4 ms·

My admittedly uninformed opinion is that it just doesn't make any sense. I don't care how good the Russians are/were at making rockets. First of all, surely the

by pbreit 12y ago

My admittedly uninformed opinion is that it just doesn't make any sense. I don't care how good the Russians are/were at making rockets. First of all, surely there has been significant progress in all aspects of the design and manufacturing of such an item. And second, who knows how well the engines have been stored, cared for, maintained and transported over the past 40 years. I would think you'd want to have more visibility into such a thing for this type of component. Elon: It “has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke,” he said. “It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s — I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.” Orbital: "we did discover there were some effects of aging since they had been in storage for awhile, including some stress corrosion cracking,” I could see Elon offering to supply Orbital with some US-made engines. But maybe that wouldn't satisfy NASA's desire for diversity.

venomsnake 12y ago
There hasn't been much development in this types of engines since the moon race. And we may have even gone backwards, because a lot of the institutional knowledge and probably some of the documentation is lost.
smacktoward 12y ago
And the punchline is, those engines weren't even very good when they were first made all those decades ago. If they article is right, they were first developed for use on the N1 rocket, the Soviet moon-rocket counterpart to America's Saturn V. There's a reason why Saturn V beat the N1 to the moon -- the N1 had a distressingly consistent habit of blowing up: N1-L3 was underfunded and undertested, and started development in October 1965, almost four years after the Saturn V. The project was badly derailed by the death of its chief designer Sergei Korolev in 1966. Each of the four attempts to launch an N1 failed; during the second launch attempt the N1 rocket crashed back onto its launch pad shortly after liftoff and exploded, resulting in one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket))
- avmich 12y ago
  You're perhaps mistaking NK-33 for their predecessor, NK-15, which was used in all 4 unsuccessful N1 flights?
  - pbreit 12y ago
    So the predecessor was involved in 4 consecutive mishaps and the successor never even used? Not sure who is mistaking here.
    - avmich 12y ago
      The reason NK-15 were exploding was traced back to turbopumps. Those were completely redesigned, from scratch, for NK-33. That alone justifies a new name for the engine. Then, unlike NK-15, NK-33 are multi-start engines. Were tested for ridiculously long work times - one worked non-stop for ~14000 (fourteen thousands) seconds on a stand.
      - Fuzzwah 12y ago
        To save anyone else who doesn't trust themselves doing simple time based math and googling 14000 seconds in hours: ~14000 seconds = ~3.9 hours
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > There's a reason why Saturn V beat the N1 to the moon -- the N1 had a distressingly consistent habit of blowing up: That, too, was a symptom, not a cause. The history of the N1 program is complex. As a westerner, you're probably more inclined to quickly thumb your nose at it, but the program failed for a sum of non-technical reasons. Korolev died early during the project. That alone was a major blow. Then, the Communist Party severely cut the funds needed for the project. They couldn't even test the rockets properly. Their "tests" were the actual live launches. Imagine if NASA was operating like that. They did the best they could, but with the chief engineer gone, and with almost no money, they couldn't get very far. I see the whole thing not as proof of lack of competence, but rather as a heroic effort against literally insurmountable difficulties. Someone should make a movie out of it, starting with Korolev's awesome early work before WW2, going through him being exiled in labor camp in Siberia by Stalin, then his rehabilitation and then the Sputnik and Gagarin, the start of the N1, Korolev's death (hastened by poor health after his siberian sojourn), and ending with the N1 being stopped and the engines being hidden in a facility against the wishes of the Party higher-ups to have them destroyed. A Dostoevsky drama kind of vibe would be quite appropriate, I guess.
