OT: 50th Anniversary of Mankind's First Spacewalk
50 years ago today, Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov stepped off his Voshkhod-2 spacecraft and out into the deep, dark void that is the vacuum of space for mankind's first ever spacewalk. This leap into the unknown marks a very important small step into our exploration of space and our exploration of mankind.
The story - like many of these early space exploration stories - is absolutely badass. His suit over-inflated and didn't function properly; yet, coming within moments of suffering a heatstroke and being hardly able to move, he remained calm, not informing anyone of the potential issues, because the world was listening and he didn't want them to hear.
He eventually had to let out pressure from his suit, exposing himself to the emptiness of space. Much like deep sea divers, he nearly suffered from the bends. As he deflatted his space suit so he could fit back into the airlock, it only made his gloves swell more, in a twist of cosmic cruelity.
Soaked with sweat, but back on board his return vehicle, the flight encountered more difficulties. While only in space for a little over one day, it was the even shorter return to earth that caused perhaps the biggest issue. As anomalies mounted, Leonov and co-pilot Pavel Belyayev were forced to tumble toward off course and into a thick forest during a snowstorm. Facing sub-zero temperatures, wolves, and bears, they had to survive the night, their sweat threatening to freeze in their now-unheated shelter, they managed to be rescued and ski out on the second day.
Of course, they had one of these just in case they had to hunt (cosmonauts, for a long time, carried guns on board all their flights in the event they became stranded)
Unlike most of his era, Leonov is still alive to this day. A badass among badasses, we look back at what "Space bitches, space" really means.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:12 AM ^
allegedly
March 19th, 2015 at 10:39 AM ^
"Allegedly" what?
I guess this means you're a space travel skeptic, that you believe it was all special effects on secret sound stages in Kyrgistan and Nevada.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:47 AM ^
has ever walked on the moon. The CIA killed Kennedy, and MLK, and Malcolm X, and Phillip Seymor Hoffman. It was actually the Olympic that sunk and not the Titanic. Vegas absolutely threw that Duke game. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually a Terminator.
Other than that I am not really a conspiracy theorist.
Conspiracy theory??? Don't forget...
Craig James bagpiped five hookers at SMU?
Kilt.
But something makes me think if he just bagged or piped those hookers, he wouldn't be in as much trouble.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:46 AM ^
So the Gemini missions were also for pretend? How about Mercury? I've often wondered where the line is drawn. Is the ISS a fiction? Is GPS a lie? How am I supposed to get home tonight?
March 19th, 2015 at 11:01 AM ^
Are we ever really "home"?
March 19th, 2015 at 12:27 PM ^
Oops, MJ's suspension belongs with conspiracy theories (above).
March 19th, 2015 at 10:18 AM ^
How did they actually land on solid earth? I didn't know that you could do that back in the day.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:22 AM ^
The Soyuz still does today, mostly because there isn't a convenient ocean to land in for them. A retrorocket fires the instant before landing, which softens the blow a bit. In the beginning, they just landed really hard and hoped not to break anything.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:32 AM ^
In the very very beginning, they ejected from the capsule, it crashed, while the cosmonaut parachuted to the ground.
Not to threadjack but this gruesome story came out about a cosmonaut burning up on re-entry in 1967. American intelligence even picked up a recording of it. This site has the details and a playback of the recording.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
March 19th, 2015 at 10:39 AM ^
It's talked about in the article, one of the guys that recovered the cosmonauts from this mission was later on board Soyuz 11, where the spacecraft depressurized, and the three cosmonauts sufficated on board.
Space flight is very dangerous. Makes it all the more incredible.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:33 AM ^
An early Apollo Capsule began filling with water and sinking. Contamination and drying and actually finding the astronauts before conditions in the ocean worsen isn't always safe. It's really just a matter of resources and other trades.
The US also has another advantage in that they can launch from Florida rather than rather than a site like Baikonur. Not only is the Cape in a direction that faces the sea and launches with the rotation of earth (so does Baikonur, but it's over land), but the Cape is also closer to the equator, making launch a little easier. The difference isn't huge, but it's real.
Poor Gus... Though I thought Shirra put paid to the theory liberty bells loss was Gus's fault.
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March 19th, 2015 at 10:18 AM ^
Not to be confused with the first American spacewalk, which occurred about 10 weeks later and was performed by Ed White, a Michigan grad.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:28 AM ^
NASA wasn't what I'd call "fully prepared" necessarily for a spacewalk, but wanted to move the American spacewalk up on the calendar to show they were catching up to the Russians. The Americans, in many ways, started out even with the Russians and could have been in space first had they not demanded more test flights with chimps.
