Muscovites, Rockets and Vodka...Oh My!

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cb123

cb123

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 10, 2012
Messages
1,796
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Mobile, Al.
Here's some vintage Soviet space toys that I have. The one to the left is the Lunochod, the first successful nuclear powered robotic lunar probe, lunched Nov. 10,  1970 - arrival date Nov. 17, 1970. The rocket to the right is Yuri Gagarin and his Vostok, launched April 12, 1961, and subsequently completed one full earth orbit. NASA's small Redstone's just didn't pack the punch as the Soviet's much more powerful Vostok, so Alan Shepard's flight was just a mere suborbital drop a few weeks later. Almost a year later, on Feb. 20, 1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Here you have a people that couldn't even build a refrigerator back in 1957, and then successfully launch the first artificial satellite ( Sputnik 1 ) and totally dominate the Space Race for almost a decade. If it was not for the failure of the N1 rocket in 1968, the Soviets/Russians would have won the Space Race by landed the first man or woman on the moon...on account they launched  Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman Cosmonaut in 1963...so there very well could've been a woman as part of the landing crew.  These little toys are over 40 plus years old, and they are built as tough as a Russian fighter jet...that's mighty tough! I have a link to Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1, 1961 launch at the Kosmodrom in Bajkonur....Absolutely Fantastic!





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For a second there, Calem,I thought you had space-missiles in your backyard! 
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No Alex, I keep them in my pocket...you get...rocket in my pocket....HEEHEEEHEEE....rocket in my pocket....HEEHEEEHEEE...Thanks Alex, that was a perfect setup!
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I couldn't help it, man! I'm so tired, now, but I want to stay up and finish watching Cleopatra Jones taking care of the baddies on the Bounce! You know that T.V. station where we watch it our way.  Man, it's so bad it's Good!
 
Really big liquid fueled rocket motors can develop huge resonances in them due to unequal mixing of the hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer. The resonance can be so great it can blow the flame out during launch, leading to loss of thrust and the rocket crashing. The US experienced the same thing with their big rockets. The Soviets were never able to come up with a way to make really big liquid fuel rockets like you find on the first and second stages of the Saturn V work reliably and had to resort to using a multitude of smaller rockets. NASA scientists came up with an internal rib in the nozzle that created the turbulence necessary to achieve a sufficient degree of mixing of the fuel and oxidizer to keep the flame lit. Even still the thrust from those rockets was quite uneven and during launch the astronauts experienced a plus or minus 6 g pulse, which is extremely hard on the body. It's like sitting on top of a piston that is pumping up and down at 6 gs. Violent indeed.

And even with the rib there were occasions during the Space Shuttle program where one of the liquid fueled rockets flamed out during launch, but there was enough of a margin built into the Shuttle that these were never critical enough to scrub a launch and initiate an emergency recovery. The Shuttle was able to get into orbit on the remaining two rockets.
 
That's what happened to the Skylab launch, it experienced extreme G-shock which damaged its solar array and heat shield. If NASA hadn't scrubbed Apollo 18 the year before there would have been Astronauts on board which could've proved fatal. I like the story astronaut Frank Borman told when they lite the second stage on Apollo 8, He said, " I felt like I was being catapulted thru the control panel!" From my understanding, Saturn was prone to dangerous harmonic oscillations which literally tore a many engine apart in their test facility in south Mississippi, just north of Waveland. It's funny, when you see them riding that column of fire, all that liquid oxygen, hydrogen, kerosene, aluminum and peroxide, all turning into super heated high pressure steam...water turning into fire, fire turning back into water again, chemistry applied to physics...fantastic! I believe the problem with the Soviet's N1 was a failure of its second stage turbo pump, sending into the Black Sea with nearly a kiloton of force. Now that would've been a bad day for hanging 10! 
 
I have the privelege of working with experienced PhD rocket scientists and they were briefing us one the problems the Soviets could not overcome on their big liquid fueled rockets. It was the rib on the inside of our nozzles that overcame the the resonance sufficiently to keep the fires lit. The Soviets never figured that detail out.

I grew up not far from the Rocketdyne test facility in Santa Susana CA and when they tested those babies the whole San Fernando Valley shook. The tests always seemed to be around dinner time too. That, sonic booms, and Clay Lacy making hot laps of the Valley in his purple P-51 pylon racer Miss Omni were the soundtrack of the San Fernando Valley I grew up with. Today if some part of the LA Basin experienced a sonic boom life would come to a stop. Back then it was just a normal part of life, nothing to get worked up about. Ba-boom and it's over. Big deal.

Oh yeah, I vividly remember one day when a big Lockheed AH-56A Cheyenne prototype attack helicopter on it's way north to the desert for testing pulled a loop right over our elementary school during recess. What a sight. Today you would get your wings pulled for doing that. Back then it just got a bunch of snot nosed kids hearts racing.
 
I think the general idea that the Soviets came to, was the fact that the R1 cluster design utilized a number of smaller nozzles to minimize turbulence. So as it seems they circumvented the rib altogether for the smaller multiple engine design with each their own cryo fuel cell. The only real problem with this was the ability to synchronize fuel consumption between the tanks, which they were able to overcome. The larger engine with the addition of the rib would have been far easier, but they choose the hard way for what ever reason. Maybe, since the R1 is basically of a German V2 construct, and of course, being familiar with the smaller engine, the decision was already made for them...the wheel was already on the cart, and if it worked, why change it. It's variants are still the most reliable transports in use today, and with such a high success rate...there must be something to it.


 


DesertTortoise, great story, and I've got a great link for you!



 
The Soviets tried the bigger rocket motors but they had problems with them flaming out. They could never make that big of a nozzle work for them. NASA scientists figured the problem out and went forward. The Soviets were forced to use a greater number of smaller rockets to obtain similar thrust, but as you noted this had it's own set of problems to solve. Space-X is similarly going with larger numbers of smaller rockets rather than spend the time and money to develop a larger boost rocket.
 
I have this DVD set in my personal collection, " When We Left Earth " totally awesome. I found it for you on YouTube, you'll want to see this one! It's one of the finest documentaries I've seen.


 


Prepare yourself to be beamed up...Energize!



 

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