Terminator57
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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We're getting a hefty 60 RpY to our resource cap no matter what option, which will leave us with plenty of budgetary breathing room especially factoring in the cancelled programs. What will we spend it on while the rocket is still getting ready? Could we potentially use the leeway to start a new space station program, potentially using it as a way to sneak in orbital infrastructure e.g. propellant depots like we floated the idea during the first abortive moon race?
I was more concerned reentry might burn holes in, but I see. Though looking through the Rover tests, one of the reactors actually did explode throwing nuclear material over the test area, apparently it took 2 months to decontaminate the area with hundreds of people and some got several rem dosages. Not sure if that was with or with out including the 6 weeks of waiting for the worst of the radioactivity to go away.
To quote
' Phoebus 1A was tested on 25 June 1965, and run at full power (1,090 MW) for ten and a half minutes. Unfortunately, the intense radiation environment caused one of the capacitance gauges to produce erroneous readings. When confronted by one gauge that said that the hydrogen propellant tank was nearly empty, and another that said that it was quarter full, and unsure which was correct, the technicians in the control room chose to believe the one that said it was quarter full. This was the wrong choice; the tank was indeed nearly empty, and the propellant ran dry. Without liquid hydrogen to cool it, the engine, operating at 2,270 K (2,000 °C), quickly overheated and exploded. About a fifth of the fuel was ejected; most of the rest melted. '
Sure, though this seems to be a test for a reactor that was never turned on, but instead setup in a scenario that would destroy it catastrophically via overheating from excessively rapid rotation. Still with the reactor off you'd think it wouldn't chain reaction as much and overall results would be more limited. One of the reasons I was never as concerned about just launching a nuclear reactor to space in an off state and only turning them on once in orbit.
But for this proposed rocket the reactors are to be on and in full use for the launch to space itself. And as I understood it for every minute a reactor is running it will build up a substantial amount of short lived radioactive materials. So a failure in the later points of the launch, where they've been running hot for awhile, would presumably have a lot more radioactives it could release, especially if it ended with a catastrophic meltdown/explosion like one of the Rovers tests did when due to a sensor malfunction the reactor suddenly ran out of hydrogen for cool it and thus had a full meltdown/explosion.
Now I will admit I'm now really not sure how much radioactivity this would add then, but naively at least I'd suspect it would be many times more then what you'd get from the Kiwi-TNT test. Admittedly that might not be all to severe still then, but I'm some what concerned never the less. It overall still kind of feels like it might have more risk to it then we really need to take, especially for a technology that isn't actually mature yet.
Still I will as such retract my previous statement. Perhaps I was a little to concerned on how much radioactivity it would spread around. It's not a complete catastrophe. Though it kind of feels like a particularly bad accident might give environmentalists a fair bit of ammunition anyway. And it probably would be for the best if such nuclear materials never fall in to a city or village as in the short term that could still be pretty lethal I suspect... though something one can hopefully some what prevent via controlling the launch trajectory.
The rotation was control rod retraction, the Kiwi core was set up to induce a massive reactivity surge in order to turn the core into a bomb on purpose. There probably weren't as many fission product as there would be in a core that had been running for a few minutes, but it did a considerable amount of fission during the surge and this is a much more violent event than the Phoebus explosion(the entire core was destroyed, total energy release was around 2.5 tons of TNT).
On a different topic, it seems like due to President Browns new Space Race, that the MAKS project is getting more impetus as well. What with the plane it needs being green lit, which is an enlarged version of the An-225 with two extra engines, so from the 6 the An-225 has to 8 for this new plane. So it has a bit more power and can be made a bit bigger, but it's still well with in the realm of reason.
Apparently in real life a variant like this was also proposed, the An-325, which presumably is a fairly similar concept as it too was meant for MAKS. Though the 1988 MAKS project, so I guess we're beating the timeline by a decade.
Hopefully this project with this extra funding and impetus will do reasonably well, as it would give a reasonable medium launcher. And if it can match the design goals, it might bring down costs by half or even maybe three quarters. The idea apparently being that the expensive engines with the space plane part gets recovered, while the tank gets dumped. Not perfect reusability, but certainly a concept that might work.
Apparently in real life a variant like this was also proposed, the An-325, which presumably is a fairly similar concept as it too was meant for MAKS. Though the 1988 MAKS project, so I guess we're beating the timeline by a decade.
