Russian roots of American inventions

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

By imposing sanctions on Russia and banning the supply of advanced technologies to our country, the United States hopes to weaken us, destroy the economy and prevent the creation of advanced military equipment. They say that we cannot do without American technology! But, in fact, on the contrary, America owes many of its most sensational achievements, including in the military field, to Russia.

Here's the most recent example. As the other day in an interview with TASS, Honored Military Pilot of the Russian Federation, Major General Vladimir Popov, part of the developments from the Soviet aircraft of vertical (short) take-off and landing unclaimed by Russia Yak-141was used in the creation of the fifth generation American stealth fighter Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II.

“I cannot name the names now, they were designers, heads of directions,” he said. - Then we met, I had to communicate with them, they very much complained that this lack of demand appeared due to the emergence of various economic difficulties. Political decisions could not be made, and that was the most important thing. There are planes, projects exist, only teams were needed,”the expert said.

According to him, “for money our specialists left and worked there”. “After all, these were already our potential partners, and not enemies or adversaries,” the pilot notes. According to him, "then, indeed, part of the developments went there." “And we see them today, by the way, in the F-35 project. You see how it is adapted: both on land (short takeoff and landing) and on the sea (vertical takeoff and landing). Almost everything worked out for them. Even in configuration, they are similar (American and Russian aircraft - V. M.) a little: the tail section, the control zone of the nozzle systems. There is such a thing, it is being caught,”said the Major General. At the same time, he added that the front of the aircraft and the lights on the F-35B Lightning II are different, due to the use of stealth technology. “But we didn't have such a task at first,” Popov said.

The pilot noted that Russia really needs a vertical (short) take-off and landing fighter, since these are "natural processes" that are "dictated by operational and strategic tasks." In August, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov announced that the Ministry of Defense had begun developing a new aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing. In 1991-1997 (according to other sources - 1995-1997), when Lockheed Martin (or until 1995 - only Lockheed) and the Yakovlev Design Bureau, the developer of the Yak-141, actively collaborated, the American company gained access to technical documents and prototypes Yak-141, wrote Task & Purpose magazine in April.

Thus, the newest American fighter jet was created largely thanks to Russian technology. Alas, this happened in the context of the collapse of the USSR in the 90s, a sharp reduction in funding for scientific and military developments, as well as our naive belief that the military confrontation has ended, and the United States is no longer an enemy for us, but a “partner”.

Russian technology "stealth"

And there are many such examples of the US borrowing our high technologies. In the 1970s, the Americans created the so-called "invisible aircraft" SR-71, built using stealth technology, touting it as their "outstanding technical achievement." However, later it became known that this was done using the discovery of the Soviet physicist Petra Ufimtseva.

In 1966, an American radar specialist working at the Lockheed plant came across an article by P. Ufimtseva in the popular Soviet scientific and technical journal. The article said that aircraft of a certain type, made of certain materials, faceted and painted in a certain way, are practically invisible to radars. The article was of great interest to American military specialists, and in the United States, using our find, they decided to build and test such an aircraft.

As a result, in the early 1990s, the United States manufactured the F-117 fighter-bomber and the B-2 heavy strategic bomber. By the way, he himself participated in the creation of the latter. Peter Ufimtsev … When in the 1980s the work on the Soviet "stealth" on the Ufimtsev ideas was stopped in Russia, the offended designer emigrated to the United States …

However, there is a version that this technology was actually planted on the Americans deliberately, since it was tested in the USSR and decided to abandon it. At least two Soviet design bureaus have built and tested various types of stealth aircraft. The authoritative commissions came to conclusions not in favor of "invisible" technologies.

Stealth. Chasing invisibility

Firstly, the stealth aircraft, made according to the ideas of Ufimtsev, due to its shape has low speed and maneuverability, it is poorly adapted to combat maneuver.

Secondly, the aircraft can be detected visually and with special high-frequency radars. In addition, when the bomb bays are opened and in some flight modes, it is visible with conventional radars and, after the "serif", can be easily shot down.

Serbian air defense specialists guessed this back in 1999, when a Soviet-made Yugoslav MiG-29 shot down an American F-117A in the skies over Belgrade. Today, defense experts point out that even the expensive F-35 stealth aircraft is not a "secret" to Chinese and Russian radars.

