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Your favorite rocket!

Kerbal01

By Kerbal01
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M.Wolfy

M.Wolfy

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Maybe we should discuss our least favourite rocket. Or maybe that should be in another thread. Anyway mine would be the Proton. That thing's just damn ugly. Not to mention unreliable. However, I suppose It did give us possibly the most spectacular explosion ever recently :)

though it does its job...

When it dosen't explode

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Temstar

Temstar

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Maybe we should discuss our least favourite rocket. Or maybe that should be in another thread. Anyway mine would be the Proton. That thing's just damn ugly. Not to mention unreliable. However, I suppose It did give us possibly the most spectacular explosion ever recently :)

Proton? Unreliable? Just because one crashed this year doesn't make it unreliable. In fact Proton at one stage was going to be a man-rated rocket lofting Zond spacecraft around the moon:

proton_zond_on_transporter.jpg

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Apotheosist

Apotheosist

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Proton? Unreliable? Just because one crashed this year doesn't make it unreliable. In fact Proton at one stage was going to be a man-rated rocket lofting Zond spacecraft around the moon

89% reliability. That's lower than average for rockets. Also I don't like the fact that when it does fail, if it's near or on the ground it spreads toxic stuff over the place. Also, what's with the six tanks sticking out the sides? It's just a visual thing I have a problem with, but if someone could explain to me the engineering rationale for it i might change my views. Oh, and just because a rocket is man-rated, doesn't make it reliable. If you have a launch escape system that doesn't matter so much. Space Shuttle had no escape system, that was still fairly unreliable.

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Temstar

Temstar

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89% reliability. That's lower than average for rockets. Also I don't like the fact that when it does fail, if it's near or on the ground it spreads toxic stuff over the place. Also, what's with the six tanks sticking out the sides? It's just a visual thing I have a problem with, but if someone could explain to me the engineering rationale for it i might change my views. Oh, and just because a rocket is man-rated, doesn't make it reliable. If you have a launch escape system that doesn't matter so much. Space Shuttle had no escape system, that was still fairly unreliable.

89% was only because of the terrible crashes back in its UR-500 infancy when it was still going through growing pains (unfortunately that doomed the Zond misson). Russians tend not to do tests with test stands as much, they'll rather just put together prototype rockets and set them off. And if it blows up then they would pick up the pieces and learn how to improve it. Even the R-7 went through a lot of crashes in its early days before it was perfected.

As to why Proton has such an odd shape for a first stage, yes there were good engineering reasons for it. When N1 started going into trouble Vladimir Chelomey and Valentin Glushko wrote to their bosses complaining that N1 is doomed to fail because its huge 17m diameter first stage is far too large to transport whole and so is always going to require extensive on site assembly at Baikonur. And since Baikonur is exactly in the middle of nowhere with no real rocket factory you will always get shoddy work (recall the second N1 was destroyed because a bolt inside the tank got shaken loose and sucked into the turbopump). In response to the N1 Chelomey proposes a new rocket family called "Universal Rocket" which share many common components - particular the 4.15m diameter fuel tank which was the largest size that can be transported by rail whole to Baikonur. Each universal rocket component will be built and tested in Moscow before transport by rail to Baikonur for simple final assembly:

urfam.jpg

The one on the far right is the UR-700, which is Chelomey's answer to the N1. It's actually an asparagus staged rocket assembled from clusters of the common 4.15m tanks. If you look at those different versions of UR-500 (aka Proton) beside it you can see what they did with the first stage. The first stage really needs to be wider than 4.15m, so what Chelomey did was he designed six "booster" like sections which holds the engines and fuel tanks which will be bolted onto the centre section which contains only the oxidiser tank. This design is called "polyblock" as opposed to the more traditional "monoblock" design with two tanks one of top of the other. Having your first stage built this way allows each major piece to be fully built and tested in factory before being sent by railway to Baiknour in seven major pieces for final assembly. It also allows a shorter first stage which makes stacking of upper stages easier.

ur700all.jpg

If then look back to UR-700 you can see that the upper stage of the rocket looks speciously like a Proton first stage - complete with the centre oxidiser tanks surrounded fuel+engine assemblies. In fact this is the whole idea behind the universal rocket series - reuse as much parts as possible for maximum reliability and least development effort. The fact that UR-700 uses no tanks wider than 4.15m also means that even with a moonshot rocket, all the major components can be built and tested in Moscow before railway transport to Baiknour - it just takes a lot more train wagon than a Proton.

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Apotheosist

Apotheosist

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No. 89% with the Proton M, which has only been flying since 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M 62 successes/70 flights=89%. It seems to me that even after many decades, this rocket still has fundamental flaws. I hope rockets like Falcon 9 will set the standard for reliability. They are actually designed to withstand component failures, like the Saturn V did too.

Thanks for the detailed explanation of why the proton is shaped as it is though, I learnt a lot! I think those universal rocket designs are awesome, I'd love to see something like that be made.

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Kulebron

Kulebron

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No. 89% with the Proton M, which has only been flying since 2001 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-M 62 successes/70 flights=89%. It seems to me that even after many decades, this rocket still has fundamental flaws. I hope rockets like Falcon 9 will set the standard for reliability. They are actually designed to withstand component failures, like the Saturn V did too.

Thanks for the detailed explanation of why the proton is shaped as it is though, I learnt a lot! I think those universal rocket designs are awesome, I'd love to see something like that be made.

If you read about the failure reasons, you'll see that every time something new fails. It's bad manufacturing. Roskosmos had it's specialists write on community blog habrahabr.ru, and they confirm this. As I know, during putinism there were more and more managers, budget overuse, and savings on the ordinary assembly specialists.

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