Can the Soyuz Still go to the moon ?

[Zerxal]

No reason for them to - they have better technology to use these days than back in the '60s.

[kerbiloid]

Kinda offtop, but.

Another case: a Space Shuttle with additional fuel tank in the cargo bay. (Like a lesser one designed for Buran, but 20t).

[DBowman]

I bet reckon you could probably cobble together a moon mission based on existing Russian vehicles with some 'mods' ( e.g. Soyuz reentry++ ) and a new lander. I've not done the math but a Soyuz + a Proton/Briz (playing CSM) would probably get you to low lunar orbit with earth return propellant left over, use the same two launcher (Soyuz + Proton) plan to send a new lunar lander and do the LEM & CSM rendezvous in LLO. Still that's only about 60 ton in LEO so maybe not enough.

 

This has a survey of Russian proposed Soyuz replacements.

[Nibb31]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Kinda offtop, but.

Another case: a Space Shuttle with additional fuel tank in the cargo bay. (Like a lesser one designed for Buran, but 20t).

 

No way. You have to wrap your head around the idea that a vehicle designed for LEO is wildly different to a vehicle designed for BEO or circumlunar.

 

The Orbiter would actually need another ET to reach the Moon. It also didn't have guidance systems, comms systems or radiation shielding for such a trip.

Edited March 4, 2017 by Nibb31

[Gaarst]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Kinda offtop, but.

Another case: a Space Shuttle with additional fuel tank in the cargo bay. (Like a lesser one designed for Buran, but 20t).

Kinda offtopic, but.

Anything invloving the Space Shuttle doing anything else than sitting in a hangar (or fixing Hubble) is a terrible idea.

[wumpus]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Kinda offtop, but.

Another case: a Space Shuttle with additional fuel tank in the cargo bay. (Like a lesser one designed for Buran, but 20t).

It would have to go wherever it was going with Shuttle Maneuvering systems.  According to the ever-correct wiki, this gives a maximum of 6000lbs of thrust, and a total life of 15 hours for the whole rocket (nearly all of which I'd expect to be nearing the end, considering how extended the shuttle program was).  You also have the fun of launching large tanks of MMH/N2O4 just off the coast of Florida (normally the shuttle barely used any of this fuel, but if you're going to the moon...) in a vehicle no longer considered all that reliable.

It might have been a cool mission back when the shuttle was NASA's go-to option (I'd assume they could refurbish and pack up the LEM in the Smithsonian and still have room for fuel.  I suspect there are a few more details that just wouldn't work with this idea).  To be honest, I'm sure the LEM simply wasn't considered "safe enough" by the 1980s, although building a new one wouldn't be that expensive for such a trip.  I'm guessing even the most anti-environmental Florida politicians would have been up in arms at the idea of throwing that much NMH up out of KSC would have been enough to quash the idea.

[tater]

Yeah, the shuttle notion is pretty absurd. Why would anyone want to send 90 tons of Orbiter anywhere? It was not a good idea to waste that much payload mass to LEO, much less cislunar . Remember that Saturn sent about the same mass (ballpark) as the Orbiter to the Moon---including all the propellant, etc. What came back? The Apollo CSM.

Edited March 4, 2017 by tater

[p1t1o]

Nobody wants to lift a pair of wings all the way to the moon, but I've always daydreamed about -

What would it take to allow me to fly the shuttle around [conventionally, within the Earth's atmosphere] on rocket power? How long would a payload bay worth of LOx/H2 burn for at the required thrust?

It might not fly for long, but for those few minutes, gawdDANG you'd be the hottest bird in the sky that day!

[Nibb31]

It took a 115-ton S-IVB to push a 30-ton CSM+LM stack into a lunar flyby. The Shuttle Orbiter was 90 tons, so you'd probably need at least 300-tons of propellant to get it into lunar orbit.

[monophonic]

7 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

It took a 115-ton S-IVB to push a 30-ton CSM+LM stack into a lunar flyby. The Shuttle Orbiter was 90 tons, so you'd probably need at least 300-tons of propellant to get it into lunar orbit.

That sets an upper limit. Remember though, the S-IVB didn't use all its fuel for the TLI burn. Before then it had done the orbital insertion of itself and rest of the stack.

I have no idea how the fuel mass was divided between the two burns though.

