Hello, everyone! It's that time once again, and having thoroughly covered the crystallization of American lunar plans for the last two weeks, this week we're turning our attention to the other side of the fallen iron curtain. This week, we're looking at the state of the Sov--er, Russian space program in the shadow of the collapse of the USSR. I hope everyone enjoys it!
Eyes Turned Skywards, Part III: Post #8
With the end of the Cold War in Russia also came the end of the reliable political support and massive budgets for the Soviet space program. For Vladimir Chelomei, his dream of being Chief Designer of the program, achieved at long last, was rapidly becoming a nightmare. When he had assumed control of the program following the death of Glushko, Chelomei had hoped to be able to build on Glushko’s achievements in space with his own, a series of mixed-fuel airbreathing single-stage spaceplanes that would enable cheap and simple development of space-based infrastructure, in turn enabling mighty space stations and far-flung expeditions even Korolev and Glushko would have been envious of. It was an idea that Chelomei had harbored for many years, but it was doomed to remain nothing more. Even by 1989, the state of the Soviet Union was dire; the Politburo had little interest in increasing funding for the space program to pursue such imaginations (even if they might be technically achievable) and indeed was more interested in asking pointed questions of Chelomei about how the program’s budget could be further trimmed with “minimal” effects on the political value of the program. With the final implosion of the Soviet Union, Chelomei found the new Russian leadership even more insistent--now, the question was how much could be cut without “critical” effects. It was readily apparent even to Chelomei that in order to enable the space program he had spent much of his life building to survive, he would have to find alternate revenue sources.
At 76 years old, Chelomei was no spring chicken, and had lived his entire adult life among the enormous battling design bureaus of the Soviet Union, an environment where vast political maneuvering and horse-trading was the fuel that powered development programs. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that, at least initially, Chelomei’s efforts to build a new revenue stream focused not on the commercial spaceflight industry that had begun to spring up, but instead on similar “great moves”. In order to reduce the costs of sustaining R-7 and Vulkan production while offering greater flexibility, the concept of a ‘lite’ version of the Vulkan, based around its RD-160 second-stage engine had been in the air almost since the Vulkan’s inception. The Indian space program had reached out to Chelomei in the early days of his time as Chief Designer, but caught in the transition (both of his career, and the rapidly changing landscape of the Soviet Union’s politics) Chelomei had had no time for their offers. However, now two years later in 1991, he saw the chance to forge a strategic design alliance that could enable completing the vehicle design, now called Neva after the short but powerful river that flows through the heart of St. Petersburg, keeping engineers at work he would need for his spaceplanes, and getting him the construction cost savings he desperately needed to balance his budget. While such a program was more than the Indians were initially looking to gain, he was willing to sweeten the pot with licensed production deals, as well as flights of Indian cosmonauts to Mir--critical for ensuring the funding needed to keep Russian astronauts flying there as well and preventing the station from falling into disuse from which it might be unrecoverable. He then built off of this by securing an alliance with the Chinese, to provide technical support to Chinese launcher and capsule design work and access to Mir in exchange for straight cash he needed to keep his programs running. It was perhaps a worse deal than he could have made, but Yuri Gagarin’s flight had been one of the great successes of the program he was trying to safeguard, and the burning of Gagarin’s Start at Baikonur had recently brought home the financial difficulties he was struggling with. To see an icon of history, and not just Russian history, burn, to see something his ancient rival Korolev had been responsible for even while he himself had been struggling to dominate the Soviet space program go up in flames, weighed heavily on the man, perhaps driving him to search farther than he otherwise would have for whatever money he could dig up. Having made these Faustian bargains to sell access to Russia’s hard-earned spaceflight knowledge for the cold, hard cash needed to keep his rockets flying, it was perhaps only inevitable that Chelomei would eventually authorize similar sales to the West--the very same opponent whose competition had spurred on the very development of the technology, back when he had been the young upstart. Needing to go to the West for help was not easy, but within Chelomei’s mindset of grand bargains, it was the only way to ensure the survival of the program.
