2001: A Space-Time Odyssey

[SpaceGeek]

In response to Kennedy's May 25th address to congress and the nation, commiting the nation to landing a man on the Moon, Chemolei and Khrushchev immediately began an informal dialog over the situation as they both took it quite seriously. Authorization for draft work for a booster and spacecraft capable of taking cosmonauts to the Lunar Surface was given on June 1st.

Despite intense criticism by Yangel and Korolev (who each had their own competing lunar landing architectures) Chemolei's LK-700 design was still the one ultimatley approved, primarily because of the simplicity of the Direct Ascent aproach to lunar landings. The Americans were taking the same aproach at the time aswell, lending even more credibility to the proposal. It also saved the USSR from a long and expensive orbital docking practice program. Overall, Chemolei had taken a sound conservative design approach with the capability for evolutionary improvements. The launch vehicle itself however, was very ambitious. With an equivelant payload to LEO of 154 metric tonnes the Universal Rocket (UR) 700 would vastly outperform any rocket currently in existence many times over. The monster LK-700 lander meanwhile would land a crew of two on an eight day mission, with the possibility of easily adding a third crew member and extending mission durations.

Meanwhile Chemolei was also giving authorization for his LK-1 circumlunar plan. With proper optimization of the Proton booster based on early flight tests the UR-500 would be capable of placing the vehicle and it's RB translunar injection stage in LEO before, at the appropriate moment in the parking orbit, this would be fired to place the spacecraft on a loop around the moon. It would separate after burnout. Using universal components in vehicles and in the Orbital capsules was hoped to not only reduce cost, but create a whole new family of manned and unmanned vehicles. Chemolei estimated that he could perform the first lunar landing as early as 1967.

OOC: This is a collaberative TL with Michel Van.

 

[Michel Van]

welcome to our TL 2001: A Space-Time Odyssey
no, you will not see apes, Monolith or Aliens here, but a realist approach on Space architecture from 2001

by the way
it was 50 years ago that Stanley Kubrick started the production of a movie called "2001: A Space Odyssey"

 

[omnimercurial]

This pleases me greatly!

LK 700 is an interesting option not explored in AH before to my knowledge.

 

[Michel Van]

This pleases me greatly!

LK 700 is an interesting option not explored in AH before to my knowledge.

a lot of the space hardware in TL are never before used in AH, so enjoy

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Toxic hypergolics! How fun.

Also, while better than the N1 quite possibly, the Proton had huge teething problems, and Im assuming the UR700 would be even worse, being based on the same hardware, just more pieces to fail.

Also. 154t to LEO. I'll buy that. But how does that get a direct ascent stack to the moon and back???? Otl, of course, the Saturn V put ~100t in orbit, and had to use lunar orbit rendezvous to land two men on the moon in a very, very light weight lander. Thats using Lh2 for fuel.

Since the Soviets are using hypergolics, they are, arent they?, how do they get a super Soyuz to the moon and back?

Given Michel van is working on this, I believe you've done the calculations, but I dont see how it's possible with that mission profile and hypergolics.

Besides, when a ur700 blows up on the launch pad, how much of Kazakhstan will it render uninhabitable?

 

[Pipcard]

welcome to our TL 2001: A Space-Time Odyssey
no, you will not see apes, Monolith or Aliens here, but a realist approach on Space architecture from 2001

That reminds me of the backstory for this Orbiter space simulator add-on based on the 2001 universe:

A key part of the technological optimism of 2001 is routine, cheap access to space. Clearly, their shuttle program turned out entirely differently from ours.

Here, the success of Apollo in the 1960's was followed by lunar bases and 50-man space stations, both American and Soviet, in the 1970's. These culminated in Mars missions in the early 1980's. All were launched by large expendable launch vehicles; Saturn V, Neptune, and N-1. Development of a reusable shuttle proceeded, but later, by which time we were all a bit smarter and better-looking. Full employment of the Apollo team was not a goal of the shuttle program; they were busy doing other things like going to Mars. This had beneficial effects on a lot of architecture choices, especially the decision to leave shuttle operation to third parties, rather than making it a space-agency monopoly.

