Does anyone else get an Ohrwurm of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett singing this?
if i hear "fly me to the moon" i got vision of big huge humanoids, control by children, who fight giant Angels...
was made by Japanese company GAINAX
WI: Soyuz to the Moon?
- Thread starter Emperor Norton I
- Start date
if i hear "fly me to the moon" i got vision of big huge humanoids, control by children, who fight giant Angels...
was made by Japanese company GAINAX
USSR to the Moon, USA to Mars, maybe we get a space race that just keeps going. Technology extends into space more, there are probably one to two dozen commercial space stations, and the USSR still falls just in a somewhat different manner. Ultra-tech labs and maybe even ultra-secure banking systems (servers) are kept in orbit or on the Moon itself as ultimate fail-safes.
Maybe we even get Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars to show up a few years early...
Maybe we even get Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars to show up a few years early...
Thanks to you and e of pi for kind attention, Michel!
Something I notice is, a lot of people who normally would be dealing in hypergolic engines were quite suddenly churning out a whole range of new meth-lox designs. It looks almost like they were just happy with the hypergolics but then out of left field someone ordered them to develop an alternative, or else!
The thing is, I think of conventional, well-developed ker-lox as the straight substitution for storable hypergolics, in that they both yield similar ISP and storage densities. The difference is, the ker-lox is much less toxic but also suffers from being partially cryogenic, hence worries about gradual boil-off.
Whereas, for the price of making all your propellant cryogenic instead of just some of it, methane as an alternative to kerosene gives better ISP than either ker-lox or hypergolics, so people who had made their peace with the latter seemed to prefer to develop it rather than simply take a step backward with ker-lox--either way they are now stuck with the thermal problems, but at least meth-lox compensates them with better performance.
Not every engine and application that suddenly had a meth-lox alternate version in the 90's; there's a handful of mentions of adaptions of ker-lox and even LH2-LOX engines. (The only reason I can imagine someone wanting the latter is in cases where the storability of methane compared to hydrogen, or its density, quite outweigh the drawback of stepping down the ISP ladder.)
But it strikes me as strange that it seems meth-lox is only considered in the light of either being the "greener" alternative to hypergolic acid fuels, or perhaps in the exotic light of being a fuel one might synthesize on Mars.
Whereas I'm thinking of it as a straight replacement and upgrade of kerosene, pure and simple. I look at a ker-lox rocket, be it an R-7 derivative or a Saturn or an Atlas (Atlas in particular might have done well to use a liquid fuel that wanted to boil to be a gas, considering its structure depended on pressure) and ask, why didn't someone suggest trying methane as an improved fuel for it way back in the Sixties? Or for that matter the 50s?
Compared to storable hypergolics, methane has the drawback of being cryogenic, but a ker-lox rocket needs for part of its propellant--by mass and even by volume, the greater part--to be kept quite cold anyway. Colder, I believe, than liquid methane must me. So substituting liquid methane for kerosene certainly requires an extension of the insulation, but that also helps with the oxygen. With some designs a certain amount of gas pressure from the methane actually helps, up to a point.
Another way to look at methane--it's a compromise between hydrogen and kerosene, with physical properties not too far from kerosene--it's significantly less dense but then you need less of it so I believe that nearly evens out--delivering a performance boost that falls considerably short of the extra 100 ISP one might expect of hydrogen, but goes about a third of the way there.
That third is gain relative to kerosene, achieved at a lower cost than full success with hydrogen requires.
Since in fact there were a few hydrogen engines already on the shelf when 1960 dawned, at least in the USA--nothing reliable or powerful enough to base a rocket stage on yet, but the technology had been demonstrated--I'd think that the lesser challenge of the meth-lox engine would be one that the US aerospace industry could accomplish handily--not with maximum efficiency right away, but with impressive improvements over kerosene. And it should even have been well within the scope of Soviet designers, at least those of the first order, to come up with meth-lox engines of comparable size and superior efficiency to their ker-lox ones. And unlike the Americans, they weren't betting on hydrogen-oxy engines becoming practically available any time soon, nor investing in the auxiliary tech needed to manage liquid hydrogen. So for them, methane would have not just be an intermediate step up--it would be the only step up available to them, barring nuclear power coming into the picture.
