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."

Comments

It just goes to show...

[Lonath]

Size doesn't matter, it's how you use it. I get told that all the time, so it must be true.

Re:It just goes to show...

[56ker]

that people never learn...

The giant rocket was launched just four times; each one was a disaster ending in abrupt and catastrophic failure.

You'd think at least after the second time it ended in disaster they'd think it was time to go back to the drawing board. However I suppose this is the kind of thing that happens when they are political motivations behind scientific achievements - shortcuts are made.

Trouble

[Drachemorder]

I don't know why they had so much trouble getting the thing to work. This isn't rocket sci.... oh. Never mind.

Lots of engines

[TrollMan 5000]

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?

Re:Lots of engines

[Buran]

Mishin, Sergei Korolev's successor, was not an experienced engineer. This was a major factor in the failure of the N-1 program.

Korolev, on the other hand, was very successful -- a rocket sharing the same basic design as the one that launched Sputnik 1 was rolled to the launch pad in support of a Progress freighter launch to the ISS. When?

This morning.

Re:Lots of engines

[Dave500]

All the 30 first stage motors are identical Kuznetsov Design Bureau NK-33's generating 154 metric ton's of thrust each.

There is a lot of debate about why the Soviets chose this approach, but for me its a combination of three reasons:-

a) Previous Soviet Rockets were also based on the "many small engines" approach - they worked fine. (Even if it was not the most efficient approach)

b) A key reason the the N-1 ended up with 30 NK-33 engines instead of something more manageable was political infighting. The Soviet chief engine disigner Glushko had an intense argument over fuel choice with the N1 designer Korolov and ended up taking experience to the Soviet military with the UK-500 and 700 boosters. That left Korolov with no engine designer and in the end the N-1 had it's engines designed from existing templates.

c) At the time there were real doubts over the feasibility of combistion stability in engines with large injector surfaces. (Ie - large engines). It took Rocketdyne many, many tests to get the F-1 to work. The Soviets felt that developing these large engines was simply too risky (and expensive), despite the obvious efficiency gains.

Re:Lots of engines

[ender81b]

Encyclopedia Astronautica is a great, and I mean the best, site on the internet for rocketry info. Here are some of their links to the N-1, and reasons why they built it the way they did:

THe N-1 StoryMore technical than the bbc article

Soviet space history, broken down by year

great site with a ton of content if you want to waste a few hours.. =)

Re:Lots of engines

[Russ Moerland]

There were a lot of reasons for the failure of the N-1. Mishin's competence as an engineer had nothing to do with it. Korolov was successful because he had the ear of Kruschev and was good at motivating his people. When Kruschev was removed from power in 64, some would argue that the drive behind the N-1 went with him, though the last launch wouldn't be until late 1972. There were also the issue of multiple design bureaus getting money to build rockets capable of getting to the moon (Chelomei and Yangel are two that come to mind).

Korolov, like von Braun, made things happen more because of his personality and management skills than engineering prowess.

Jim Harford wrote an excellent book titled Korolov, which presents an excellent picture of his life from childhood to death. There's also quite a bit of information on what happened at his design bureau after his death.

Re:Lots of engines

[Russ Moerland]

Just to clarify a few things.

The NK-15 was actually used on the N-1. The NK-33 are the modified NK-15 engines sold to Kistler. The NK-15 is based off the design for the NK-9.

The engines in the R-7, the RD-107/108, were single turbopumps (one for fuel and one for oxidizer) driving four combustion chambers. The reason for four combustion chambers was to deal with acoustic problems inside the chamber. The F-1 had similar acoustic problems, but they were solved with baffles inside the chamber. The RD-170/171/180 are also multiple chambers driven by single fuel and oxidizer turbopumps.

Glushko's bureau did the N2O4-hydrazine engines for the UR-500 (Proton). The UR-700 was never built.

Re:Lots of engines

[Dolly_Llama]

a rocket sharing the same basic design as the one that launched Sputnik 1

What do you mean by sharing the same basic design? Pointy end up - Fiery end down?

