Why can't Americans make space engines?

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

The creator of the world's best liquid-propellant rocket engines, Academician Boris Katorgin, explains why the Americans still cannot repeat our achievements in this area and how to keep the Soviet head start in the future.

On June 21, at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, the Global Energy Prize winners were awarded. An authoritative commission of industry experts from different countries selected three applications out of 639 submitted and named the winners of the 2012 prize, which is commonly called the "Nobel Prize for Power Engineers." As a result, 33 million premium rubles this year were shared by the famous inventor from Great Britain, Professor Rodney John Allam, and two of our outstanding scientists - Academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Katorgin and Valery Kostyuk.

All three are related to the creation of cryogenic technology, the study of the properties of cryogenic products and their application in various power plants. Academician Boris Katorgin was awarded "for the development of highly efficient liquid-propellant rocket engines on cryogenic fuels, which provide reliable operation of space systems with high energy parameters for the peaceful use of space." With the direct participation of Katorgin, who devoted more than fifty years to the OKB-456 enterprise, now known as NPO Energomash, liquid-propellant rocket engines (LRE) were created, the performance of which is still considered the best in the world. Katorgin himself was engaged in the development of schemes for organizing the working process in engines, mixture formation of fuel components and elimination of pulsation in the combustion chamber. Also known are his fundamental work on nuclear rocket engines (NRE) with a high specific impulse and developments in the field of creating powerful continuous chemical lasers.

In the most difficult times for Russian science-intensive organizations, from 1991 to 2009, Boris Katorgin headed NPO Energomash, combining the positions of General Director and General Designer, and managed not only to keep the company, but also to create a number of new engines. The absence of an internal order for engines forced Katorgin to look for a customer in the external market. One of the new engines was the RD-180, developed in 1995 specifically for participation in a tender organized by the American corporation Lockheed Martin, which chose a liquid-propellant rocket engine for the Atlas launch vehicle being upgraded at that time. As a result, NPO Energomash signed an agreement for the supply of 101 engines and by the beginning of 2012 had already supplied more than 60 rocket engines to the United States, 35 of which were successfully operated on Atlas in the launch of satellites for various purposes.

Before the award of the award, the Expert talked with academician Boris Katorgin about the state and prospects of the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines and found out why engines based on developments of forty years ago are still considered innovative, and the RD-180 could not be recreated at American factories.

- Boris Ivanovich, what exactly is your merit in the creation of domestic liquid-propellant jet engines, which are now considered the best in the world?

- To explain this to a layman, you probably need a special skill. For liquid-propellant rocket engines, I developed combustion chambers, gas generators; in general, he supervised the creation of the engines themselves for the peaceful exploration of outer space. (In the combustion chambers, the fuel and oxidizer are mixed and burned, and a volume of hot gases is formed, which, then ejected through the nozzles, create the actual jet thrust; gas generators also burn the fuel mixture, but already for the operation of turbo pumps, which pump fuel and oxidizer under enormous pressure into the same combustion chamber. - "Expert".)

- You are talking about peaceful space exploration, although it is obvious that all engines with thrust from several tens to 800 tons, which were created at NPO Energomash, were intended primarily for military needs.

- We did not have to drop a single atomic bomb, we did not deliver a single nuclear charge on our missiles to the target, and thank God. All military developments went into peaceful space. We can be proud of the enormous contribution of our rocket and space technology to the development of human civilization. Thanks to astronautics, entire technological clusters were born: space navigation, telecommunications, satellite television, and sensing systems.

- The engine for the R-9 intercontinental ballistic missile, on which you worked, then formed the basis of almost all of our manned program.

- Back in the late 1950s, I carried out computational and experimental work to improve mixture formation in the combustion chambers of the RD-111 engine, which was intended for that very rocket. The results of the work are still used in the modified RD-107 and RD-108 engines for the same Soyuz rocket; about two thousand space flights were performed on them, including all manned programs.

- Two years ago I interviewed your colleague, Global Energy Laureate Academician Alexander Leontyev. In a conversation about specialists closed to the general public, which Leontyev himself once was, he mentioned Vitaly Ievlev, who also did a lot for our space industry.