This is why I think it is very odd that methane seems to have fallen between the stools of ker-lox/storables versus hydrogen, and languished there for several decades, until suddenly the hypergolic crowd of designers noticed it in their desperation for an alternative to the soon-to-be-banned "dragon's blood" they were so addicted to.
And here we are nearly 20 years from that sudden fashion for meth-lox in the '90s, a fashion that included the HL-20 and still prevails in many NASA paper designs for moon landers and the like--but as far as I have seen, has yet to be realized in a single operational rocket!
Honestly, people can tell me, it won't break my fragile heart, is there something wrong with meth-lox? Or is it just another case of institutional inertia prevailing over all?
By the way, I do understand and expect that a meth-lox engine that matches a given ker-lox engine's performance is fundamentally just a bit more challenging, because 20 percent ISP improvement is achieved by 40 percent greater power flows in the reaction--that is to say, HEAT! The methlox equivalent engine will use a lower mass flow, by 20 percent when optimized, but run hotter, which is not just an incremental problem--depending on the limits of materials available at a certain state of the art, it might be a deal-breaker, or cut into reliability and endurance, or cost significantly more to realize. I understand we can't have even the 10 percent increase in ISP for free.
But that's why I stressed the reality that some American hydrogen-burners were already being test-fired in labs in 1960--that suggests to me that meth-lox, at least in the crude form of simply substituting methane for kerosene for a 10 percent boost in performance, should have been attainable by then. An optimized engine, as relatively efficient as the best ker-lox engines were relative to their theoretical optimums, should have been possible by the middle of the decade.
NASA had good reasons to be conservative about the fuel they used in the Saturn first stages, considering how many gambles they'd already taken and proposed to take in the program.
The Soviets on the other hand, have never in the event launched any cosmonauts on any sort of rocket except an incrementally upgraded series of R-7 type rockets. For them, looking into substituting methane for kerosene would make a significant difference. So it's strange they don't seem to have done so.
Every one of these thoughts are exactly the way I've been thinking today. Look at the advantage a 10 percent increase in payload mass can bring a craft as marginal (and yet, as proven time and again, quite useful) as the Soyuz! Then consider that another 10 percent should be available by redesigning the engines properly.
And you bet I have been trying to get more facts about the details of the R-7 family rockets as they existed in the early and mid-60s--the Voshkod and Molynia variants as well as early "Soyuz-rocket"--to consider just exactly what margin there was for upping the outer cluster of booster aka "first stage" rockets from 4 to 6.
I have not been thinking about changing the diameter of the stage units. If I am to imagine the Soviets of the early and mid-60s sustaining this project, I suspect that the advantages of standardization and utilizing only infrastructure they've already developed (or is being developed, according to the old specs for the rocket) must be used to the hilt. Meaning, no free-form widening of stages. We can vary length, within a certain range, and that is all.
My feeling is, a new larger "standard" R-7 derivative with methane fuel and a cluster of 6 boosters instead of 4 could reliably put 10 tonnes or maybe a bit more into low orbit.
The feasibility of anything grandiose like a moonshot would then focus on increasing the pace of rocket assembly, payload integration and launch so that 10-20 modules could be placed into orbit within a relatively restricted time period, like a month or two.
Projects like N-1 or Proton might still proceed, with residual funding, on the back burner, and perhaps be cancelled completely when it develops that any grand goal the Americans can aspire to with their giant, partially hydrogen burning rocket, can be matched by numerous Soviet modules launched in what is approaching a routine. And that the Soviets can do more modest, cheaper things with just a few such launches instead of dozens.
They'd only need something like N-1 or Energia if they came up with a single, integral payload that can't be broken down into 10 tonne units.
I can see that, by poking around in Encyclopedia Astronautica and at Wikipedia.
Something I notice is, a lot of people who normally would be dealing in hypergolic engines were quite suddenly churning out a whole range of new meth-lox designs. It looks almost like they were just happy with the hypergolics but then out of left field someone ordered them to develop an alternative, or else!