Hopefully this project with this extra funding and impetus will do reasonably well, as it would give a reasonable medium launcher. And if it can match the design goals, it might bring down costs by half or even maybe three quarters. The idea apparently being that the expensive engines with the space plane part gets recovered, while the tank gets dumped. Not perfect reusability, but certainly a concept that might work.
Sure thus why I retracted my previous position. The note was partially also made because you said the reactor couldn't possibly explode, and then in the part I quoted we could see one reactor had a bit less of a good outcome. I imagine part of the difference was that in the quote the reactor was open, as it had to be to let fuel flow through, and this opened the opportunity for a new failure mode.
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plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
It'll probably make routine logistical launches - supplies, crew, and fuel restocks - and satellite launches way more than two or three times as affordable. Our current satellite launches are pretty much all predicated on launching a 15+ ton payload rocket with one or two tons of payload, and then the rocket just being spent and dead. Spending just the cost of a fuel tank, maintenance, and fuel every launch is so much more economical once you've sunk the fixed costs for the BEEG PLANE and SMOL PLANE.
I swear our space programs are always running into some type of crisis lmao.
I'm feeling lucky we gonna roll real high this time bois
[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
I'm feeling lucky we gonna roll real high this time bois
[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
You already have to be a real tough cookie to get to this point of the soviet bureaucracy. Add to that the woman debuff of that time period and she's probably got some seriously top tier potential.
Yeah, Literally in Bala's lifetime the soviet onion has gone from complete economic backwater ran on blood sweat and tears (and love of papa Stalin) to the definitive number 2 power in the world that's making gains on the number 1 power.
Oil Shock-kun is just waiting for the most funny time to strike. Still we're probably better prepared for it than anyone else.
Yeah forcing the government to have a "balanced budget" through a constitutional amendment is insanity. IDK how they will manage economic crisis's without a whole host of tools that are gained by being able to go into debt. governments aren't corporations, they don't absolutely need to make money every quarter.
can run hot for only so long. We know that ourselves having experienced pains from such actions before.
Relative to our timeline, how far along are we in the space tech tree? Not just the Soviet Union but other countries. While there hasn't been some big triumph of landing on the moon, the space programs of the US and the Americans seem to have had consistent and strong funding for these past few decades, so I'm pretty curious about how we compare to OTL.
Looking at when voyager one was supposed to be launched, we're all sort of behind on the big ticket items, and maybe slightly ahead on the technological sophistication of what is being launched, especially relative to OTL's USSR.
- Location
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Heh, Balakirev's already talking about how global warming will make resources easier to access. Truly a positive feedback loop! Question is, will the warming actually help or will it just turn permafrost into unmanageable swamps?
The question is, how easily can we stop the probes burning up so that we're actually politically able to keep the program running?
Isn't the tech advance of being able to keep things from burning up also a high priority tech we want to advance for space utilization though? Just spin it as "we are sending probes to mercury specifically to develope our heat handling abilities, sending them elsewhere would defeat the purpose".
Truthfully that happening was kind of mismanagement or error by the probe designer. It's not like you can't calculate the heat load you'd get from the Sun in a vacuum, so clearly some one messed up that calculation and underspecced the design. Solution to protect probes from this aren't really 'that' hard. One option being a sun shade, where you hold a thin sheet between you and the Sun, now you're in the cold dark and the sheet is made of a metal that can take the temp.
So in that sense, that failure shouldn't have happened. And at the least some one needs a good looking at over that.
Still the USA achieved a flyby for this in 1974 with out melting, and didn't need a nuclear engine to do it with either. Though admittedly I believe that was because our probe was supposed to enter orbit unlike that one.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
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[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
Ahhh, right, I see.
Here's a question, is Chelomei planning a wide enough shadow shield that we can actually use the whole diameter of the rocket for payloads?
Because a major reason why we started the superheavy was to be able to launch wider stuff, and if Chelomei can't deliver that, his superheavy has fairly limited applications.
Is that for one nuclear stage, or for both nuclear stages on Chelomei's proposal?
Also, I am dubious that it is comparable to only a bit more than a dozen atmospheric nuclear detonations.
Unless the bomb is a squib, the nuclear explosion consumes almost all of the uranium and plutonium in the bomb, and most of the fallout is from short-duration stuff or from irradiated dirt. The short duration stuff decays to negligible amounts in a few months, and the long duration stuff (mainly irradiated dirt) isn't so radioactive and isn't significantly more toxic than normal dirt chemically.