- Many academics who worked for the defense industry were classified - this is a fact. Now a lot has been declassified - this is also a fact. I know Alexander Ivanovich very well: he worked on the creation of calculation methods and methods for cooling the combustion chambers of various rocket engines. Solving this technological problem was not easy, especially when we began to squeeze out the chemical energy of the fuel mixture as much as possible to obtain the maximum specific impulse, increasing, among other measures, the pressure in the combustion chambers to 250 atmospheres. Let's take our most powerful engine - RD-170. Fuel consumption with an oxidizing agent - kerosene with liquid oxygen flowing through the engine - 2.5 tons per second. Heat flows in it reach 50 megawatts per square meter - this is a huge energy. The temperature in the combustion chamber is 3, 5 thousand degrees Celsius. It was necessary to come up with a special cooling for the combustion chamber so that it could work calculated and withstand the thermal head. Alexander Ivanovich did just that, and, I must say, he did an excellent job. Vitaly Mikhailovich Ievlev - Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, who, unfortunately, died quite early, - was a scientist of the broadest profile, possessed an encyclopedic erudition. Like Leontiev, he worked a lot on the methodology for calculating high-stress thermal structures. Their work somewhere intersected, somewhere they were integrated, and as a result, an excellent method was obtained by which it is possible to calculate the heat intensity of any combustion chambers; now, perhaps, using it, any student can do it. In addition, Vitaly Mikhailovich took an active part in the development of nuclear, plasma rocket engines. Here our interests intersected in the years when Energomash was doing the same.

- In our conversation with Leontyev, we touched upon the sale of the RD-180 energomash engines in the USA, and Alexander Ivanovich said that in many ways this engine is the result of developments that were made just during the creation of the RD-170, and in a sense it half. Is this really the result of backscaling?

- Any engine in a new dimension is, of course, a new apparatus. RD-180 with a thrust of 400 tons is actually half the size of the RD-170 with a thrust of 800 tons. The RD-191, designed for our new Angara rocket, has a thrust of 200 tons. What do these engines have in common? All of them have one turbo pump, but the RD-170 has four combustion chambers, the "American" RD-180 has two, and the RD-191 has one. Each engine needs its own turbo pump unit - after all, if the four-chamber RD-170 consumes about 2.5 tons of fuel per second, for which a turbo pump with a capacity of 180 thousand kilowatts was developed, which is more than two times higher than, for example, the reactor power of the atomic icebreaker "Arktika", then the two-chamber RD-180 - only half, 1, 2 tons. In the development of turbo pumps for the RD-180 and RD-191, I participated directly and at the same time led the creation of these engines as a whole.

- So the combustion chamber is the same on all these engines, only their number is different?

- Yes, and this is our main achievement. In one such chamber with a diameter of only 380 millimeters, a little more than 0.6 tons of fuel per second is burned. Without exaggeration, this camera is a unique high-heat-stress equipment with special belts to protect against powerful heat fluxes. Protection is carried out not only due to external cooling of the chamber walls, but also due to an ingenious method of "lining" a fuel film on them, which evaporates and cools the wall. On the basis of this outstanding camera, which has no equal in the world, we manufacture our best engines: RD-170 and RD-171 for Energia and Zenit, RD-180 for the American Atlas and RD-191 for the new Russian missile "Angara".

- "Angara" was supposed to replace "Proton-M" several years ago, but the creators of the rocket faced serious problems, the first flight tests were repeatedly postponed, and the project seems to continue to stall.

- There really were problems. A decision has now been made to launch the rocket in 2013. The peculiarity of the Angara is that, on the basis of its universal rocket modules, it is possible to create a whole family of launch vehicles with a payload capacity of 2.5 to 25 tons to launch cargo into low-earth orbit on the basis of the RD-191 universal oxygen-kerosene engine. Angara-1 has one engine, Angara-3 - three with a total thrust of 600 tons, Angara-5 will have 1000 tons of thrust, that is, it will be able to put more cargo into orbit than Proton. In addition, instead of the very toxic heptyl, which is burned in the Proton engines, we use environmentally friendly fuel, after which only water and carbon dioxide are left behind.

- How did it happen that the same RD-170, which was created back in the mid-1970s, still remains, in fact, an innovative product, and its technologies are used as the basis for new rocket engines?