ddrmaxgt37 12y ago
Context for the Musk Quotes, his 2012 Wired interview: http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/
avmich 12y ago
Uninformed, yes :( . There are theoretical limits for how high Isp - the specific impulse, defined as how much thrust, in, say, pounds of force, you can get from a unit of fuel flow, going into the engine, in, say, pounds of mass per second. The engines created in '60s are already rather close to that theoretical limit - so saying that you can do much better just because decades has passed is similar to saying "well, surely we had SR-71 flying back in '70s already - by today we ought to have all civil aviation routinely doing at least Mach 2". So - no, it's pretty hard, including for fundamental reasons, to make engines much better that NK-33 by Isp. And that parameter is of paramount importance for a rocket engine. Mind you, this is still not the only parameter. After all, you probably care a lot about economic efficiency. Elon Musk seems to understand that pretty well - and SpaceX engines, while lacking technically, could be in a much better position economically. Next, you're right that design and manufacturing aren't standing still. Both control of materials parameters and the ability to convert the raw material into an engineered device substantially rose - talking about, say, 3D printing engines or parts, which happens rather frequently now, but didn't in '70s. So it's a complicated matter. However, NK-33 still have good technical parameters, and were bought inexpensively - in '90s, when Russia was severely starved for cash. Why not to use something which is already there, and not expensive? That's quite a rational decision Orbital - and Aerojet before them - took. Regarding the second part, about storage. Surely this is unprecedented case. That's why the engines were tested - many times, both in Russia and in USA, and also analysed, trying to predict how several decades of storage could affect engines. The results were apparently positive - of course you and I don't have the original raw data which was used to make that decision. But don't think the engines just were, say, buried underground; their storage history is roughly known and isn't that different from other products of heavy machinery industry. So I think Elon is habitually being overreacting in regard to Orbital usage of those engines. May be it has something to do with Elon's unsuccessful attempts to strike a deal with Russian space industry back when SpaceX was really young - or may be it's just a tradition for him, Elon sometimes says something out of proportions, even though SpaceX real - smaller - results are undeniable. Elon misses the point - it's only for uninformed the phrase "rocket engines made in USSR 40 years ago" would mean "unacceptable variant". George Sutton, author of "History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" mentions that USSR spent far more towards rocket engine research than all other countries combined, and NK-33 is one of the serious achievements of Soviet rocket school. Don't discount something off hand just because it's old and foreign.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
Yes and no. Rocket engine design has not actually made that much progress in the meanwhile. It's not the design that was the issue. Also, the Russians were VERY good at making rocket engines. The real problem is that these are engines actually made decades ago, and stored under a tarp in a former Soviet facility for a long time before they were purchased by Orbital as the cheap option.
- avmich 12y ago
  I've seen photos of the hangar where they were stored. Looks like some decent conditions. Regardless, they were inspected - with replacing proper parts, like in valves - and tested on stands. And x-ray checks are standard for this kind of systems.

