fuel, or run through fuel cells to produce water, electricity, and heat, three essential commodities for any spacecraft. In addition, the Moon could become an important construction base for ships designed to fly further out, as well as for space stations...and the back side of the Moon would be an excellent place for radio astronomy, as the antennas there would be shielded from terrestrial interference.
There's nothing stopping us. We've just gotta decide to go.
"I look up at the Moon, and I wonder: When will we be going back? And who will that be?"
-- Ibid.
Eric
Be who you are...and be it in style!
The Soviets had the home-grown Korolev, who was probably as good as von Braun. Remember that the Soviets beat us to orbit both with sats and people.
Korolev, unfortunately, was badly mistreated by the Soviet government, and worked under horrendous conditions. It's sad, really: imagine what he could have done working for a sane Russian government. Of course, that would mean that all of those controls on the lunar lander would be labelled in Russian . . .
Kistler had a project underway to create a re-usable launch vehicle. I thought it had gone belly-up, but according to the Kistler Aerospace web site, they expect to begin commercial operations next year (2003). It looks like maybe they got an infusion of NASA money, which is itself drying up, so their schedule might take a hit.
I've been watching Kistler with some interest for years now, and I continue to wish them all the best. Unlike some of the cranks and profiteers, they seem to be serious about making money in space.
Korolev, the "Grand Designer" of the Soviet space program, was easily the equal of Von Braun. With his ability and the fact that the Russians got all the German V2 production lines and factories and, many of the people who operated them during WWII, also gave the Soviets a huge boost.
And the US *DID* use the V2 scientists to the best of their abilities, but initially only for military projects. The doomed satelite launches made in response to Sputnik (Vanguard) were on not-ready-for-prime-time civilian launch vehicles, not military rockets. In fact, the military already had proven technology on the shelf that could put a satellite in orbit, but Von Braun was expressly forbidden by the President from using 'military hardware' for such a purpose.
Eventually, Von Braun was allowed to put the first American satellite (Explorer 1) in orbit with his Jupiter C rocket.
(NOTE: Jupiter C was a slightly modified Jupiter missle, which was designed during Von Braun's 'satellite ban' for a 'special nose-cone' test. After the initial testing, Von Braun kept a few Jupiter C's in storage for a 'certain time' and a 'certain nose-cone test'. Later it was obvious that the 'nose-cone test' was his plan to put a satellite in orbit.)
Anyway, I picked all this up last weekend at the Kansas Cosmosphere. Very neat place, and the current home of the Odyssey command module from Apollo 13.
All this money wasted on these rockets brings to mind the book
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer is a great history as told by a Soviet engineer of a number of different massive engineering failures that occurred under central planning. I.E The Building of the white sea canal in which 200,000 people died and the resulting canal was much less usefull than the railroad that was proposed by engineers before the commencement of construction that would have cost less to build in terms of lives and capital.
BTW, the greatest technological failure of all time was a series of dam collapes in China in 1975 that caused the deaths of more than 85,000 people and as many as 200,000 if you count the resulting disease epidemics set off.. Story here. Which is why everyone has been so warry of the Three Gorges Dam project.