- A similar story happened with an aircraft created after World War II by Vladimir Mikhailovich Myasishchev (a long-range strategic bomber of the M series, developed by the Moscow OKB-23 of the 1950s - "Expert"). In many respects, the plane was thirty years ahead of its time, and the elements of its design were then borrowed by other aircraft manufacturers. So it is here: in the RD-170 there are a lot of new elements, materials, design solutions. According to my estimates, they will not become obsolete for several more decades. This is primarily due to the founder of NPO Energomash and its general designer Valentin Petrovich Glushko and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vitaly Petrovich Radovsky, who headed the company after Glushko's death. (Note that the world's best energy and operational characteristics of the RD-170 are largely due to Katorgin's solution to the problem of suppressing high-frequency combustion instability by developing antipulsation baffles in the same combustion chamber. - "Expert".) And the first-stage RD-253 engine for carrier rocket "Proton"? Introduced back in 1965, it is so perfect that it has not yet been surpassed by anyone. This is how Glushko taught to design - at the limit of the possible and always above the world average. It is also important to remember another thing: the country has invested in its technological future. How was it in the Soviet Union? The Ministry of General Machine Building, which, in particular, was in charge of space and rockets, spent 22 percent of its huge budget on R&D alone - in all areas, including propulsion. Today, research funding is much less and that says a lot.

- Doesn't the achievement of some perfect qualities by these rocket engines, and this happened half a century ago, that a rocket engine with a chemical energy source is in some sense outdated: the main discoveries have been made in new generations of rocket engines, now we are talking more about the so-called supporting innovations? ?

- Certainly not. Liquid-propellant rocket engines are in demand and will be in demand for a very long time, because no other technology is able to more reliably and economically lift a load from Earth and put it into low-Earth orbit. They are environmentally friendly, especially those that run on liquid oxygen and kerosene. But for flights to stars and other galaxies, liquid-propellant rocket engines, of course, are completely unsuitable. The mass of the entire metagalaxy is 10 to 56 degrees of grams. In order to accelerate on a liquid-propellant rocket engine to at least a quarter of the speed of light, an absolutely incredible amount of fuel will be required - 10 to 3200 grams, so even thinking about it is stupid. The liquid-propellant rocket engine has its own niche - sustainer engines. On liquid engines, you can accelerate the carrier to the second cosmic speed, fly to Mars, and that's it.

- The next stage - nuclear rocket engines?

- Certainly. It is not known whether we will live to see some of the stages, but much has been done for the development of nuclear-powered rocket engines already in Soviet times. Now, under the leadership of the Keldysh Center, headed by Academician Anatoly Sazonovich Koroteev, the so-called transport and energy module is being developed. The designers came to the conclusion that it is possible to create a gas-cooled nuclear reactor that is less stressful than it was in the USSR, which will work both as a power plant and as a source of energy for plasma engines when traveling in space. Such a reactor is currently being designed at the NIKIET named after N. A. Dollezhal under the leadership of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Dragunov. The Kaliningrad design bureau "Fakel" also participates in the project, where electric propulsion engines are being created. As in Soviet times, it will not do without the Voronezh Design Bureau of Chemical Automatics, where gas turbines and compressors will be manufactured in order to drive the coolant, the gas mixture, along a closed circuit.

- In the meantime, are we going to the rocket engine?

- Of course, and we clearly see the prospects for the further development of these engines. There are tactical, long-term tasks, there is no limit here: the introduction of new, more heat-resistant coatings, new composite materials, a decrease in the mass of engines, an increase in their reliability, and a simplification of the control scheme. A number of elements can be introduced to better control the wear of parts and other processes occurring in the engine. There are strategic tasks: for example, the development of liquefied methane and acetylene as fuel together with ammonia or three-component fuel. NPO Energomash is developing a three-component engine. Such a liquid-propellant rocket engine could be used as an engine for both the first and second stages. At the first stage, it uses well-developed components: oxygen, liquid kerosene, and if you add about five percent more hydrogen, then the specific impulse will increase significantly - one of the main energy characteristics of the engine, which means that more payload can be sent into space. At the first stage, all the kerosene is produced with the addition of hydrogen, and at the second, the same engine switches from running on three-component fuel to a two-component one - hydrogen and oxygen.