By contrast, uranium or plutonium from an exploded nuclear stage would be radioactive to a concerning degree for thousands or hundreds of years respectively, and most importantly, both are extreeeeeemely toxic heavy metals.
The peak radiation exposure in an area might be the same, but due to what is causing the radiation, the risk profiles are very different.
The whole reason why the Soviets rushed to clean up Chernobyl when it was super radioactive was because they feared the elephant's foot reaching the aquifer under the reactor and chemically contaminating water that people even as far away as Moscow would be exposed to.
...
You think that less fission products is a GOOD thing?
Oh heck no! We want as much of that uranium and plutonium fissioned as we can!
Uranium and especially plutonium are a combination of decently long life, reasonably radioactive and hella toxic chemically. Anything else is an improvement as far as releasing it into the environment.
Like all the scare stories about nuclear waste we've been hearing for all our lives? That's because of the unburned uranium and plutonium in spent nuclear fuel. Which is why recycling nuclear fuel solves so dang many of the problems with nuclear power.
You absolutely don't want a nuclear engine to break up on the way down. You want it to land in one piece so you can pick it up and melt it down to make a new engine.
By contrast, atomized, highly toxic dust that people could breathe into their lungs is never a story that ends well.
Ion engines have limits as to how much thrust you can get out of them. There's also complexity issues with large solar-electric or nuclear-electric ion rockets.
As such, nuclear rockets are very useful in deep space - they are relatively simple, relatively high thrust, and either you can run them on something easily recovered from local resources like water and enjoy ISPs comparable to a hydrolox chemical rocket or you run them on something like hydrogen and enjoy ISPs twice as good, meaning you can get away with carrying VASTLY less propellant.
The tyranny of the rocket equation means that even though solid core nuclear rockets are "only" twice to three times as good ISP-wise as hydrolox, that translates to a much, much, much smaller rocket, meaning you can go to more interesting places and bring more fun tools with you wherever you go, or you can do the same mission as you would with a chemical rocket, but for vastly less cost.
A nuclear rocket basically knocks at least an order of magnitude off of the cost of a Mars mission, for example.
There's a couple things to consider with nuclear rocketry:
1) what is day-to-day operation like and how often will it be operated?
2) what is a catastrophic failure like, and how often will that happen?
If the engine fails in space, and becomes drifting debris, it wouldn't be any worse than any other space junk, so long as it stayed in space. If the reactor had ever run, it would cool down from really dangerous radioactivity within a few months, the hunk or uranium or plutonium that was left would then not be significantly more radioactive than the rest of space.
If it fell, hopefully it wouldn't be so bad. Ideally, one would make a nuclear engine such that if the rocket blew up on ascent, or if the engine underwent a controlled or uncontrolled re-entry it would drop as a single chunk of debris that could be either picked up and salvaged, or it could be plunked into the ocean, where the shell could grow radiation tolerant deep sea organisms. However, it is not clear if this is possible even if corners aren't cut. And even if we could make an engine that rugged, would we? Making a nuclear engine so rugged implies adding a bunch of dry mass, which is the opposite of what you want in a rocket.
This isn't a small upper stage engine that can be kept in a sarcophagus during its ride up from Earth and that can leave the sarcophagus behind when it needs to be used. Chelomei wants nuclear engines that are for riding through Earth's atmosphere and that alone.
My conservative estimation would be that some measures to ruggedize the engines would be made, but that they wouldn't be enough to keep the engine in one piece through all failures. So maybe we'd be talking a bit of dust and a handful of large radioactive chunks getting produced by Chemomei's rocket each time it fails.
We then need to multiply that small issue by how long we intend to use the rocket. Using the rocket for, say 10-20 launches for a manned moon program and a short duration Lunar base is very different from using it for hundreds of launches.
But the worse problem comes in day-to-day operation. To my knowledge, no nuclear engine program ever managed to stop the problem of bits of the reactor cracking off and getting blown out with the propellant. So as this thing rode up through Earth's atmosphere, it would leave a dust trail of highly toxic heavy metals.
A dust trail which PROBABLY wouldn't ever be enough to cause acute illness, but which will probably significantly shorten the lives of people living under the fallout. Which could easily end up getting blown over major population centers or into foreign countries like China.
To put it bluntly, the main dangers of this engine from our perspective in Moscow are that other people have shorter lives and that this could cause the politicians to turn against our nuclear program and our space program.
Yeah, a highly reliable hypergol for the lander is exactly the right tool. Especially on a direct descent approach, with its limited options to abort!
