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The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

everydayastronaut.com

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Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#21

Post by HPsquared »

jacquesm wrote: post #14
lkozma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is there any kind of index of software inefficiency? Something like "number of operations required by the software stack to display a sentence on screen", with a trend over time.

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#22

Post by jacquesm »

HPsquared wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there any kind of index of software inefficiency? Something like "number of operations required by the software stack to display a sentence on screen", with a trend over time.

This is very much application dependent, so you'd have to take a 1980's application, say Visicalc and extrapolate to today, say Office 365 or Google Sheets.

This you can then do for different application domains, and both in absolute terms (# cycles wasted) as well as relative terms (%age of cycles wasted).

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#23

Post by pmayrgundter »

Maybe of interest to others, I'm building up a spreadsheet of Rockets, focused on new space ventures but just added a placeholder to move in Tim's work:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13VikMGN0WsVOKp43W-1M...

Comments welcome and interested in potential collaborators!

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#24

Post by synchrone »

KMag wrote: post #4
cameldrv wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

This person had the exact same issue with their child, developed an app for this and got banned from play store: https://habr-com.translate.goog/ru/post/421451/?_x_tr_sl=aut...

The app is available as a standalone APK now: https://channelwhitelist-tilda-ws.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=a...

Unfortunately i could not find sources, but it works rather well and has English UI as well

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#26

Post by JKCalhoun »

ipnon wrote: post #2

Popularizing astroengineering means kids watching YouTube today are going to be making rockets in the future. It's exciting to see the enthusiasm for moonshot industries reach a wide audience. Enough people sharing a wild dream slowly turns the impossible into reality.

I enjoyed reading about the early exploits of rocketry.

As an American I grew up seeing Robert Goddard and his famous first liquid fuel rocket everywhere in various books on the history of rocketry.

As I got older and read more I became more impressed with the fledgling rocket club (Verein für Raumschiffahrt) that Werner von Braun was famously a member of in post-WWI Germany. You couldn't help but see parallels to closed vs. open collaboration as Goddard, always secretive, seemed to get stuck on developing the necessary fuel pump while von Braun and collaborators were able to move forward to develop the high-speed, one-shot turbine that ultimately delivered the goods.

I am not sure if it was Willy Ley's classic ("Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel") or maybe even Arthur C. Clarke's book ("The Promise of Space") where I got that sense. Both books are oldies but excellent.

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#27

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

rwmj wrote: post #25

The famous problem with the N1 was plumbing all of those engines to the fuel tanks without leaks. But SpaceX uses a similar design (lots of small engines) - how have they solved the plumbing problem?

I think a lot of the answer is just really good engineering. Precision manufacturing and computer simulation have come a long way in the past 50 years.

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#28

Post by R0b0t1 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #27
rwmj wrote: post #25

The famous problem with the N1 was plumbing all of those engines to the fuel tanks without leaks. But SpaceX uses a similar design (lots of small engines) - how have they solved the plumbing problem?

I think a lot of the answer is just really good engineering. Precision manufacturing and computer simulation have come a long way in the past 50 years.

It's more accurate to ascribe it to better manufacturing processes, really. They're the result of engineering, but orthogonal to what you'd think of as engineering practice.

Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines

#30

Post by sbradford26 »

rwmj wrote: post #25

The famous problem with the N1 was plumbing all of those engines to the fuel tanks without leaks. But SpaceX uses a similar design (lots of small engines) - how have they solved the plumbing problem?

I wouldn't say that plumbing was the biggest issue. A big limiting factor was the control systems available then. I believe a couple of the N1 failures were caused by control system failures. With modern controls you can monitor and control each engine with much more granularity.
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