I’ve Returned



Too much to fit into one update. The leads could be

Communisms’ legacy

• in the Baltic states
• in East Berlin
• in demographies
• its relation to other genocides like the holocaust
• a prison
• how do the people live today
• Ignalina and its replacement

• (Peripherally a subject matter, the western powers’ somewhat interesting views on Finnish-Soviet wars and relations and their potential wagings of war against the reds – project Pike forum summary and the book here)

Russian forest fires

• Beriev’s share price (A Be-200 appears on the video 15 seconds in, hat tip to Secret Projects)
• organization of society and its ability to handle crises
• the smoke in Helsinki because of that
• should they care

Hot weather

• Here, after the coldest ever winter comes the hottest ever summer
• Is it largely just winds from the southeast’s continental hotness – when usually they blow from the more marine southwest?

Climategate blahblah

• BBC has apologized and some NYT reporter has said the NYT should apologize on some small back page article.
• Follow Michael Tobis for climate related news

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Waiting for the Start Signal

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NK-33

It seems to be such a marvelous rocket engine. A high thrust to weight, high ISP high tolerance design that is still top of the line after sitting forty years in storage – it will be used for Orbital’s Taurus II as a first stage engine.

I drew a diagram on how the engine works internally.

NK-33 Simplified Flow Diagram

It’s a full flow oxygen rich staged combustion design. Also note that there’s a separate geared booster pump to raise the pressure of the small fraction of kerosene going to the gas generator. This is most likely because the turbine lowers the pressure, hence the gas generator has to be at a much higher pressure than the chamber.

In the modern launcher business, Russia probably still has the best expertise on first stage engines.

With a modest chamber pressure, the full flow oxygen rich gas generator gas wouldn’t need even to be that hot. I don’t know why specifically these kinds of engines have not been tried more often. Maybe SpaceX can do something, they’re one of the few companies designing new engines anymore. This is the logical path after gas generator engines. Remember that perhaps the best known GG engine, F-1, originated from around 1958… It could be seen as an anachronism that the US companies are still sticking to gas generator cycle engines.

With modern day machining capabilities and turbine / pump computer optimization, one should be able to do quite a lot relatively easily.

Source for the data that I made the graphic with: Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines, lpre.de, in Russian.

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