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...
The V2s used alcohol (from potatoes) and liquid oxygen.
The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
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Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#12I 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#13The 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, sim…
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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#15I 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 watchin…
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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#18This 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 watchin…
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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#20Fantastic work by Tim here, a true labour of love over 2 years.