Anyway, White did ultimately go on his spacewalk, and had GO2 to propell him around. Unfortunately for the ground ops folks, they had trouble "reminded" him that there was a time constraint, and White was most disappointed with the fact that he depleted his entire HHMU gas supply.
White basically ignored orders to get back in, and used the idea that he "had to take more pictures" before returning as an excuse to extend his stay in space. Of course, he did eventually return to the spacecraft and they landed safe back on Earth. But that's kind of a summary of his spacewalk experience.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:20 PM ^
Speaking of the space race, why didn't the USSR ever put a man on the Moon? I always thought it was odd that they never did.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:34 PM ^
Essentially they made the decision to say that they were never trying to get to the Moon at all (an outright lie), and that they were more concerned about developing space station technology (more or less the truth).
The main reason both nations were trying to land on the Moon was for propaganda, and there isn't much propaganda value in finishing second in a 2-participant race. So they made the decision to stop their lunar program and pretend it never existed. They probably wouldn't have gotten there until 1976 or so anyway; their answer to the Saturn V was still blowing up on the launch pad in 1971.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:43 PM ^
First, there was serious in-fighting in the USSR. NASA had James Webb, who pretty much ran things for NASA. The USSR essentially had four different chief designers due to being split into competing groups. The USSR was split on what the goal of the agency should be, some wanted to go to the moon and set up space stations, others wanted near-Earth missions as well as unmanned interplanetary missions (the Russians loved Venus while the US focused on Mars in that field).
They then had some accidents, started focusing more on ICBMs, and fell behind a bit. Because of that, the person in charge of the moon missions wasn't very experienced, and development was slow. Then, because the US was advancing, the Russians paniced and started designing competing designs rather than working forward together, until they finally officially ented the race to the moon in '64.
Then Korolyov died, and mishap after mishap began. A man named Mishin was put in charge to land on the moon by '68 and a man around the moon by '67. The in-fighting continued, and then, as stated above Soyuz 1 happened and killed a cosmonaut. Mishin developed a drinking problem and continued working on the N1 rocket (Soyuz successfully orbited the moon shortly after the Americans did, but not on the N1-L3 or superheavy version needed to have a lander). The N-1 had failure after failure and finally was abandoned without ever launching a crewed mission.
So in summary: lots of in-fighting, sending great engineers to work on other things, and the inability to develop a super-heavy launch vehicle.
Where the Russians were really ahead of the Americans was in their manufacturing. Because of that, they basically designed and tested things, and then once it worked, they just used it over and over again.
So the Saturn V had 5 main engines to boost it toward space. Well, the Russians had developed their boost engines and weren't going to redesign what was already done. So the old addage of just duct-taping it together until you have enough thrust for it fly was put into use. The N1-L3 had 30 first stage engines.
As an aside, Russia had two major boost engine guys in this "boost" rocket engine work Glushko and Korolev. Glushko wanted to develop a new engine to compete with America's F-1; Korolev insisted that the Russians were at least 5 years behind in that technology and the Gulags and for the failure of his first marriage. So the two didn't like each other. Glushko refused to work on it anymore, so Korolev leaned on someone else who developed the cluster of smaller NK-15 engines. FWIW, Glushko eventually designed the RD-170, the basic design of which is still in use today in upgraded variants, but that development took over 10 years despite being 20 years after the F-1. So neither would have been right. Of course, then Korolev died and Mishin took over and the in-fighting started all over again, which I described above.
Anyway, the plumbing was crazy complex because there were 30 engines, a fuel side, and an ox side. The launch site also couldn't be reached by large barges making things even more difficult. This made for what would be considered non-optimal static testing where the entire cluster was never tested together. Well, then you cluster them, the vibration loads are much different and much larger, and eventual destructive. There were also just fluid dynamic problems which caused cavitation and vehicle roll and all that. All four test flights failed because first-stage separation. So everyone was wrong for the Russians when it came to the launch vehicle.
I always was curious about the N-1. I'd been told by someone that the Russian engines were better, technically. But, I could never figure out why, if that was the case, they used so many engines.
Their version of a CM and LEM were really interesting too. Much smaller than the Apollo version I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_(spacecraft)
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Russians were well ahead of Americans in terms of manufacturing capabilities.