Thirdly, the cost of such aircraft is very high. B-2 bomber cost 1.157 billion … dollars is the most expensive aircraft in the history of aviation. So, having borrowed the idea of a Soviet engineer from the USSR, the Americans "got into a puddle." However, the very fact of this shows that in the United States they did not do much themselves, but borrowed inventions from us.

Flight to the moon along the "Kondratyuk track"

It is known that even for its most ambitious technical project "Apollo" - flight and landing on the Moon - the USA used the ideas of a Russian engineer Yuri Kondratyuk … His real name Alexander Shargey, which he, a tsarist officer, was forced to change after the revolution, and then disappeared during the Great Patriotic War.

Even at the school of warrant officers, Shargei began a manuscript "To the one who will read in order to build" … In it, independently of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, he derived the basic equations of jet propulsion by his method, gave a diagram of a four-stage rocket running on oxygen-hydrogen fuel, a fuel oxidizer, an electrostatic rocket engine, and much more.

Exactly Shargey was the first to propose the use of atmospheric resistance to decelerate the rocket during descent, the use of solar energy to power the onboard systems of spacecraft. He came up with the idea, when flying to other planets, to launch a ship into orbit of an artificial satellite. And to send a person to them and return to Earth, use a "shuttle", a small take-off and landing ship. The textbooks include the so-called "Kondratyuk track" - the flight trajectory of a spacecraft with a return to Earth.

During one of his trips to the capital, the engineer met with Sergey Korolev, who then headed the Group for the Study of Jet Propulsion - GIRD, and he suggested that he go to work for him. But Shargei-Kondratyuk refused. After reading the questions of the questionnaire, which had to be filled out in order to enter the GIRD, the former White Guard understood: after a thorough check of all the data by the NKVD, he was threatened with exposure and execution.

“We found a small inconspicuous booklet published in Russia immediately after the revolution,” he admitted Dr. Lowe, involved in the "Lunar Program" NASA, after its successful completion. - Its author, Yuri Kondratyuk, substantiated and calculated the energy profitability of landing on the Moon according to the scheme: flight to the Moon's orbit - launching to the Moon from orbit - returning to orbit and docking with the main ship - returning to Earth."

It turns out, like this, indirectly, he actually admitted that the flight of American astronauts to the moon was carried out along the "Kondratyuk route".

Even more convincing in the recognition of the merits of the Russian scientist is the completely unusual act of the "first man on the moon", astronaut Neil Armstrong. After his famous flight, the American visited Novosibirsk, where he collected a handful of earth near the house where Kondratyuk-Shargey lived and worked, took him to the USA and poured out on Cape Canaveral - the place where the rocket was launched to the moon …

Who created American aviation

But we "helped" the Americans not only in the field of flight to the moon and rocketry. Russian talent actually created American aviation. Everyone knows today Igor Sikorsky, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, who built the world's first helicopter in the United States. The helicopters, which the presidents of the United States still fly, still say "Sikorsky".

But there were also our other compatriots - Mikhail Strukov, Alexander Kartveli, Alexander Prokofiev-Seversky, who actually created the American military aviation. For many years they were considered by us "white emigrants", "deserters", "traitors", and therefore little was known about these technical geniuses in our country for a long time.

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Once in the USA, Seversky created the aircraft construction company Seversky Aircraft Corporation. Its main product was the SEV-3 amphibious aircraft developed by him, which showed excellent flight qualities. On this plane, Seversky set a world speed record for amphibians - 290 kilometers per hour, for many years no one could beat this achievement.

When the US Air Force announced a competition to replace the Boeing 26 fighter, Severskiy's firm submitted the P-35 fighter for it and received a government order for 77 aircraft, becoming one of the largest aircraft manufacturing companies in the United States. Then he created a number of successful aircraft models, introduced many inventions.

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Another creator of American military aviation, Mikhail Strukov, was born in Yekaterinoslav into a noble family. Strukov did not accept the revolution either, and soon found himself in the role of an emigrant in New York. In the United States, he managed to defend his degree in civil engineering at Columbia University and start working in his specialty, he soon created his own company.

When the war began, Strukov managed to get an order from the aviation command for the construction of transport gliders. This is how the Chase Aircraft Company was born. Strukov became its president and chief designer, and another emigrant from Russia became his deputy. M. Gregor(Grigorashvili).