The thing is, I think of conventional, well-developed ker-lox as the straight substitution for storable hypergolics, in that they both yield similar ISP and storage densities. The difference is, the ker-lox is much less toxic but also suffers from being partially cryogenic, hence worries about gradual boil-off.
Whereas, for the price of making all your propellant cryogenic instead of just some of it, methane as an alternative to kerosene gives better ISP than either ker-lox or hypergolics, so people who had made their peace with the latter seemed to prefer to develop it rather than simply take a step backward with ker-lox--either way they are now stuck with the thermal problems, but at least meth-lox compensates them with better performance.
Not every engine and application that suddenly had a meth-lox alternate version in the 90's; there's a handful of mentions of adaptions of ker-lox and even LH2-LOX engines. (The only reason I can imagine someone wanting the latter is in cases where the storability of methane compared to hydrogen, or its density, quite outweigh the drawback of stepping down the ISP ladder.)
But it strikes me as strange that it seems meth-lox is only considered in the light of either being the "greener" alternative to hypergolic acid fuels, or perhaps in the exotic light of being a fuel one might synthesize on Mars.
Whereas I'm thinking of it as a straight replacement and upgrade of kerosene, pure and simple. I look at a ker-lox rocket, be it an R-7 derivative or a Saturn or an Atlas (Atlas in particular might have done well to use a liquid fuel that wanted to boil to be a gas, considering its structure depended on pressure) and ask, why didn't someone suggest trying methane as an improved fuel for it way back in the Sixties? Or for that matter the 50s?
Compared to storable hypergolics, methane has the drawback of being cryogenic, but a ker-lox rocket needs for part of its propellant--by mass and even by volume, the greater part--to be kept quite cold anyway. Colder, I believe, than liquid methane must me. So substituting liquid methane for kerosene certainly requires an extension of the insulation, but that also helps with the oxygen. With some designs a certain amount of gas pressure from the methane actually helps, up to a point.
Another way to look at methane--it's a compromise between hydrogen and kerosene, with physical properties not too far from kerosene--it's significantly less dense but then you need less of it so I believe that nearly evens out--delivering a performance boost that falls considerably short of the extra 100 ISP one might expect of hydrogen, but goes about a third of the way there.
That third is gain relative to kerosene, achieved at a lower cost than full success with hydrogen requires.
Since in fact there were a few hydrogen engines already on the shelf when 1960 dawned, at least in the USA--nothing reliable or powerful enough to base a rocket stage on yet, but the technology had been demonstrated--I'd think that the lesser challenge of the meth-lox engine would be one that the US aerospace industry could accomplish handily--not with maximum efficiency right away, but with impressive improvements over kerosene. And it should even have been well within the scope of Soviet designers, at least those of the first order, to come up with meth-lox engines of comparable size and superior efficiency to their ker-lox ones. And unlike the Americans, they weren't betting on hydrogen-oxy engines becoming practically available any time soon, nor investing in the auxiliary tech needed to manage liquid hydrogen. So for them, methane would have not just be an intermediate step up--it would be the only step up available to them, barring nuclear power coming into the picture.
This is why I think it is very odd that methane seems to have fallen between the stools of ker-lox/storables versus hydrogen, and languished there for several decades, until suddenly the hypergolic crowd of designers noticed it in their desperation for an alternative to the soon-to-be-banned "dragon's blood" they were so addicted to.
And here we are nearly 20 years from that sudden fashion for meth-lox in the '90s, a fashion that included the HL-20 and still prevails in many NASA paper designs for moon landers and the like--but as far as I have seen, has yet to be realized in a single operational rocket!
Honestly, people can tell me, it won't break my fragile heart, is there something wrong with meth-lox? Or is it just another case of institutional inertia prevailing over all?
I'm not sure I understand what your phrase "just fuel exchange" refers to, I think what you mean is, if you were to dump methane into a completely unmodified ker-lox engine, say an F-1, you could only expect about a 10 percent increase in ISP, while the "20 percent" I've bandying about can indeed be realized with a new design optimized around it.