Development of the spaceplane proceeded in two stages. The first stage was to develop the orbiter, which would get to orbit by staging a drop tank. The Lockheed Starclipper was taken as a design starting point, though the final configuration of the Orion II/III was different in many details. The Titov V was not; it unabashedly shows its origins as the borrowed Starclipper.
By the end of the 1980's, it became significantly cheaper to launch supplies in small pieces on the shuttles than to launch on Saturns, or even the economy-size Neptunes purchased in bulk. First propellant, and later, as orbital assembly became a going concern, structural elements, were brought up routinely in small daily (and later, hourly) flights rather than big monthly ones. Space stations and moon bases and the Mars base were not abandoned; they were expanded.

The market for shipments to orbit well-established, it was time to bring costs down another increment. The Orion IV and Titov B boosters were developed, and passenger service became cheap enough to be afforded by thousands, then millions. An orbiting hotel was built.

The USSR passed into the hands of pragmatic leaders, communist by name but with capitalist reforms. Ideological competition between the superpowers lessened, though did not end entirely. The two superpowers did cooperate to try to lessen other powers' access to space; this was almost completely unsuccessful. The Chinese built space stations and moon expeditions; the British built a moon base.

Thirty-eight declared nuclear powers flexed their muscles, and for reasons not fully explored or explained, at least six of them placed nuclear weapons in orbit. (By the time of 2010, this was apparently illegal by treaty, but violated anyway. What the advantage is of putting your nukes where it takes longer to use them and anyone can tamper with them, nobody can explain. We're faithful to the canon anyway.)

Today, the drop tank versions continue in service for some missions. While riding a reusable booster is clearly cheaper, boosters are scarce resources, closely scheduled. The drop tank allows missions, particularly military ones, to proceed without tight schedules in advance. It is the ONLY practical way to place a military spaceplane on alert, ready for launch but at an indeterminate time.

Also, this:

Development of the [Orion] spaceplane proceeded in two stages. The first stage was to develop the orbiter, which would get to orbit by staging a drop tank. The Lockheed Starclipper was taken as a design starting point, though the final configuration of the Orion II/III was different in many details.

The Titov V was not; it unabashedly shows its origins as the borrowed Starclipper.

Both designs wound up being horizontal takeoff, assisted by a steam catapult. This was driven partly by customer demand – airlines wanted an airplane that could reject a takeoff or return to base at any point, not a flame-belching vertical-takeoff behemoth that needed to get supersonic before it was possible to abort and return to land. This also allowed easier adaptation to the later two-stage concept, as no engines would have to be removed to make that work. The drop tank itself was named Orion I; the cargo shuttle Orion II. The passenger-only version came later, named Orion III.

The Titov used different nomenclature; the drop tank was Blok A (Titov A), the booster Titov B, and the orbiter Titov V (third letter in the Cyrillic alphabet).

 

[Michel Van]

Toxic hypergolics! How fun.

Also, while better than the N1 quite possibly, the Proton had huge teething problems, and Im assuming the UR700 would be even worse, being based on the same hardware, just more pieces to fail.

Also. 154t to LEO. I'll buy that. But how does that get a direct ascent stack to the moon and back???? Otl, of course, the Saturn V put ~100t in orbit, and had to use lunar orbit rendezvous to land two men on the moon in a very, very light weight lander. Thats using Lh2 for fuel.

Since the Soviets are using hypergolics, they are, arent they?, how do they get a super Soyuz to the moon and back?

Given Michel van is working on this, I believe you've done the calculations, but I dont see how it's possible with that mission profile and hypergolics.