After World War II, Strukov created a transport plane S-123 … Later organizing the company "Strukov Aircraft Corporation", he established the production of transport aircraft under the name "Provider" - "Supplier", who gained special fame during the Vietnam War for their unique survivability and reliability, becoming one of the "workhorses" of the American Air Force. Several hundred of these machines were produced in the United States, which were later used in Thailand, Cambodia, and South Korea.

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During the First World War Alexander Kartveli served in the Russian army as an artillery officer. I got acquainted with aviation only at the front and was so carried away by flights that I decided to devote my whole life to this business. He was sent to Paris to improve his flight education, where he entered the Higher Aviation School. But from Russia, where the "Red Terror" raged, sad news came. As a former tsarist officer, he began to fear for his life, and when it became known that the Bolsheviks had seized power, Kartveli decided not to return …

In the USA, Kartveli was appointed head of the design bureau, where the powerful attack aircraft of the Second World War "Republic P-47 Thunderbolt" was created. Until the end of the war, more than 15 thousand such aircraft, while the level of losses they had was lower than that of other American aircraft.

Then the Kartveli bureau created one of the first American jet fighters. F-84Thunderjet. It was used during the Korean War, but when Soviet MiG-15s appeared on the North Korean side, Kartveli made an urgent upgrade of his aircraft, and its speed increased to 1150 kilometers per hour. The last fighter created by Kartveli was supersonic F-105, which was widely used by the Americans during the Vietnam War.

Kartveli, as an aircraft designer, received universal recognition overseas, became a member of the National Aeronautical Association, received an honorary doctorate. In addition to fighters, he also built an amphibious aircraft, a four-engined photographic reconnaissance aircraft with a huge flight range.

Borrowed and stolen

But not only in aviation and astronautics, Russian inventions were used in the United States. It is known that one of the main inventions of the twentieth century - the television created in the USA by a Russian engineer Vladimir Zvorykin.

And another miracle of technology - video recorder invented on American soil by a Russian engineer Alexander Ponyatov.

And thanks to high-octane gasoline - the invention of a Russian emigrant chemist Vladimir Ipatiev - American aircraft flew faster than German ones during World War II.

In the mid-1980s, a young professor Felix Beloyartsev started developing an unprecedented drug that could replace blood plasma. The unique blood substitute was named "Perftoran" … The drug began to be produced only in 2016, but its characteristics significantly surpassed the imported counterparts that appeared later. The Americans got hold of the formula of the Soviet blood substitute 30 years ago and began to actively use Perftoran in their practice, hinting that it was they who invented the artificial plasma.

We had a lot of Americans simply stolen … So in the early 1990s, a huge amount of information about secret Soviet developments, especially in the space industry, began to flow to the United States through various channels.

Many believe that thanks to these leaks, the Americans stole the idea of the orbital ship. Both the appearance of the Dream Chaser and the technical solutions resemble the project developed in the USSR back in the 60s. The original is a Soviet orbital rocket plane "BOR". However, this is not the only thing that the States "borrowed" from us in this industry.

In the early 90s, a delegation from the United States arrived at a Russian plant where ejection seats for military pilots "K-36 DM". Similar chairs were invented in the USSR back in the 70s. The Americans bought a small batch of these unique designs and very soon began to produce "their own", like two peas in a pod similar to ours. Then in our country there were hard times, so no one again took care of obtaining a patent. The Americans have not paid a dime for the stolen technology.

By the way, even the first in the world Personal Computer was invented not at all by the American company Apple Computers and not in 1975, but in the USSR in 1968 Soviet designer from Omsk Arseny Gorokhov … Copyright certificate No. 383005.

They say that today there are many talented programmers and other specialists from Russia working in Silicon Valley in California. And the rocket motors RD-180 Americans still buy from Russia, because they themselves are not yet able to produce them. The United States does not have nuclear icebreakers, which Russia has been successfully producing for a long time; they have not yet been able to create a nuclear-powered rocket, which our country has already done.

So the sanctions that have announced to us today USA in many respects, thanks to the Russian "brains" and the invention of Russian brilliant engineers and scientists, they themselves became an advanced power, and they still cannot do without them.

The United States has always tended to be distinguished by its successful industrialization other people's inventions … So maybe now the sanctions they have announced will create the conditions for us to finally start doing the same?