By the way, I do understand and expect that a meth-lox engine that matches a given ker-lox engine's performance is fundamentally just a bit more challenging, because 20 percent ISP improvement is achieved by 40 percent greater power flows in the reaction--that is to say, HEAT! The methlox equivalent engine will use a lower mass flow, by 20 percent when optimized, but run hotter, which is not just an incremental problem--depending on the limits of materials available at a certain state of the art, it might be a deal-breaker, or cut into reliability and endurance, or cost significantly more to realize. I understand we can't have even the 10 percent increase in ISP for free.
But that's why I stressed the reality that some American hydrogen-burners were already being test-fired in labs in 1960--that suggests to me that meth-lox, at least in the crude form of simply substituting methane for kerosene for a 10 percent boost in performance, should have been attainable by then. An optimized engine, as relatively efficient as the best ker-lox engines were relative to their theoretical optimums, should have been possible by the middle of the decade.
NASA had good reasons to be conservative about the fuel they used in the Saturn first stages, considering how many gambles they'd already taken and proposed to take in the program.
The Soviets on the other hand, have never in the event launched any cosmonauts on any sort of rocket except an incrementally upgraded series of R-7 type rockets. For them, looking into substituting methane for kerosene would make a significant difference. So it's strange they don't seem to have done so.
Every one of these thoughts are exactly the way I've been thinking today. Look at the advantage a 10 percent increase in payload mass can bring a craft as marginal (and yet, as proven time and again, quite useful) as the Soyuz! Then consider that another 10 percent should be available by redesigning the engines properly.
And you bet I have been trying to get more facts about the details of the R-7 family rockets as they existed in the early and mid-60s--the Voshkod and Molynia variants as well as early "Soyuz-rocket"--to consider just exactly what margin there was for upping the outer cluster of booster aka "first stage" rockets from 4 to 6.
I have not been thinking about changing the diameter of the stage units. If I am to imagine the Soviets of the early and mid-60s sustaining this project, I suspect that the advantages of standardization and utilizing only infrastructure they've already developed (or is being developed, according to the old specs for the rocket) must be used to the hilt. Meaning, no free-form widening of stages. We can vary length, within a certain range, and that is all.
My feeling is, a new larger "standard" R-7 derivative with methane fuel and a cluster of 6 boosters instead of 4 could reliably put 10 tonnes or maybe a bit more into low orbit.
The feasibility of anything grandiose like a moonshot would then focus on increasing the pace of rocket assembly, payload integration and launch so that 10-20 modules could be placed into orbit within a relatively restricted time period, like a month or two.
Projects like N-1 or Proton might still proceed, with residual funding, on the back burner, and perhaps be cancelled completely when it develops that any grand goal the Americans can aspire to with their giant, partially hydrogen burning rocket, can be matched by numerous Soviet modules launched in what is approaching a routine. And that the Soviets can do more modest, cheaper things with just a few such launches instead of dozens.
They'd only need something like N-1 or Energia if they came up with a single, integral payload that can't be broken down into 10 tonne units.
I want to stress that the above post in response to Michel Van was mainly musings and questions about methane-LOX rockets in general, and in the context of this thread in particular I was thinking solely of upgrading their standard R-7 based "Soyuz rocket" launcher using meth-lox engines and increasing the booster cluster from 4 to 6.
The question of using meth-lox for the deep space vehicle, that is the TLI stage (obviously a cluster of 10-tonne stages) and then the lunar vehicle itself, is a different and more difficult one, due to the fact that the whole shebang is made of 10-tonne units that will take months if not years to assemble in orbit. One possible answer would be to have a core space station that can take either oxygen or methane that is boiling off from the assembled units, and then actively cool and recondense it back to cold liquid then pump it back into the stage units, thus allowing a given quantity of cryogenic propellant to keep indefinitely.
But that's probably way too ambitious for a 1960s Moon race; clearly we need to rethink the mission--or rather, return to the original thinking about the mission--in terms of the assembled lunar vehicle being fueled by storables, that is hydrazine and the other stuff, nitric acid or whatever it is called. You know, Dragon's Blood.