Froydian Engine Sizes

[citizenc]

Wow. That's a pretty big rocket engine. It makes you wonder if the engineers who designed it were compensating for something..

An obvious joke, I know, but SOMEBODY had to make it!

Re:Froydian Engine Sizes

[cube farmer]

Wow. That's a pretty big rocket engine. It makes you wonder if the engineers who designed it were compensating for something..

Uh... Gravity and inertia?

In a way..

[xtermz]

..It is kind of depressing to ponder the rise and fall of the soviet space exploration empire. Crippled by the fall of communism, and lack of money, a once great competitor to NASA is now a laughing stock.

Now a point to ponder, how long will it be before NASA becomes a laughing stock. Countless articles continually point out that NASA cant get proper funding, etc etc.

The sad thing is, if only Russia's space agency could of survived after the berlin wall came down, we would probably still have a thriving space race and maybe even more public interest.

Re:In a way..

[mesocyclone]

NASA is a classic government bureaucracy (see Laws of Bureaucracy ). As such, it is spending way more money than required to achieve the wrong goals.

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.

Re:In a way..

[ksheff]

That depends if the companies in question have the capital in order to do all the R&D and if the management decides that rate of return on that capital is sufficient for them to invest in it. What NASA initially gets may not be commericially viable, but in the process much is learned and with a few iterations it does become viable. Many companies don't want to or can't wait a couple iterations for something to become viable. The standard answer that many have is that for every $1 spent on NASA, $7 is generated due to commercial spinoffs. It's the same reason for any sort of research funded by the Govt. Or do you think the DARPA guys should have just sat back and took the position of "Well, if interconnecting diverse computers over a large geographical distance with a common protocol has genuine commercial potential, let's just wait until the vendors develop something on their own and drop it on our doorstep."?

As far as your second point, actually yes. Companies always have projects that don't work the way that they're supposed to. The key thing is what is learned and how what was completed can be put to good use (ie turning lemons into lemonade). In your example, those servers can always be used for something else (renderfarm, database cluster, etc.). I also wouldn't consider the Shuttle a complete failure. It's expensive compared to some other alternatives, but it's still very useful.

"Moon Rocket?"

[cjpez]

Come on, at least make it "destruktor-module 7" or something. Then again, I suppose ours wasn't really that great.

(okay, so I just wanted to try out my new .sig . . .)

Could it be because

[ch-chuck]

after WWII the US got the better German V2 rocket scientists like Wernher Von Braun, instead of the USSR? Certainly the US didn't have the will to fully use their experience and talents, however, untill after Sputnik.

Re:Could it be because

[ptrourke]

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 . . .

Re:Could it be because

[John Fulmer]

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.

The Mishin Mission

[Caractacus Potts]

Here's a link to some cool drawings of the N1's. Of course, these drawings mean nothing. My theory is that the Soviet moon mission was as faked as the US one. Here's photographic proof that the N1's were only about 15 ft tall! Seeing is believing. You do believe me, don't you?

Re:How much rocket fuel?

[jonerik]

Everything you've ever wanted to know about the Saturn V.

That picture wasn't an engine

[Rocketboy]

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

Re:That picture wasn't an engine

[Buran]

Multi-engine rockets are still used by Russia today. These photos are dated today -- and this particular rocket design is very, very successful.

Photo of base of the Soyuz rocket (20 main engines and 12 smaller auxiliary engines)

The same rocket rolling to the pad

On the pad (probably the same one that launched Sputnik 1!)

But, as you say, the N-1 just took the concept too far, and the Soviets had invested so much into it by that point that the N-1's failure forced the entire lunar program to be cancelled. The only other booster that could do the job at the time (nothing exists now that could, though the Shuttle could launch a moon ship) was the Saturn V.

Re:Kerosene?

[GMontag]

Nooo, the first stage of the Saturn V used Kerosene and LOX too. Despite the higher power offered by liquid hydrogen, Koelle's studies indicated that little would be gained by using it in the first stage also, where it would have needed disproportionately large tanks. (Liquid hydrogen is only one twelfth as dense as kerosene, so a much larger tank volume would have been required.)