The Western world, with the exception of the relative latecomer Japan, had developed a suite of reliable, if relatively low performing rocket engines during the 1950s and 1960s through painstaking labor and testing. As a result, the development of new engines, however large a benefit they promised over the already developed motors, seemed almost too painful to bear, given the common assumption that any such development would need similar amounts of testing--and quite probably similar numbers of expensive flight failures--to become equally reliable. Instead of continuously developing and introducing new engines utilizing improved design features, Western designers chose instead to incrementally upgrade their existing designs, introducing new materials, increasing chamber pressures, and a host of other tweaks to push performance as far as possible. And therein lay the rub, as the underlying designs were fundamentally low-performance, and could only be pushed so far. To get around these inherent limitations, Western engineers turned towards augmenting the perhaps unimpressive core vehicles with a wide variety of additional stages and modifications. For example, rather than relying purely on thrust from the core, a rocket might use strap-on boosters, whether liquid or solid, to lift its bulk into the sky, increasing the payload carried. Alternatively, upper stages using solids, storables, or kerosene as fuels could be replaced by far more efficient high-energy stages using hydrogen and oxygen, a difficult propellant combination that had nevertheless been greatly developed by the United States military during the "Suntan" spy plane program and the later Centaur upper stage project. Taken separately, they could yield important gains to the performance of the underlying vehicle; taken together, however, they could turn a previously mediocre vehicle into an outstanding performer, as in the case of the Europa 3. Most of the performance gain of this workhorse of ESA over the initial Europa 2 came not from the improvements, however significant and difficult, that Rolls-Royce made to the core's RZ.2A engines relative to the older RZ.2, nor from the large increase made in the size of the first stage now that it no longer needed to be largely a copy of Blue Streak. Instead, it gained from the use of a capable new French hydrogen-oxygen upper stage in place of the older hodgepodge of storable French and German stages and the ability to use solid and liquid boosters to increase takeoff thrust. This combination lifted the vehicle from matching the Delta, barely, to seeing eye to eye with the mighty Titan III in terms of payload capacity. By the early 1990s, virtually every Western rocket used some combination of boosters and high-energy upper stages to boost performance, with most of the exceptions being launchers where other concerns, such as politics or cost, dominated over raw performance.
In contrast, the Soviets had preferred a stable of relatively simple vehicles specialized to their particular use, and, due to the absence of a significant technology base in solid rockets and the presence of a rare concentration of liquid engine design talent, relied almost exclusively on liquid propellants for thrust, even in military applications where the Western world quickly developed solids. Moreover, as a consequence of the peculiarities of character of their chief designers, the Soviets were skeptical, even dismissive, of very high energy but hard to handle cryogenic propellants, famously expressed in the battle between over what propellants should be used in the Soviet moon-landing efforts. This battle, waged between Glushko, an engine designer who favored storable propellants, and Korolev, a systems designer who favored the mildly cryogenic pair of liquid oxygen and kerosene, lasted through much of the 1960s. Although Glushko reconciled himself to cryogenics by the 1970s, when his Vulkan was designed to use exclusively kerosene and liquid oxygen, and the Soviets began using high performance hydrogen-oxygen stages in the 1980s, they never completely lost their aversion to cryogenics, with the Blok R high-energy stage mainly being used for a select set of planetary and very high orbit spacecraft, where nothing short of hydrogen would do. In fact, one of the very first things NPO Lavochkin tried to do after becoming an independent firm after the fall of the Soviet Union was sell a derivative of the storable propulsion system they had developed for the latest block of Soviet planetary probes as a reliable upper stage for the Soyuz launch vehicle, achieving some success in the process. To compensate for the inherently lower performance of kerosene and storables as propellants, the Soviets had developed highly sophisticated metallurgy and engine design practices allowing them to run their engines as high-pressure staged combustion engines, offering far better specific impulse and thrust for a given propellant than the simpler, mostly low-pressure gas-generator engines dominant in the West. Between this mastery of a number