Besides, when a ur700 blows up on the launch pad, how much of Kazakhstan will it render uninhabitable?

the UR-700 is a Monster of 4823 tons (Saturn V only 2800 tons)

it's brings the LK-700 space craft into orbit, with 154 ton mass. (that it on left side of picture)
what lands on moon is that on Right side of picture (landing gear not show)
the mission profile:

and yes if the UR-700 has a malfunction and blow up
it around 4497 tons of high toxic Nitrogen tetroxide and Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine that burn up over Kazakhstan or china
the Toxic fall out would be mostly: ammonia, water, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitric oxide.
but around 269 tons would this:
acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, ethylene, formaldehyde, propadiene, ketene, cyanous acid, hydrazoic acid, various methylamines, acetaldehyde, methyl nitrite, formic acid, nitrous acid, butadiyne, nitrilohydrazines, nitromethane, and nitrosohydrazines with other oxidized derivatives of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and hydrazine.

source
Apollo Lunar Module Engine Exhaust Products
Science 7 November 1969:
Vol. 166 no. 3906 pp. 733-738

 

[e of pi]

Toxic hypergolics! How fun.

Also, while better than the N1 quite possibly, the Proton had huge teething problems, and Im assuming the UR700 would be even worse, being based on the same hardware, just more pieces to fail.

Also. 154t to LEO. I'll buy that. But how does that get a direct ascent stack to the moon and back???? Otl, of course, the Saturn V put ~100t in orbit, and had to use lunar orbit rendezvous to land two men on the moon in a very, very light weight lander. Thats using Lh2 for fuel.

[cut]

Given Michel van is working on this, I believe you've done the calculations, but I dont see how it's possible with that mission profile and hypergolics.

Besides, when a ur700 blows up on the launch pad, how much of Kazakhstan will it render uninhabitable?

Examining the numbers Mark Wade has for the LK-700 on Astronautix, to me it seems they did it by making extremely optimistic assumptions about achievable mass ratio for hypergolic stages, delta-v for each part of the mission, and vacuum ISp of each stage. For instance of the first, the Block I and II boosters seem to have been expected to have a dry mass of about 1.8 tons for a stage with a gross mass of 39.5 tons--about 5.5% of the stage gross mass. Even for dense hypergolics, that's optimistic. For the second, they seem to have been planning perfectly optimal delta-v for each section--absolute minimum delta-v for TLI, absolute minimum for a direct descent (that is, no entry of lunar orbit, just directly descending to the surface--slightly more efficient than orbiting first, but with less chance to check your navigation), absolute minimum for return. Finally, this all used a specific impulse of 326s for each stage--not unbelievable with a pump-fed hypergolic engine, but on the upper limit of performance for even such an engine. If they're stuck with less-efficient pressure-fed hypergols, then they're down to more like 318s as an optimistic guess. Even that change alone pushes the minimum initial mass in LEO to 170 tons. Basically, it's a plan that only works if they can make every technical development work, and all their optimistic assumptions work. If they don't, the minimum mass quickly rises beyond the throw of even the UR-700.

 

[Michel Van]

on e of pi remarks on UR-700

I have to defend Mark Wade, because there no hard date on UR-700 in west. even Anatoly Zak fantastic book "Russia in Space" is astounding vague on the UR-700 rocket.
The UR-700 use some trick, like it first stage got additional fuel tanks for center stage Engine so second stage is full fueled at jettison of first stage parts.
the use of UR-500 parts for it construction and use of High pressure engine to push the thrust and ISP to max.

If our Russian members have hard Data on UR-500 and UR-700, please PM me !

this weekend, i will try to estimate the UR-700 and LK-700 mass based on Proton rocket hardware.

 

[SpaceGeek]

October 24th 1960:

Mitrofan Nedelin inadvertently played a key role in ushering in the space age by concluding that rockets were the ideal means to deliver a nuclear warhead to USA instead of bombers and ordered Sergei Korolev to develop the massive R-7 ICBM to carry a large warhead to the USA. This rocket and its derivatives, while never an effective ICBM, was powerful enough to launch Sputnik and Vostok manned space vehicles into orbit enabling the USSR to beat the US to space.

