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Launch vehicle, Atlas V
ugordan
post Jun 5 2006, 08:53 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Jun 5 2006, 09:45 PM) *
So far as I know, no parachutes were flown on either Energia launch - was the recovery you speak of simply examination of the broken components after they impacted, or were there indeed recovery devices flown?


From http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd170.htm:

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The first stage strap-ons were recovered under parachutes and returned to Baikonur for study. The engine was designed for 10 reuses but tests showed they could stand up to 20 burns.


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Bob Shaw
post Jun 5 2006, 09:07 PM
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Gordan:

Yup, I see what you mean - I still thought that was just the plan, but never actually happened! The landing sequence never looked to clever to me - the booster always seemed likely to snap at touchdown!

Anyone - Don, maybe? - got any other sources?

Bob Shaw


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ugordan
post Jun 5 2006, 09:19 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Jun 5 2006, 10:07 PM) *
the booster always seemed likely to snap at touchdown!

Why snap? What landing sequence? The casing was probably lighter than shuttle's SRB casing which should be just fine under a parachute. The Russians tend to make their stuff robust, you know! If it handled dragging the Energia stack with 800 tons of force, surely it could stand a soft ground impact.


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Bob Shaw
post Jun 5 2006, 09:34 PM
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QUOTE (ugordan @ Jun 5 2006, 10:19 PM) *
Why snap? What landing sequence? The casing was probably lighter than shuttle's SRB casing which should be just fine under a parachute. The Russians tend to make their stuff robust, you know! If it handled dragging the Energia stack with 800 tons of force, surely it could stand a soft ground impact.



Gordan:

The boosters were to land on two sets of parachutes, one set at the front of the structure and one at the rear - they landed horizontally, on the hard Kazakhstan soil. I think the instantaneous stresses on landing would have been enormous, and expressed through the structure in quite a different way to the SRBs used on the Shuttle, ie at right angles to the way that the forces would have acted during launch.

Somewhere, I have diagrams...

Bob Shaw


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Bob Shaw
post Jun 5 2006, 10:16 PM
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Looks like I disremembered the landing sequence to some extent - it was a big set of parachutes with the booster dangling horizontally beneath it, not two sets - but the thing would still have landed horizontally, on Gemini-style skids!

Here's also a Polyus diagram, and a bigger launchpad image.

Bob Shaw
Attached thumbnail(s)
Attached Image
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post Jun 5 2006, 10:57 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Jun 5 2006, 01:45 PM) *
Gordan:

So far as I know, no parachutes were flown on either Energia launch - was the recovery you speak of simply examination of the broken components after they impacted, or were there indeed recovery devices flown?

Bob Shaw


There's a remarkable series of photos that Jonas Bendiksen made, about the space junk that lands in the territory east of Baikonur: Titanium Rain
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ugordan
post Jun 6 2006, 01:28 PM
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Bob:

In the leftmost image you sent, the drawing at the bottom strikes me (booster lying on the ground). Notice a section below the booster that has something looking like multiple nozzles and the ground appears excavated below that point. Did the booster design include solid retro-rockets to reduce descent speed just before landing or did this contraption serve a whole other purpose?


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Bob Shaw
post Jun 6 2006, 02:37 PM
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QUOTE (ugordan @ Jun 6 2006, 02:28 PM) *
Bob:

In the leftmost image you sent, the drawing at the bottom strikes me (booster lying on the ground). Notice a section below the booster that has something looking like multiple nozzles and the ground appears excavated below that point. Did the booster design include solid retro-rockets to reduce descent speed just before landing or did this contraption serve a whole other purpose?



Gordan:

I think you're right - look at the cutaway above it, too. That's a helluva way to land a rocket!

Bob Shaw


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ugordan
post Jun 6 2006, 02:44 PM
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Yep, look at the other cartoon you sent showing the launch-descent sequence. At frame 9 you can clearly see exhausting below the aft end of the booster. Also, I can barely make out the words "dvigatel", e.g. "engine" in the last description before the landing at the bottom right.


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Bob Shaw
post Jun 6 2006, 02:53 PM
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Gordan:

So, the question remains: did it actually work?

If it did all work as advertised, then I can't imagine that we'd *not* have been treated to propaganda images of happy smiling locals posed around their new visitor, with it perched on it's landing legs like Thunderbird 2...

If it 'almost' worked then the engines might well have been in good enough condition to allow their turbopumps etc to be cut up, or boresighted, even if the main structure was broken. This may explain the lack of photos, but still the assertion that the engines were recovered.

Bob Shaw


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Spirit
post Jun 6 2006, 06:15 PM
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Hi everybody,
I am new to the forum.

Here is my first question:
Aren't the Russian vehicles armed with explosives? Don't they have RSO?


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Jim from NSF.com
post Jun 6 2006, 06:31 PM
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QUOTE (Spirit @ Jun 6 2006, 02:15 PM) *
Hi everybody,
I am new to the forum.

Here is my first question:
Aren't the Russian vehicles armed with explosives? Don't they have RSO?


Neither
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Guest_DonPMitchell_*
post Jun 6 2006, 07:24 PM
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Here is a rather fanciful site dedicated to the Energiya technology: Energiya. They seem to overlook the fact that it doesn't really exist anymore.

I misread Wade's article by the way, Polyus was based on the TKS, not the TMK. I must be becoming dyslexic in my old age...

There have been a lot of stories about Nudel'man antiaircraft cannons developed for the Almaz/Salyut stations and Polyus. On the Salyuts, Wikipedia says they were test fired in space. Asif Siddiqi says they were never deployed in orbit. So you can chose from the opinions of an expert in Soviet space history or the random teenager who wrote the wikipedia article. :-)

Certainly the Russians and Americans experimented with anti-satellite weapons though. The US has ground-launched missles designed to reach satellites. The Wikipedia article is worthless, but Sven Grahan has a great website about the Soviet interceptor satellites: Polyut
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