[tater]

The orbiter is mostly dead mass, and pointless to bring past LEO under pretty much any circumstances. You'd also need to bring fuel to the Moon and back to brake once in LEO, since Shuttle was never designed for a direct entry from the Moon.

Want to go to the Moon with Shuttle technology? They should have built Direct. Then you use a Jupiter 246 or 232 (SMEs in an engine fairing at the back of shuttle orange tank (with an extension), 2 stock STS SRBs, a cryo upper stage, with Orion/CST-100 on top, and an Aries lander below.

[JetJaguar]

Not so much a hijack, but maybe a tangent:  This thread touches on something that most people probably don't even realize, but I deal with at work from time-to-time (I'm a systems engineer for the US Navy).  How do you support a system that was first built decades ago, with parts that have been obsolete and out of production for maybe 20 years, and with OEM contractors that may not even still be in business?

For example, at work we treat the F-18C/D as a completely different aircraft from the F-18E/F (and the G is another animal altogether).  Part of it is because the Super Hornet really is a completely different aircraft compared to the Hornet (if you see them parked next to each other on the flight line, the E/F/G is almost a third bigger than the C/D), but part of it is down to age.

So when you talk about dusting off blueprints from the 1970's and putting that back into production, the engineering hours you would have to budget just to find modern substitutes for everything that's obsolete, and then integrating it all and testing it, is probably about the same as designing something new from the ground up.  A lot of it may sound really simple, like a bunch of transistors that haven't been produced in maybe thirty years.  Yes, you can find a modern equivalent, but then it's going to have to be manufactured, then integrated, and then tested, all over again.  Might as well just design something new, it will cost the same in the end.

[kerbiloid]

I just quoted a fragment of "Time Machine" movie where a shuttle lands on the Moon...

[p1t1o]

There is a rather interesting story related to old technology that goes around circles interested in nuclear weapons, obviously there are issues corroborating a lot of stories due to their classified nature, but there is much that is declassified and this piece of information is supported by various unclassified statements.

Code-named "Fogbank" it is supposedly an aerogel of particular makeup used in certain warheads as the "filler" material in between primary and secondary components. It is assumed that it gives physical support to components when inert, and during detonation, must form a plasma that is transparent to certain types of radiation, and opaque to others.

Whatever it does, however it does it, it is/was obviously a very specifically formulated material.

Only thing is, it was produced only in small batches by a small facility, so when it came to look into refurbishment and modernisation of these warheads - years after manufacture - it was found that nobody could remember how to make it. Likely developed using data from live detonations, computer simulations at the time were not sophisticated enough to reproduce the required data.

The whole process had to be reverse engineered from remaining samples - 15 years and $100million later, they finally (re)cracked how to manufacture something that was invented decades ago.

[Nibb31]

Absolutely. The N1 was a product of many compromises that no longer exist. It used spherical tanks because they couldn't ship large cylindrical tanks to Baikonur. It used a multitude of small engines because the USSR wasn't interested in making an F-1 equivalent. Each stage wasn't tested separately because they didn't have large test facilities. And so on. These requirements actually made things more complicated for the design bureau and don't make any sense today.

The same is true for Saturn V. Some of the parts were designed to reuse existing tooling and hardware to save costs at the time. Nowadays, those savings don't make any sense.

Techniques and materials have evolved a lot. Parts are made with CNC machines that require digital CAD/CAM files, so old drawings would all need to be manually converted to digital, old materials would need to be converted to new materials with different properties, and therefore reassessed and retested. You would basically be better off designing a new rocket that takes advantages of current tooling and hardware, which is basically what SLS is.

Edited March 6, 2017 by Nibb31

[DDE]

6 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Absolutely. The N1 was a product of many compromises that no longer exist. It used spherical tanks because they couldn't ship large cylindrical tanks to Baikonur.

And because we don't have the large transport aircraft used for Energiya, that limitation is still there. It's even worse for Vostochnyi!

Oh, and then there was the RD-270. Very nearly the thrust of F-1, but it was one of Glushko's beloved UDMH-N2O4 large hypergolic motors. As the nutter reasoned, maximum safe UDMH contamination levels are much lower than those for elemental fluorine, so why is everyone so nervous about the fluorine-ammonia RD-301?

Edited March 6, 2017 by DDE

[Nibb31]

36 minutes ago, DDE said:

And because we don't have the large transport aircraft used for Energiya, that limitation is still there. It's even worse for Vostochnyi!