I would suggest, to be a little bit ambitious, reversing the conventional wisdom a bit. Apollo used the really good stuff, hydrogen, for the initial TLI boost, where it made the most difference in cutting down total stack mass, and where it was available because it was used within hours of launch, then relied thereafter on hypergolic storables in the SM and LM. I think with meth-lox, maybe we can switch it around:
Use meth-lox for the Soyuz-based "CSM" and also the lunar lander, launching these components last. Specifically launch the block that includes the lander second to last, having launched the block(s) that make up the stage or stages that brake the whole craft into Lunar orbit just before, and having made these oversized, so they have reserves both for a modest amount of boil-off while lingering in parking orbit and something left over to top off the lander just before they are discarded. The last stage up is the Soyuz itself, whose service module is also meth-lox, and also gets topped off by the LOI stage(s). Korolev's minimum cosmonaut landing on the Moon was going to happen fast, the cosmonaut would not even sleep one night on the Moon. He'd land, get out, grab some rocks and plant a flag, then climb right back in and go back to the mother ship.
So the time lag between the LOI injection maneuver and the lander returning from the Moon would be pretty small, less than a day. Then the Soyuz, having ejected the lander, would boost back to Earth immediately.
And indeed, the whole mission from TLI to return would happen in about the same one-week timeframe as Apollo took; somewhat slower orbits costing them time saved by the minimal sprint to the Moon's surface and back. In that time frame, I don't think a lot of meth-lox would boil off.
The sacrifice would be to be stuck with needing a significantly larger amount of storable acid fuel for the TLI burn. But that seems OK to me, it's a matter of having to have had more launches from Earth first, but those launches could have been spread out over many months and even years, as the TLI cluster is slowly assembled. The storables buy time. Timing becomes critical only when the first meth-lox stages go up, and those might be as few as three, so the oldest one would only be waiting in orbit a few weeks perhaps.
By the time the crucial manned stages are ready to launch, the Soviets would have had years of experience with orbital rendezvous and launches with their new upgraded launcher, and timing could be made pretty tight for those final stages.
But--I daresay even if meth-lox is totally ruled out for the whole spacecraft, it is still feasible, with even more launches to be sure but on a relaxed timetable. (Relaxed as far as fuel boil-off is concerned, they might still be casting anxious eyes at the Americans...)
And as I said, the good thing about this approach is, assuming it works once, the Kremlin can then consider if they want to have more missions of the same minimal type (unlikely, what would be the point?) or invest more time in assembling a somewhat more capable moon expedition (now that they wouldn't have to worry about beating some American-set deadline) or vice versa, retreat from Luna and focus instead on building orbital infrastructure and doing research there. If they want to revisit the Moon later, they could then take time to put up a suitable fuel conditioning plant and go methlox all the way--or even by then, convert over to hydrogen.
Or God help us, nuke stages.
That was another thought I shared with you completely, Michel. I think you horror was reserved solely for that particular Soviet proposal, or perhaps nuclear launchers as such, and we might disagree as to the wisdom of fission rockets in space. (Or agree; just because you shared some information about nuke shuttles NASA and industry proposed doesn't mean you endorsed them!)
Anyway yeah, good show the Russians dropped the YaKhR-2 idea.
The question of using meth-lox for the deep space vehicle, that is the TLI stage (obviously a cluster of 10-tonne stages) and then the lunar vehicle itself, is a different and more difficult one, due to the fact that the whole shebang is made of 10-tonne units that will take months if not years to assemble in orbit. One possible answer would be to have a core space station that can take either oxygen or methane that is boiling off from the assembled units, and then actively cool and recondense it back to cold liquid then pump it back into the stage units, thus allowing a given quantity of cryogenic propellant to keep indefinitely.
But that's probably way too ambitious for a 1960s Moon race; clearly we need to rethink the mission--or rather, return to the original thinking about the mission--in terms of the assembled lunar vehicle being fueled by storables, that is hydrazine and the other stuff, nitric acid or whatever it is called. You know, Dragon's Blood.