For Military purposes however, a new launch vehicle was neccesary. One that could be launched quickly after the go ahead, one that would be useful in retaliation against an American first strike. That came as the R-16. Over 30 m long, 3.0 m in diameter and with a launch weight of 141 tons it was not by any means a small vehicle. Despite pressure to perform all safety tests before October 7th (the day of the Bolshevik revolution) the vehicle thuroughly tested even after the date, the last thing Nedeplin needed was a failed launch on the missiles premier launch.[1]

Luckily all went well as the rocket soared into the sky. While the launch was not without it's faults (comming somewhat short of the intended range) the success was more than any of the hundreds of engineers had hoped for. By August 1961 R-16s were being deployed as operational ICBMs all along the Soviet Union while Gherman Titov flew a record breaking day long orbital spaceflight. The R-16 would be used in mass for several years untill it's eventual retirement[2]

[1] The Nedelin Tragedy is famous in rocket history for being one of the worst launch failures ever. 120 people died, the program was delayed by a year, and was covered up untill 1989. ITTL the launch is successful because more safety testing was done before launch.
[2] Without the Nedelin Tragedy, the R-16 becomes a commonly deployed ICBM. With the Soviet Union more reliant on ICBMs they never need to deploy IRBMs in Cuba and the Cuban Missile crisis never happens. The results of this will become clearer later in the TL.

 

[e of pi]

on e of pi remarks on UR-700

I have to defend Mark Wade, because there no hard date on UR-700 in west. even Anatoly Zak fantastic book "Russia in Space" is astounding vague on the UR-700 rocket.

this weekend, i will try to estimate the UR-700 and LK-700 mass based on Proton rocket hardware.

Michel,

I think you may misunderstand me. I'm not critiquing Mark Wade--the data he has is self-consistent to the extent I was able to determine (if you'd like, PM me an email address and I'll email you my calculations). The issue is that those calculations suggest that the original designers assumed the absolute most optimistic value at every stage of their design, and that with anything less than perfect performance, the LK-700 grows beyond the ability of the UR-700 to throw to orbit. That's worrying as an engineer, because it means there's no margin for anything less than success. Saturn V had margin, which was good because the original LM design ended up growing by about a ton. From what I can figure, LK-700 has no margin at all.

I hope this clarifies what I meant.

 

[Michel Van]

yes i have misunderstand you, e of pi
sorry about that

 

[nixonshead]

...Despite pressure to perform all safety tests before October 7th (the day of the Bolshevik revolution) the vehicle thuroughly tested even after the date, the last thing Nedeplin needed was a failed launch on the missiles premier launch.

Minor thing, but the anniversary of the "October Revolution" actually falls on 7 November in the modern Gregorian calendar - so Nedelin beats his deadline after all

 

[SpaceGeek]

Vostok: Reaching Orbit.

While Korolev had lost his bid for control over the Soviet manned lunar program he still had plenty of work to do in the coming years of the Space Race. The Vostok was already a highly versatile spacecraft that had taken Yuri Gagarin on an orbital spaceflight dozens of times longer, faster and farther than the suborbital Mercury-Redstone flights of Alan Shepard and Guss Gissom. In addition to its demonstration of orbital spaceflight it also had enough consumables to support a cosmonaut for 10 days, making the Vostok superior to the Mercury capsule in long duration ability as well.

Korolev’s plan would be to launch the second Vostok on a manned 24 hour orbital spaceflight. This would not only make the Americans 15 minute Mercury flights look pathetic in comparison it would also provide a significant amount of scientific information about human adaptation to outer space. Beyond this Korolev was considering longer multi-day duration missions as the next logical step. By utilizing the R-7’s launch accuracy two Vostoks (launched a day apart) could be placed in a similar orbit on a dual flight. Without the ability to maneuver they would drift apart but it would at least appear as a rendezvous to the public and score the USSR another prestige victory.