They used a converted Myasishchev M-4 bomber to transport Energia tanks and even Buran. I don't know if the plane is still operational or how difficult it would be to build a new one.

Russia could still rent the AN-225 Mriya from Ukraine like Airbus and Boeing do. However, in the current political climate, that might be difficult...

 

Edited March 6, 2017 by Nibb31

[DerekL1963]

8 hours ago, p1t1o said:

The whole process had to be reverse engineered from remaining samples - 15 years and $100million later, they finally (re)cracked how to manufacture something that was invented decades ago.

In the same vein, a friend who works at a Naval shipyard recently finished a project to replace a pair of motor-generators on a given submarine class with static inverters...   It was cheaper to replace them outright than to re-establish the production lines to replenish the spares pool for something designed and first built in the 70's and for which spares were last purchased back around the turn of the century.

The Russians are still building a couple of very old designs, but they can do so because they've never stopped building them.  Their knowledge and experience with building is current, and the pipelines are running...   But I suspect they'd find themselves in the same boat as us when it comes to resurrecting an old design.  The tools and equipment are long gone, and the guys who know how are retired (after not working with the stuff for forty years) or dead.

[DDE]

42 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

The Russians are still building a couple of very old designs, but they can do so because they've never stopped building them.  Their knowledge and experience with building is current, and the pipelines are running...   But I suspect they'd find themselves in the same boat as us when it comes to resurrecting an old design.  The tools and equipment are long gone, and the guys who know how are retired (after not working with the stuff for forty years) or dead.

Not to mention how the whole N-1 ground infrastructure got neatly cannibalized for Energiya...

[magnemoe]

On 6.3.2017 at 10:59 AM, p1t1o said:

There is a rather interesting story related to old technology that goes around circles interested in nuclear weapons, obviously there are issues corroborating a lot of stories due to their classified nature, but there is much that is declassified and this piece of information is supported by various unclassified statements.

Code-named "Fogbank" it is supposedly an aerogel of particular makeup used in certain warheads as the "filler" material in between primary and secondary components. It is assumed that it gives physical support to components when inert, and during detonation, must form a plasma that is transparent to certain types of radiation, and opaque to others.

Whatever it does, however it does it, it is/was obviously a very specifically formulated material.

Only thing is, it was produced only in small batches by a small facility, so when it came to look into refurbishment and modernisation of these warheads - years after manufacture - it was found that nobody could remember how to make it. Likely developed using data from live detonations, computer simulations at the time were not sophisticated enough to reproduce the required data.

The whole process had to be reverse engineered from remaining samples - 15 years and $100million later, they finally (re)cracked how to manufacture something that was invented decades ago.

Can imagine. here the high security requirements add to the problem, and as you say it was something who was produced in small quantities as in a few tons. 

 

[p1t1o]

1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

Can imagine. here the high security requirements add to the problem, and as you say it was something who was produced in small quantities as in a few tons. 

There was also a lack of/poor documentation around the processes and the fact that in the intervening time the business disappeared with the employees scattered to the four winds.

And then, presumably amongst other difficulties, there was a little matter that when they were trying to work out the manufacturing process, one of the raw materials was being produced with a more modern, more efficient process.

This removed an impurity in the material which turns out was key to getting the right properties in the final product.

[55delta]

I think we can all agree now that N-1 isn't being re-built.

However, I'm still wondering about the original question. Does Russia have a lifter that could send a Soyuz to the Moon, either to orbit the moon or for a free-return trajectory? Would anyone happen to know?

[kerbiloid]

LK-1 (Chelomei's) and L-1 (Korolev's) spacecrafts were designed to flyby the Moon by one Proton launch.

L-1 is Soyuz without habitation unit. In its uncrewed tests it is known as Zond.
Two Soviet tortoises (do not confuse with turtles) were the first Terrans who have performed a lunar flyby.

So - of course, that's UR-500K Proton.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, 55delta said:

Would anyone happen to know?

Angara with the five first stages. Flew once, never heard from since. Apparently Roscosmos wants to embrace the Kerbal Way; its future superheavies will likely be clusters of Zenit or Sunkar first stages as well.

[_Augustus_]

10 hours ago, 55delta said:

Does Russia have a lifter that could send a Soyuz to the Moon, either to orbit the moon or for a free-return trajectory? Would anyone happen to know?

A Proton-M could do it.