I would suggest, to be a little bit ambitious, reversing the conventional wisdom a bit. Apollo used the really good stuff, hydrogen, for the initial TLI boost, where it made the most difference in cutting down total stack mass, and where it was available because it was used within hours of launch, then relied thereafter on hypergolic storables in the SM and LM. I think with meth-lox, maybe we can switch it around:
Use meth-lox for the Soyuz-based "CSM" and also the lunar lander, launching these components last. Specifically launch the block that includes the lander second to last, having launched the block(s) that make up the stage or stages that brake the whole craft into Lunar orbit just before, and having made these oversized, so they have reserves both for a modest amount of boil-off while lingering in parking orbit and something left over to top off the lander just before they are discarded. The last stage up is the Soyuz itself, whose service module is also meth-lox, and also gets topped off by the LOI stage(s). Korolev's minimum cosmonaut landing on the Moon was going to happen fast, the cosmonaut would not even sleep one night on the Moon. He'd land, get out, grab some rocks and plant a flag, then climb right back in and go back to the mother ship.
So the time lag between the LOI injection maneuver and the lander returning from the Moon would be pretty small, less than a day. Then the Soyuz, having ejected the lander, would boost back to Earth immediately.
And indeed, the whole mission from TLI to return would happen in about the same one-week timeframe as Apollo took; somewhat slower orbits costing them time saved by the minimal sprint to the Moon's surface and back. In that time frame, I don't think a lot of meth-lox would boil off.
The sacrifice would be to be stuck with needing a significantly larger amount of storable acid fuel for the TLI burn. But that seems OK to me, it's a matter of having to have had more launches from Earth first, but those launches could have been spread out over many months and even years, as the TLI cluster is slowly assembled. The storables buy time. Timing becomes critical only when the first meth-lox stages go up, and those might be as few as three, so the oldest one would only be waiting in orbit a few weeks perhaps.
By the time the crucial manned stages are ready to launch, the Soviets would have had years of experience with orbital rendezvous and launches with their new upgraded launcher, and timing could be made pretty tight for those final stages.
But--I daresay even if meth-lox is totally ruled out for the whole spacecraft, it is still feasible, with even more launches to be sure but on a relaxed timetable. (Relaxed as far as fuel boil-off is concerned, they might still be casting anxious eyes at the Americans...)
And as I said, the good thing about this approach is, assuming it works once, the Kremlin can then consider if they want to have more missions of the same minimal type (unlikely, what would be the point?) or invest more time in assembling a somewhat more capable moon expedition (now that they wouldn't have to worry about beating some American-set deadline) or vice versa, retreat from Luna and focus instead on building orbital infrastructure and doing research there. If they want to revisit the Moon later, they could then take time to put up a suitable fuel conditioning plant and go methlox all the way--or even by then, convert over to hydrogen.
Or God help us, nuke stages.
That was another thought I shared with you completely, Michel. I think you horror was reserved solely for that particular Soviet proposal, or perhaps nuclear launchers as such, and we might disagree as to the wisdom of fission rockets in space. (Or agree; just because you shared some information about nuke shuttles NASA and industry proposed doesn't mean you endorsed them!)
Anyway yeah, good show the Russians dropped the YaKhR-2 idea.
And finally, for now: I have, from another bit of reading today, perhaps an answer to the mystery of why methane has been neglected for so long:
It's clear enough that in the 60s, both sides of the Space Race were rather distracted and needed to try to stay focused. After Apollo, the Americans decided to go for a mix of solid fuel boosters and hydrogen all the way for the liquid fuel--with storables (in Titan rockets) and old-fashioned kerosene type rocket fuel (in Deltas and Atlases) soldiering on without much ambitious meddling (that I am aware of tonight anyway).
But in the Soviet Union, with their ongoing commitment to ker-lox as the main show (alongside storables in Glushko's Proton) there was some attention to improving it--they didn't look to methane but they did come up with "syntin," a hydrocarbon that among other desirable properties yielded a higher ISP, about 10 percent more than traditional rocket fuel.
At that point they had something as good as substituting in methane into a standard ker-lox engine and they didn't have to redesign the engine at all.
Hence, I suppose, the neglect of methane by both superpowers' space programs?
It's clear enough that in the 60s, both sides of the Space Race were rather distracted and needed to try to stay focused. After Apollo, the Americans decided to go for a mix of solid fuel boosters and hydrogen all the way for the liquid fuel--with storables (in Titan rockets) and old-fashioned kerosene type rocket fuel (in Deltas and Atlases) soldiering on without much ambitious meddling (that I am aware of tonight anyway).