Re:Failed?

[Alien54]

Nine or ten N1's were built at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The giant rocket was launched just four times; each one was a disaster ending in abrupt and catastrophic failure.

When things go BOOM, this is technically not a good thing.

Here is a summary of the Russian lunar launches. Here is the data from 1969

Jan. 20, 1969 7K-L1/ 13L - Circumlunar UR-500 Launch failure
Feb. 19, 1969 E-8 - Lunar rover 8K82K (UR-500) Failed to reach orbit
Feb. 21, 1969 7K-L1S - Circumlunar N-1 / L3 Exploded during launch
June 14, 1969 E-8-5 #402 - Sample return UR-500 Failed to reach orbit
July 3, 1969 7K-L1S - Circumlunar N-1 / 5L Exploded at launch
July 13, 1969 E-8-5 Luna-15 Sample return UR-500 Crashed on lunar surface
Aug. 8, 1969 7K-L1 Zond-7 Circumlunar UR-500 Flew around the Moon
Sept. 23, 1969 E-8-5 Cosmos-300 Sample return UR-500 Failed to leave Earth orbit
Oct. 22, 1969 E-8-5 Cosmos-305 Sample return UR-500 Failed to leave Earth orbit

Give them points for effort.

Don't sell the Soviet space program short...

[John Fulmer]

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.

Re:Kerosene?

[AJWM]

Nope, sorry, but thanks for trying.

To clarify, the name "Saturn V" refers to an assembly of several stages: the S-IC, S-II, and S-IVB. The first and biggest stage, the S-IC, was a pure LOX-kerosene stage. Its F-1 engines (1.5 million pounds thrust each) burned kerosene, only the upper stages burned hydrogen.

This makes a lot of sense -- "efficiency" (in terms of Isp) is only one figure of merit in rocket engines. It's more relevant when the engine no longer has to lift the mass of the vehicle against gravity. For lifting power (as with a first stage), you care about thrust, which is proportional to the mass of the exhaust products (and thus the mass of the fuel). Hydrogen is just too light to generate useful thrust except at very high exhaust velocities, which means very high engine pressures, which means heavy engines, etc, etc. (Also, because of LH2's low density, you need bigger fuel tanks, which weigh more, etc, etc.)

Case in point, the three Shuttle SSMEs together (which burn LO2/LH2) have barely more thrust than a single F-1 engine, and run at a much higher chamber pressure.

There's a reason the Shuttle uses those god-awful, low Isp solid boosters -- to create enough thrust to get off the pad!

Details on the N1...

[Ryan_Terry]

Here ya go (For those who like BluePrints more than cute pics)

http://members.aol.com/Satrnpress/samprotw.htm

robotic mission

[orcldba]

As far as I know - robotic mission to the moon was complete success though. It is interesting to observe mass media in the West time after time to concentrate on areas where US were ahead and never opposite. Venus landing of a robotic craft and photographs from the surface is an example of another success of soviet space programm and I am sure there are many others not well known in the West.

Easy to scoff until you remember...

[Rogerborg]

... what have we done recently that's so hot? Shuttle launches still cost a billion bucks a pop (yeah, we're always learning how to save money on the next generation), and all we do is either dick around in low earth orbit or lob probes out.

Maybe I just OD'd on space opera, but to me "space exploration" means letting real people go out there and take real risks, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

One of those little throwaway comments that stuck in my mind was Buzz Aldrin commenting that we're in for a shock when (if) we do try and go back to the moon, because we're going to find out just how hard it was. Sure, we know how to do it, but do we still have the knowhow?

Re:Easy to scoff until you remember...

[Erbo]

"From now on we're living in a world where men have walked on the moon. But it wasn't a miracle; we just decided to go."
-- 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

Re:Use it if you got it.

[AJWM]

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.

Its funny our attitude about success...

[ACK!!]