by pbreit 12y ago

venomsnake 12y ago

There hasn't been much development in this types of engines since the moon race. And we may have even gone backwards, because a lot of the institutional knowledge and probably some of the documentation is lost.

smacktoward 12y ago

And the punchline is, those engines weren't even very good when they were first made all those decades ago. If they article is right, they were first developed for use on the N1 rocket, the Soviet moon-rocket counterpart to America's Saturn V. There's a reason why Saturn V beat the N1 to the moon -- the N1 had a distressingly consistent habit of blowing up: N1-L3 was underfunded and undertested, and started development in October 1965, almost four years after the Saturn V. The project was badly derailed by the death of its chief designer Sergei Korolev in 1966. Each of the four attempts to launch an N1 failed; during the second launch attempt the N1 rocket crashed back onto its launch pad shortly after liftoff and exploded, resulting in one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket))

avmich 12y ago
You're perhaps mistaking NK-33 for their predecessor, NK-15, which was used in all 4 unsuccessful N1 flights?
- pbreit 12y ago
  So the predecessor was involved in 4 consecutive mishaps and the successor never even used? Not sure who is mistaking here.
  - avmich 12y ago
    The reason NK-15 were exploding was traced back to turbopumps. Those were completely redesigned, from scratch, for NK-33. That alone justifies a new name for the engine. Then, unlike NK-15, NK-33 are multi-start engines. Were tested for ridiculously long work times - one worked non-stop for ~14000 (fourteen thousands) seconds on a stand.
    - Fuzzwah 12y ago
      To save anyone else who doesn't trust themselves doing simple time based math and googling 14000 seconds in hours: ~14000 seconds = ~3.9 hours
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> There's a reason why Saturn V beat the N1 to the moon -- the N1 had a distressingly consistent habit of blowing up: That, too, was a symptom, not a cause. The history of the N1 program is complex. As a westerner, you're probably more inclined to quickly thumb your nose at it, but the program failed for a sum of non-technical reasons. Korolev died early during the project. That alone was a major blow. Then, the Communist Party severely cut the funds needed for the project. They couldn't even test the rockets properly. Their "tests" were the actual live launches. Imagine if NASA was operating like that. They did the best they could, but with the chief engineer gone, and with almost no money, they couldn't get very far. I see the whole thing not as proof of lack of competence, but rather as a heroic effort against literally insurmountable difficulties. Someone should make a movie out of it, starting with Korolev's awesome early work before WW2, going through him being exiled in labor camp in Siberia by Stalin, then his rehabilitation and then the Sputnik and Gagarin, the start of the N1, Korolev's death (hastened by poor health after his siberian sojourn), and ending with the N1 being stopped and the engines being hidden in a facility against the wishes of the Party higher-ups to have them destroyed. A Dostoevsky drama kind of vibe would be quite appropriate, I guess.

ddrmaxgt37 12y ago

Context for the Musk Quotes, his 2012 Wired interview: http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ http://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

avmich 12y ago

Uninformed, yes :( . There are theoretical limits for how high Isp - the specific impulse, defined as how much thrust, in, say, pounds of force, you can get from a unit of fuel flow, going into the engine, in, say, pounds of mass per second. The engines created in '60s are already rather close to that theoretical limit - so saying that you can do much better just because decades has passed is similar to saying "well, surely we had SR-71 flying back in '70s already - by today we ought to have all civil aviation routinely doing at least Mach 2". So - no, it's pretty hard, including for fundamental reasons, to make engines much better that NK-33 by Isp. And that parameter is of paramount importance for a rocket engine. Mind you, this is still not the only parameter. After all, you probably care a lot about economic efficiency. Elon Musk seems to understand that pretty well - and SpaceX engines, while lacking technically, could be in a much better position economically. Next, you're right that design and manufacturing aren't standing still. Both control of materials parameters and the ability to convert the raw material into an engineered device substantially rose - talking about, say, 3D printing engines or parts, which happens rather frequently now, but didn't in '70s. So it's a complicated matter. However, NK-33 still have good technical parameters, and were bought inexpensively - in '90s, when Russia was severely starved for cash. Why not to use something which is already there, and not expensive? That's quite a rational decision Orbital - and Aerojet before them - took. Regarding the second part, about storage. Surely this is unprecedented case. That's why the engines were tested - many times, both in Russia and in USA, and also analysed, trying to predict how several decades of storage could affect engines. The results were apparently positive - of course you and I don't have the original raw data which was used to make that decision. But don't think the engines just were, say, buried underground; their storage history is roughly known and isn't that different from other products of heavy machinery industry. So I think Elon is habitually being overreacting in regard to Orbital usage of those engines. May be it has something to do with Elon's unsuccessful attempts to strike a deal with Russian space industry back when SpaceX was really young - or may be it's just a tradition for him, Elon sometimes says something out of proportions, even though SpaceX real - smaller - results are undeniable. Elon misses the point - it's only for uninformed the phrase "rocket engines made in USSR 40 years ago" would mean "unacceptable variant". George Sutton, author of "History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" mentions that USSR spent far more towards rocket engine research than all other countries combined, and NK-33 is one of the serious achievements of Soviet rocket school. Don't discount something off hand just because it's old and foreign.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

Yes and no. Rocket engine design has not actually made that much progress in the meanwhile. It's not the design that was the issue. Also, the Russians were VERY good at making rocket engines. The real problem is that these are engines actually made decades ago, and stored under a tarp in a former Soviet facility for a long time before they were purchased by Orbital as the cheap option.

avmich 12y ago
I've seen photos of the hangar where they were stored. Looks like some decent conditions. Regardless, they were inspected - with replacing proper parts, like in valves - and tested on stands. And x-ray checks are standard for this kind of systems.