The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
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The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
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Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#2Popularizing 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#3Popularizing 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.
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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#4Popularizing 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.
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 watching a group of Australians competing to see how many weather balloons they could pop by throwing various items at them.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#5The 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#6The three main "classical" engine design companies in USSR were Energomash, headed by Valentin Glushko, KBKhA, headed initially by Semyon Kosberg, and KBKhM, headed by Alexey Isayev. Of course there is Kuznetsov's bureau, but that was doing many different things, like aircraft engines and later gas pumping machines for natural gas pipes. This video shows works of Energomash and KBKhA, but no works of Isayev's KBKhM are shown - they concentrated on spacecraft engines - and that's a pity, as KBKhM had a lot of results in pushing the envelope in rocket engines technology.
So... waiting for the next chapter?
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#7Earlier 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…
Heh. I know exactly what videos you're talking about and I quite easily get sucked into watching them.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#8The 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.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#9https://www.gazeta.ru/science/2021/08/27_a_13919672.shtml Here is an article in Russian about the effects of sanctions on RD-180 engines (these were powering the Atlas rockets run by ULA). it mentions a few interesting details: Energomash is loosing a third of its income, they will likely have to close down production of that engine, and that they won't be able to resume production of the engine in the future. This means that
we, as a space faring species, are likely to loose the know-how for the RD-180, just like we lost the know-how for the F-1 engine of the Saturn-V.
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#10I 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...