In America, it's a bit of a no-no to regeneratively cool engines with the Ox system, because the Ox when heated can essentially ignite on its own. But the Ox is also a more efficient heat-transfer fluid, so in that way their plumbing is more efficient. Russians regen with Ox.
Russians didn't design as many engines, but tested the hell out of their ultimate designs, and continued to fine-tune them. Furthermore, their better manufacturing capabilities allowed them to be more repeatable in this way.
I believe the Russians were using Pintle injectors for a longer time (which is what Space X uses for their Merlin engines). This is typically seen as a slight improvement. I'm guessing the combination of more testing and better manufacturing allowed for it to come into use.
In other areas, the American's were better though. It just depends on which part of rocket engineering you're discussing. There are things you don't typically think about, like pump technology, combustion stability, and things of that nature that probably allowed the Americans to get more bang for their buck per se (I'd have to read up on it again to actually know where the American advantages were, it may not be what I listed, but I know it really was just dependent on what aspect you were talking about more or less). But the Russians just knew their rocket engines inside and out because once they were developed, they repeatedly tested them and took a few more risks with them than the American side of things.
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Open-Cycle vs Closed-cycle has to do with how the pumps are driven. Large liquid rockets, like the ones used for launches, use turbopumps to feed the propellants to the injector. Well there are a several ways to drive turbopumps, but the most common way for large rockets is to utilize the propellants in such a way that a small-scale combustion event causes pressures on one side of the turbopump that drives the other side of the pump that pumps the propellants to the injector.
Most pumps on earth are either electrically driven or chemically driven. Electrically driven pumps are heavy, so chemically driven pumps are preferred for rocket propulsion systems. The way it works is that a small amount of propellants are diverted to an area, a combustion event occurs, which cause the pump to rotate. In turn, the other side of the pump begins feeding the propellants to the injector.
Now, in an open-cycle system, the combustion gas that is formed in order to drive the pump is simply off-gassed. It provides no benefit to the combustion of the rocket, and is essentially "wasted" propellant, thus making it less efficient. A closed-cycle system tries to utilize the combustion gasses, at least in some way, in addition to the main combustion chamber in the rocket. Basically, an open-cycle trashes a small fraction of the propellant, and a closed-cycle recycles the propellants.
Everyone was using open-cycle systems because they were easier, up until about the mid-50s. And yes, looking into, the Russians began using closed-cycles while the American's didn't. In fact Raptor engine being developed by Space X is a departure in that it is a closed-cycle rather than an open-cycle, like their Merlin engine.
FWIW, the more you scale up (the stronger your engine is at producing thrust), the more difficult it is to utilize a closed-cycle. This is why the RD-180 is known as such an efficient engine for it's class.
I'm guessing it would be a bear to go closed loop on an f-1 sized engine?
Do you consider the f-1 to be a good engine even though it's open loop? Or sort of an engineering hack to get the job done?
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But they don't contribute anything to the thrust, is my understanding. They simply ducted the hot gas to the end of the nozzle kind of like you said.
And yeah, for the technology at the time, I think it probably would have been quite difficult to make it a closed cycle system. But don't get it wrong, the F1 engine is still an amazing engine. To date, the most powerful liquid rocket engine ever designed and flown. There were combustion stability problems at the start of the program, which really should be unexpected with just how big this thing is (remember, it's basically a controlled bomb), but eventually they got it to be incredibly stable, to the point that it actually self-damped itself.
At the end of the day, a single engine produced nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust. For reference, an average 2200 sq ft, 2 story home, including foundation and everything in it, typically weighs about 600,000 pounds. (As an aside, a typically thrust to weight ratio to maintain stability is 6:1, so you include propellants and it'd probably take something like 3 F-1 engines to launch your house into orbit).
March 20th, 2015 at 11:02 AM ^
of the F-1's on a test stand. What amazed me was that they could build a test stand strong enough to repeatedly test all 5 F-1's. 7.5 million lbs of thrust?!?!?! Dang!
That, and if you had a house anywhere near, that had to rattle some windows.
I'll admit my bias. I love the F-1. To me its inextricably linked to going to the moon. I am boggled that NASA didn't try to keep up its development. Why not F-1 boosters on the shuttle instead of the SRB's? Then at least you could throttle them. Why not scale it down for smaller applications? The RS-25's are nice but seemed damned complex for the amount of thrust they kicked out.
Oh well. I hope both SLS and Falcon Heavy work out.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:52 PM ^
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March 19th, 2015 at 12:53 PM ^
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March 19th, 2015 at 10:19 AM ^
March 19th, 2015 at 10:21 AM ^
NASA has to pay the Russians to put our guys in space.