We have already created an experimental engine, albeit of a small dimension and a thrust of only about 7 tons, carried out 44 tests, made full-scale mixing elements in the nozzles, in the gas generator, in the combustion chamber and found out that you can first work on three components, and then smoothly switch to two. Everything is working out, a high combustion efficiency is achieved, but to go further, we need a larger sample, we need to modify the stands in order to launch the components that we are going to use in a real engine into the combustion chamber: liquid hydrogen and oxygen, as well as kerosene. I think this is a very promising direction and a big step forward. And I hope to have time to do something during my lifetime.

- Why the Americans, having received the right to reproduce the RD-180, have not been able to make it for many years?

- Americans are very pragmatic. In the 1990s, at the very beginning of working with us, they realized that in the energy field we were far ahead of them and we had to adopt these technologies from us. For example, our RD-170 engine in one start, due to a higher specific impulse, could take out a payload two tons more than their most powerful F-1, which at that time meant $ 20 million in gain. They announced a competition for a 400-ton engine for their Atlases, which was won by our RD-180. Then the Americans thought that they would start working with us, and in four years they would take our technologies and reproduce them themselves. I told them at once: you will spend more than a billion dollars and ten years. Four years have passed, and they say: yes, six years are needed. More years have passed, they say: no, we need another eight years. Seventeen years have passed, and they have not reproduced a single engine. They now need billions of dollars for bench equipment alone. At Energomash we have stands where the same RD-170 engine can be tested in a pressure chamber, the jet power of which reaches 27 million kilowatts.

- I heard right - 27 gigawatts? This is more than the installed capacity of all Rosatom NPPs.

- Twenty-seven gigawatts is the power of the jet, which develops in a relatively short time. During tests on the stand, the energy of the jet is first extinguished in a special pool, then in a dispersion pipe 16 meters in diameter and 100 meters high. It takes a lot of money to build a test bench like this one that can house an engine that generates such power. The Americans have now given up on this and are taking the finished product. As a result, we are not selling raw materials, but a product with a huge added value, in which highly intellectual labor is invested. Unfortunately, in Russia this is a rare example of high-tech sales abroad in such a large volume. But this proves that with the correct formulation of the question, we are capable of a lot.

- Boris Ivanovich, what should be done in order not to lose the head start gained by the Soviet rocket engine building? Probably, apart from the lack of funding for R&D, another problem is also very painful - personnel?

- To stay on the world market, you have to go forward all the time, create new products. Apparently, until the end of us was pressed down and the thunder struck. But the state needs to realize that without new developments it will find itself on the margins of the world market, and today, in this transitional period, while we have not yet grown to normal capitalism, it must first of all invest in the new - the state. Then you can transfer the development for the release of a series to a private company on terms beneficial to both the state and business. I do not believe that it is impossible to come up with reasonable methods of creating something new, without them it is useless to talk about development and innovations.

There are personnel. I am the head of a department at the Moscow Aviation Institute, where we train both engine specialists and laser specialists. The guys are smart, they want to do the business they are learning, but you need to give them a normal initial impulse so that they do not leave, as many people do now, to write programs for distributing goods in stores. For this it is necessary to create an appropriate laboratory environment, to give a decent salary. Build the correct structure of interaction between science and the Ministry of Education. The same Academy of Sciences solves many issues related to personnel training. Indeed, among the current members of the academy, corresponding members, there are many specialists who manage high-tech enterprises and research institutes, powerful design bureaus. They are directly interested in the departments assigned to their organizations to educate the necessary specialists in the field of technology, physics, chemistry, so that they immediately receive not just a specialized university graduate, but a ready-made specialist with some life and scientific and technical experience. It has always been this way: the best specialists were born in institutes and enterprises where educational departments existed. At Energomash and at NPO Lavochkin we have departments of the branch of the Moscow Aviation Institute “Kometa”, which I am in charge. There are old cadres who can pass the experience on to the young. But there is very little time left, and the losses will be irrecoverable: in order to simply return to the current level, you will have to spend much more effort than is needed today to maintain it.