Listen the Americans beat the USSR in the race to get to the moon but that is absolutely it.

They got:

1st satellite.
1st man in orbit.
1st woman in orbit.
1st lunar rover.
1st space station.
1st long term space station.

The US my country that I love so well got to the moon first.

The Soviet's took us down in every other first. It terms of keeping people in space for long periods of time they had it down while we had lost interest after seeing some guys hope around on the moon.

________________________________________________ __

Re:Its funny our attitude about success...

[jkujawa]

A lot more people have died in the Soviet space program than the US one. It's easy to be first if you don't care about quality and safety.

Soviets were never really far ahead

[mikosullivan]

The only reason the Soviets ever appeared to be significantly ahead of the US during the moon race era was that the Soviets started sooner and were willing to take higher risks. Keep in mind that the US's Explorer went into orbit only a few months after Sputnik. Granted, Sputnik was more advanced, but the difference was mostly due to a lack of motivation on the part of the US. Once the US got motivated, we surged ahead. By the time of Apollo it was barely a contest at all, in terms of "firsts": the US was far closer to the moon.

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

Re:Failed?

[Kesha]

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Modern Russian Rockets

[cthrall]

Now that you've read all the posts about how the Russian space program is done, read this Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/rd-180.ht ml) that describes how US companies are launching their payloads using Russian propulsion.

Here's a quote: "They build the thing and test the shit out of it. This engine cost $10 million and produces almost 1 million pounds of thrust. You can't do that with an American-made engine."

Re:What has been done with them?

[Scurrilous Knave]

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.

Re:PBS gave a glimpse

[jonerik]

It really was awful, there were analog gauges and whatnot littering the interior

It was built the late '60s. What else would they have been using?

basically one step shy of having Cosmonauts just jump out of the orbiter and hope for the best!

Actually, this isn't too far off the mark. If memory serves, the Soviet lunar missions were planned for two-man crews, as opposed to the three-man crews of the Apollo program. In the Soviet missions one cosmonaut would have stayed with the orbiter - same as the US flights - and the other would have spacewalked to and from the lander, rather the orbiter first docking with the lander. Soviet lunar landings and explorations would have been accomplished by one man, at least early on.

Yet another massive failure of central planning

[TheNarrator]

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.

When are we going back?

[QuantumG]

Why has no-one been to the moon since 1972? For those who cant count, that's 30 years. There are not even plans to go back even though we've (debatably) found ice up there (perfect for a settlement). I guess the next people to go will be from the private sector. Seems like a long way out though.

Engineering and heat

[Eric Green]

The larger the engine, the more heat is produced. Keeping the nozzle from melting down requires more and more exotic materials the bigger the engine gets. The Soviets had trouble coming up with materials that would withstand the heat, and thus could not have increased their engine sizes to Saturn V proportions even if they'd had Werner Von Braun as their chief designer, rather than the squabbling herd of non-entitities that were in charge after "the" Chief Designer died.

The same basic considerations are why the jet engines used in the very successful Su-27 class fighters are more fuel-thirsty for the same thrust as an F-15 class fighter (the two are roughly equivalent). The hotter you can get, the more expansion you can get. If you don't have the expansion, the only way to get the same thrust is to pour more fuel into the nozzle. The Russian designers are confident that their newest engines for the Su-30 class follow-ons to the Su-27 are every bit as good as current Western engines -- but they have not had the money to actually build the things.

There is also, of course, the Russian tendency to improve existing designs rather than embark upon all-new designs. For example, the next-generation Russian air superiority fighter, the Su-34/Su-35, is basically an Su-27 improved with the latest in materials to decrease weight, increase strength, and improve payload and maneuverability (not to mention better engines). The Su-34/Su-35 aren't going to be built because Russia cannot afford them, but show what Russian designers prefer to do rather than embark upon all-new aircraft like the U.S. designers like to do. The N-1 engines were similar in design to other engines used by the Soviets, and thus preferable, in the eyes of Russian designers, to all-new (risky) engine designs.

-E