But in the Soviet Union, with their ongoing commitment to ker-lox as the main show (alongside storables in Glushko's Proton) there was some attention to improving it--they didn't look to methane but they did come up with "syntin," a hydrocarbon that among other desirable properties yielded a higher ISP, about 10 percent more than traditional rocket fuel.
At that point they had something as good as substituting in methane into a standard ker-lox engine and they didn't have to redesign the engine at all.
Hence, I suppose, the neglect of methane by both superpowers' space programs?
means the engine got only minor adaptations from Lox/Kerosine to Lox/methane fuel, like Valve who not frees close under methane
while the modified advance engine got new fuel injector plate and new turbo pumps for optimal combustion of Lox/methane.
the Lunokhod program ?
original goal was to look for landing sites for LK manned lander
also if Wiki is right, also give support to the Cosmonaut, like in case of Failure drive the Cosmonaut to landed Rescue LK.
Lunokhod one, landed november 1970 on the moon, and drive 10 km, it failed after 322 Earth days of operations.
Lunokhod two, landed january 1973 on the moon and drive 37 km unit it failed after 4 months do dust stuck in cooling radiators
When faslesteps says;
" As well as two seismometers, this would have included a mini-rover attached to the LK’s landing gear by a cable for power and telemetry—after the explorer left to go home, Soviet scientists back on Earth could drive it around and continue exploring the site by remote control. "
I don't think they mean lunokhod.
" As well as two seismometers, this would have included a mini-rover attached to the LK’s landing gear by a cable for power and telemetry—after the explorer left to go home, Soviet scientists back on Earth could drive it around and continue exploring the site by remote control. "
I don't think they mean lunokhod.
They might. Lunakhod rovers were about 750 kg each, which could qualify as "mini," and would fit the grand Soviet tradition of reusing designs.
back to Shevek23, R-8 proposal
made some calculation on it.
R-8
stage one 6xR-7 Booster each 35635 kg, empty 3800 kg,
Core Stage 145304 kg, empty 7000 kg
Third Stage 37251 kg, empty 3000 kg
total Thrust 4926 kN during lift off
payload 15000 kg vs 6340 kg to R-7 Soyuz in 200 km orbit at 65°
max diameter 8.1 meter, main diameter 2.9 meter ø
booster are 19 meter long with diameter of 2.6 meter
core stage 27.7 meter long with diameter of 2.9 meter
second stage 8.1 meter long with diameter of 2.9 meter
total leng with payload 49.3 meters
note
that the Booster are from R-7 only other fuel in same total tank volume
Lox Methane 820 kg/m3 has diverted density as Lox Kerosin with 1020 kg/m3
a cylinder core stage with diameter of 2.9 meter ø (not conical as like R-7)
all Engine Isp 350 sec
made some calculation on it.
R-8
stage one 6xR-7 Booster each 35635 kg, empty 3800 kg,
Core Stage 145304 kg, empty 7000 kg
Third Stage 37251 kg, empty 3000 kg
total Thrust 4926 kN during lift off
payload 15000 kg vs 6340 kg to R-7 Soyuz in 200 km orbit at 65°
max diameter 8.1 meter, main diameter 2.9 meter ø
booster are 19 meter long with diameter of 2.6 meter
core stage 27.7 meter long with diameter of 2.9 meter
second stage 8.1 meter long with diameter of 2.9 meter
total leng with payload 49.3 meters
note
that the Booster are from R-7 only other fuel in same total tank volume
Lox Methane 820 kg/m3 has diverted density as Lox Kerosin with 1020 kg/m3
a cylinder core stage with diameter of 2.9 meter ø (not conical as like R-7)
all Engine Isp 350 sec
The LK rover was to be attached to the LK landing gear by a cable for power and telemetry, the lunokhod was self powered with the big clamshell solar panel.
The more I learn the bigger shame it becomes that the Soviets didn't have a crack.
I found on you tube something about Soviet Rover program Lunokhod and Marsokhod program (with view on unique prototypes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxewoGbsvao
my Guess is that LK rover must similar to little walking machine used on soviet MARS lander in 1970s