of highly sophisticated technologies and design methods and a willingness to "just build a bigger booster" if that proved necessary, the Soviets were able, just prior to their collapse, to field a set of launchers, from the small Tsyklon and Cosmos to the reliable workhorse Soyuz to Vulkan and on up to the mighty Vulkan-Atlas, just as capable as any booster in the West, if less flexible on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resulting elimination of many barriers on trade and travel between the West and the newly-formed Russian Federation, particularly restrictions on discussions of Russian and Western rocket hardware, came the discovery of these advanced capabilities by Western rocket engineers. Except for Mitsubishi, which was engaged on pursuing a completely different and independent route to high rocket performance levels, the major Western rocket engine development firms quickly began salivating over the potential offered by these technologies, especially given the low cost of acquiring the fundamentals from a Russia in the throes of significant economic restructuring and in desperate need of hard cash. All of them proposed to their respective governments that Russian technology be incoporated into new engines that would dramatically outperform existing designs. Rocketdyne and Rolls-Royce had in many respects the most conservative proposal, where they would form an international partnership, International Engines, to apply Russian design principles to their existing (and dominant) engines. The goal would be to replicate as closely as possible the key characteristics of the engines, such as thrust and physical size, so that only minimal changes would need to be made in existing stages, while still reaping the benefits of dramatically improved ISP and specific thrust compared to their existing, more conventional rockets. By contrast, Pratt and Whitney had the most radical proposal, where they would partner with the Russian company NPO EnergoMash to sell their engines directly in the United States. Although significant amounts of development work would need to be undertaken to replace existing boosters, which were largely incompatible with the Russian designs, noises about "Third Generation Boosters" (where the 1950s and 1960s boosters were "First Generation" and the products of ELVRP "Second Generation") in the US and the Europa 5 program in Europe perhaps encouraged Pratt and Whitney to believe that such a replacement was inevitable anyways.
Aerojet, the fourth major Western engine manufacturer, had a completely different approach to the prospect of incorporating Russian technology than either Rocketdyne/Rolls-Royce or Pratt and Whitney. Rather than upgrade or use existing engines, Aerojet proposed that an entirely new engine be designed to take maximum advantage of the new technology. By properly regulating its size--Aerojet estimated that an engine with about half a million pounds (or 2200 kilonewtons) of thrust would be ideal--and allowing the ability to throttle significantly, a single engine could replace all existing first-stage engines in all Western launch vehicles (subject to the necessary redesigns, of course). Everything from Europa to Delta could be powered by the same engines, allowing enormous economies of scale. Of course, the Europeans were unlikely to agree to dismantling the independent infrastructure they had constructed over the past three decades for the benefit of an American firm, but even if only the United States adopted its proposal, there could be substantial advances not only in performance but also in economy.
Meanwhile, on the Russian side, Chelomei’s grand bargains had at least achieved much of their task of keeping the program the Russians had inherited from the Soviets alive through to the approach of the mid-90s. However, new forces in the political and technical realms were beginning to make themselves heard, pointing out that the kind of mindset Chelomei was operating with was falsely constrained within the new, capitalistic, commercial world that Russia was a part of. In this world, it wasn’t grand alliances that ultimately were the real money source, it was putting payloads on rockets (or passengers in capsules) and flying them to space. Moreover, these payloads and passengers weren’t just a side project to fund the massive projects of space exploration, they would have to be the bread and butter--the program’s main reason to be. In the view of those within the Russian government and space program who had begun to grasp this fact by watching the operations of their competitors like Lockheed, ESA, ALS, and McDonnell-Douglas, Chelomei’s attitude towards developing a base for selling Russian rocket flights to foreign customers was unacceptably lax--by 1994, not a single foreign payload had flown on a Vulkan or Soyuz rocket in spite of the dramatically lower costs of Russian rockets allowed by the condition of the Russian economy and the lower cost of labor, and the results of his other partnerships had also been less than might have been hoped.