Kamanin, the head of the cosmonaut corps and a believer in a larger role of the Soviet military in space, had different plans. He proposed that the Vostok be modified by adding retro-rockets allowing multi-person flights and early extra-vehicular activity (EVA) also known as spacewalks to occure. Originally Korolev had pushed for an advanced maneuverable spacecraft called the Soyuz as part of his manned lunar architecture and he wanted to wait until the Soyuz would be available before attempting such missions. But the cancellation of his lunar ambitions meant any spaceflight under his control would be under Vostok and so any upgrade was in his interest. And so the plans were finalized

Vostok 2 launched into the history books on August 6th 1961 as it’s R-7 booster (the same that had carried Sputnik years earlier) carried it higher and faster until finally it was coasting serenely and silently after just eight minutes of powered flight. Gherman Titov was eager to take his own place in the world stage after being the backup for Vostok 1 just four months earlier. His spaceflight was quite unlike Gagarin’s mission because of its focus the body’s reaction to microgravity along with his eating, sleeping and defecating in space. He returned safely after rocketing out of his descending Vostok via his ejection seat. The flight was troubled by low temperatures (10 c) a bout of space sickness and failure of the SM to separate properly (as had happened on Vostok 1). But despite these minor issues the Soviet space program had scored a major victory and was on the road to dominate the Space Race in the coming years. Spaceflight was day by day becoming more and more real to the public just as the Soviets presented more and more of a threat.

 

[omnimercurial]

Good update!

Will we eventually see sometthing like the Leonov from the 2010 Book?

 

[Michel Van]

back to UR-700
after remarks of e of pi, i used my free day to calculate the UR-700 and it's LK-700 design
result it works, but the mass are 12% higher as optimistic estimated by Chemolei
what push liftoff mass of UR-700 to 5430 tons…

if one or two of this monster explode, i really prefer a vacation in Pripyat, near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant...

Good update!

Will we eventually see sometthing like the Leonov from the 2010 Book?

yes, there will be a Soviet space craft called Leonov in future of this TL, be patience
There many post to come, with allot of surprise:

a Stalinist and his ultra secret swimming-pool
a American Icon give a commemorative address for a fallen hero and 21 day later that's speech become his Testament.
A US president is push to limits and his Vice president Wildest Dreams come true…

 

[omnimercurial]

Wonderful!!

Horrific if Rocket goes Boom.

Really hoping it wont happen.

 

[e of pi]

Wonderful!!

Horrific if Rocket goes Boom.

Really hoping it wont happen.

It's related to Proton, which IOTL had about a 50% failure rate at this time, but far more complex in every respect. Honestly, if it doesn't have three or four big failures during testing, it'd be a miracle. If they only have five major failures in the program, they're lucky and building rockets a lot better than IOTL.

 

[Bahamut-255]

back to UR-700
after remarks of e of pi, i used my free day to calculate the UR-700 and it's LK-700 design
result it works, but the mass are 12% higher as optimistic estimated by Chemolei
what push liftoff mass of UR-700 to 5430 tons…

At 5,430 Tonnes, each RD-270 would need to be capable of 7,259 KN thrust at sea-level as opposed to its designed 6,278 KN to have an acceptable T/W Ratio. Which given Glushko's inability to resolve the combustion instability issues that plagued it IOTL (though funding likely played a role in that), I severely doubt he could get it to that level with just the one chamber-per-engine. In other words, it needs to match OTL's RD-170/1 SL Thrust to get the UR-700 off the launch pad in a short enough time.

 

[e of pi]

At 5,430 Tonnes, each RD-270 would need to be capable of 7,259 KN thrust at sea-level as opposed to its designed 6,278 KN to have an acceptable T/W Ratio. Which given Glushko's inability to resolve the combustion instability issues that plagued it IOTL (though funding likely played a role in that), I severely doubt he could get it to that level with just the one chamber-per-engine. In other words, it needs to match OTL's RD-170/1 SL Thrust to get the UR-700 off the launch pad in a short enough time.

Even worse, combustion instability (1) gets worse with increasing combustion chamber size and (2) the degree to which it does was very hard to anticipate. With the F-1, they didn't realize how bad its combustion stability issues would be until it got to the test stands...where it stayed for about 7 years. The RD-270 only got to its first firing sequence in 1967, so...if they don't switch to clustered smaller engines, does the UR-700 even fly by 1973?