Fairly easily. We just need a sun shade. Electronics able to tolerate higher temperatures also helps. (High temperature tolerance on electronics is something with valuable applications here on Earth as well, which is another reason why I'd like to keep the Mercury program going.)
I am sure it is nothing and we can go back to sleep.
The US, as far as we can tell, is well behind OTL and it seems unlikely that it was ever well funded. Their moon program was an absolute joke last time. They never funded a big rocket that could get them the landing.
We however have strongly prioritized our probes and the price for that was nerfing our manned programs into the ground after the first moon race ended. With the low rolls of our station program, this means the US is still probably ahead in many respects in the manned stuff, especially space stations. Their program may have developed a LV with greater payload capacity than the RLA-3, but we aren't sure.
Actually, if the US has ALREADY developed a superheavy for lofting laser battle stations under Ashford, that might explain why Brown wants a settlement by 1984. He may thing that they are within a couple years of landing the first men.
We are overall ahead of OTL, but we aren't equally ahead in all places.
To start off with, our rockets are vastly better than the OTL USSR. Instead of being stuck with the Proton and R-7 and producing a couple heavy lift vehicles of no real use, we developed the RLA-1 and RLA-3, each easily twice as capable as the medium and heavy LVs of the OTL USSR. They are also more mass produceable and have engines that are so good that are still a decade ahead of OTL, despite being a product of our 60s.
In terms of high-tech rocketry, we are also well ahead, we mastered hydrogen/LOX engines far earlier than the OTL Soviet Union and are beyond anything ever achieved in OTL with nuclear rocketry. MAKS is also ahead of the OTL Soviet Union, not only have we done far more work on non-capsule designs in the 60s, we started the actual MAKS program more than a decade before the OTL Soviet Union. (MAKS was started in 1988 in OTL, TTL we started it in what, 1974?)
Our probe program is absolutely out of this world. We have started missions beyond anything any OTL space program has done, and our programs have largely been left to continue once started. As such, we have sent many, many robot probes to Mars and Luna, each probe iterating on the last. We likely understand far more about both bodies than we do in OTL's present. And all this work on probes means we are well ahead on things like building manned landers and manned moon buggies. Our probes going to the outer planets are also well ahead of schedule - yes, some are leaving later, but those that are do so because our rockets are so much better, allowing our mission planners to use more conservative approaches. Our probes are also more capable than anything so far sent out beyond the asteroid belt in OTL and we'll be arriving at Pluto over 30 or years sooner than the US managed in OTL. Our Mercury program is also out of the 21st Century. The first Mercury orbiter in OTL achieved orbit in 2011. If we continue our Mercury program, we'll probably have a more capable orbiter in place before the 70s are done.
We're also ahead in things like the development of inflatable habs and using finnicky maneuvers like aerobreaking in another planet's atmosphere.
And we're ahead in terms of automated activities in Earth orbit and the commercial utilization of space. We started Intercosmos early in TTL and one of the things we've been doing with it is doing cheap commercial launches (as in, we provide launch at cost to our friends) strengthening our diplomacy and providing economies of scale to our launch industry. We don't know exactly how much we are launching, but it seems like we are sending up far more than the OTL Soviet Union, and probably more than all countries combined were launching in OTL's 20th Century. Early in our space program we massively over-invested in rocket production capability and currently we are running those facilities at full tilt and are so tight on rocket cores that we've had to develop ride-sharing 30 years early. As such, it is no surprise that our Earth observation programs are well ahead of OTL. This turn we also saw one of the benefits of our dominance in commercial launch. Since we provide satellite television across Africa and Asia, this has now opened a new way to export Soviet television (by the way, we need to invest in making lots and lots of cheesy soap operas to capitalize on this).
Our manned program is worst off. The space station program may even be behind the OTL Soviet Union. We never succeeded in creating a viable space suit for the moon. However, our space capsule is vastly better than OTL's Soyuz. And Intercosmos again has been doing very well. The manned part of Intercosmos started something like a decade ahead of its OTL counterpart and it has been far more open - we've had mentions of joint missions between us, Indonesia and China - if you remember we helped the Indonesian military purge the Maoists in the country, so Intercosmos is clearly something that can bridge tensions between fraternal countries to some degree. By contrast, in OTL the Soviets and Chinese never did any significant cooperation in space.
And we have been able to achieve all of this without losing the trust of the SupSov. More than NASA achieved in OTL. As a result, we not only have a bigger budget, but we are trusted to invest that budget in long-term bets.
Regards,
fasquardon