In many ways, this blame was undeserved--getting insurance coverage, technical contacts, launch support and pricing structures in place was a colossal task, and even if payloads had not been designed from the ground up for a specific launch vehicle, it usually took years to negotiate and finalize LV contracts. This was exacerbated by the sheer scale of Vulkan compared to other commercial vehicles--it had a payload both to low Earth orbit and the more commercially relevant geosynchronous transfer orbit substantially larger that its largest competitor, the Europa 44u, and several times larger than the commercially dominant Lockheed Titan IIIE and Europa 42u. While Vulkan was cheaper per kilogram of payload than any of its competitors in theory, this advantage only applied if its payload capacity was fully exploited, not if it was allowed to fly partially empty. However, since most commercial satellites fell well short of Vulkan’s lifting ability, “fully exploiting” its capacity meant lifting two or more satellites on a single launch, a complicated and difficult proposition to arrange. If merely one satellite was launched, Vulkan would be no cheaper and less convenient for the usually Western firms that were seeking to launch satellites than its competitors at the Cape and Kourou. Even the best salesman would struggle to obtain contracts under such conditions, and the environment of the Soviet Union, where Chelomei and his top lieutenants had had to do little but focus on research and development, meant that they were far from the best salesmen in Russia.
Moreover, Chelomei’s extensive co-operative programs which he had attempted to offer as a path had been progressing slower than had been promised to the international development partners. India had initially been promised that development of the Russian designs for the Neva/Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle would be complete by 1995. Given that the core was to be based on Soyuz tankage and Vulkan-derived engines, the goal had looked initially achievable. However, the combination of limited budgets and unanticipated challenges in adapting hardware to produce Neva pushed these schedules back. Originally, India had hoped to have its PSLV by 1994, but had allowed a slip to 1995 as an acceptable alternative given the potential of the Russian stage, extending the use of its Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle in the meantime. However, every slip of the Russian development program brought implications for the Indian program; as delays accumulated and began to push the introduction of the vehicle into the latter half of the decade, many Indian program managers began to express impatience and frustration, even to the point of suggesting that it might be just as well for India to cancel their co-operation and instead build their own native designed-stage. While Neva’s engineering team managed to largely assuage those impulses (in part with arrangements to pay to fly some of the PSLV-only payloads on Vulkan in the meantime), they were an ominous and discouraging sign for the future of the Russian-Indian partnership. Perhaps the only areas relatively immune from delay were those simply involving flights to Mir--including Indian, Chinese, and American astronauts. On the commercial passenger side, where Russian companies had begun attempting to sell the concept of a “tourism” flight to Mir, there had been interest even at the prices needed to help subsidize Mir operations, but none of that interest had yet translated into the cold, hard cash the program needed.
These difficulties provided strong evidence that Chelomei’s worldview of grand moves and massive projects was incompatible with the efforts needed to secure the stream of mundane commercial payloads needed to secure the program’s future, and that given the strain already present on the cash-strapped program, he had over-extended. Finally, in 1995, Chelomei was outmaneuvered in his own game--the last of the great Chief Designers had made one wrong move too many and he was informed he was being offered a well-deserved, richly compensated, and quite compulsory retirement in honor of his stewardship of the program as Chief Designer and years of dedicated service beforehand. His replacements would focus on the large commercial potential of the assets he had managed, however clumsily, to preserve of the glory days: Vulkan, TKS, Mir, as well as cooperative efforts on Neva with India and with the Americans in LEO and beyond.
) current list of potential destinations are landing sites at both poles, all over the nearside, and all over the farside. Artemis needs to be flexible enough to be just as capable at the poles as it is at the equator (and vice versa) and L2 staging gives that better than LLO, as you said. On top of that, then, the requirement for anytime return, no matter the point in the ~2 week nominal mission duration, means that getting back at any time is a critical component. Getting this from LLO staging is hard to add, while doing it from an L2 staging position is baked into the mission plan. In addition, while after the Richards-Davis report active planning for a lunar base are off the table, the fact that this staging method does translate well to a potential base isn't entirely out of the equation. After all, by the time a series of 6 annual missions, starting in 1999 would conclude, it'd be 2005--almost 12 years after Gore's inauguration and the Richards-Davis Report. Each individual factor isn't a killer app, but together they make L2 favored for Artemis.