The coolest thing I ever got to see in person...
March 19th, 2015 at 10:27 AM ^
In case you're feeling some space-inferiority, no need to worry... the SLS is going to drop some jaws and we can all go back to feeling like Capt. Kirk
March 19th, 2015 at 10:52 AM ^
You're better off lamenting that the shuttle was approved in the first place over a continuing Apollo/advanced capsule program. It temporarily sucks that we have to pay the Russians, but shuttle was an engineering failure from day 1 and never made good on any of its promises (i.e., rapid, safe, and inexpensive reusability).
March 19th, 2015 at 11:04 AM ^
The Shuttle had its own purpose, and that purpose wasn't to be like Apollo. While it far from lived up to what it was proposed to do, it was also an engineering marvel in many ways. Shuttle suffered as much from politics and politicians and demands as any other project NASA currently works on. Funding was seriously cut around that time. And frankly, we learned a ton from Shuttle and its capabilities.
It did fail to be what was often called a "Space Plane". NASA was always going to have problems with that though. They were working so ahead of the curve as far as technologies, perhaps the biggest issue was simple over-reaching of capabilities given the climate at the time.
So no, it was a failure in the fact that it never made good on many of its promises. But it was not a complete failure, and it was still a technological and engineering feat that is worth praise.
March 19th, 2015 at 11:14 AM ^
is was designed and built using 1970's technology the initial expectations for the program were far too ambitious. Especially considering that the NASA budget was gutted once Apollo was over. There was a time during the 60's when we were spending as much on NASA as on the DOD. Imagine what they would be capable of today given that level of funding.
A shuttle designed and built with today's technological capabilities would likely be far more reliable and efficient.
I saw mission 131 launch in person (last night launch). What I saw and felt defies explanation.
March 19th, 2015 at 11:27 AM ^
disaster is probably the most distinct memory that I have from my early childhood. Obviously I know far less about this topic than you, so my comment is not meant as a "retort" to yours anyway. But for "laypersons" if you will, that is the lasting memory of the Space Shuttle and really America's space program in general.
March 19th, 2015 at 11:40 AM ^
I believe the Shuttle was actually only designed with an intended failure rate of something like 1:100 or 1:200. People forget just how dangerous space flight is, and for a failure to have that negative impact is a shame.
Both problems could have been avoided, and that's the worst part. But we also learned a lot from those failures, unfortunately at the loss of lives. But the Shuttle had 133 successful launches and returns and 2 failures. It wasn't good enough, and I understand that, but few remember any of the other 133 flights unless that saw them live. That's a shame and really downplays just how difficult it really is.
March 19th, 2015 at 10:00 PM ^
The Shuttle failed that day because it was an unnaturally cold at launch. One of the gaskets was designed to operate at temperatures above 60F. It failed due to the cold weather and leaked fuel.
I remember that day vividly. I was in a 4th P.E. class running an obstacle course in socks because I wore boots to school and didn't have gym shoes. The janitor walks in and proclaims, "Shuttle blew up." No more. No less.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:21 PM ^
blow up on live tv too I was in 3rd grade. They were showing the launch in classrooms all over the country due to Crista McAullffe being on board. Lot's of crying at school that day. Teachers and kids.
March 19th, 2015 at 11:28 AM ^
"There was a time during the 60's when we were spending as much on NASA as on the DOD."
[citation needed]
NASA's budget never passed 4.5% of the federal budget (1966, 5.9 billion dollars was 4.4 percent of the budget). The defense budget that year was 69.6 billion, over 10 times NASA's budget.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:35 PM ^
But 4.5% of the budget is still huge compared to the table scraps they get today. Amazing that we were spending more than 40% of the total federal budget on the military though.
March 19th, 2015 at 12:40 PM ^
But as an adult I wonder what would
Have happened if we'd kept up development of Saturn and the F1.
We talk about heavy lift now with the Falcon Heavy. IIRC the f-1a was rated at 1.8 million lbs of thrust.
Manufacturing and computer advances could have only made it better and more efficient.
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March 19th, 2015 at 12:44 PM ^
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f…
...is cook. I'd love to see SLS boosters using a modernized F-1.
I still love seeing the "dark" layer of cooler fuel come out of the nozzle as the motor runs.
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March 19th, 2015 at 10:29 AM ^
March 19th, 2015 at 10:32 AM ^
but as a great american once said, 'trust, but verify'.