[FPSPACE] Energia Booster LH2 Engine Origin Question

[Bart Hendrickx]

Jim Oberg wrote :

>But the big liquid hydrogen engine still worries me. That's an ENORMOUS
>technological leap to make for a country whose technology didn't use that
>sort of thing -- except one smaller engine built for the N-1  twenty years
>earlier, that never flew, right?


Note that apart from the relatively low-thrust hydrogen engines for the
upper stages of the N-1 (the 11D56 of the Isayev Design Bureau and the 11D54
and 11D57 of the Lyulka Design Bureau), the Kuznetsov Design Bureau worked
on a much more powerful 200-ton thrust liquid hydrogen engine for the second
stage of the N-1. This was in the same thrust range as Energiya's RD-0120.
However, there are no indications that this engine never seems to have
reached
the testing stage.

Actually, very little seems to be known about Kuznetov's LOX/LH2 work. There
was at least one other hydrogen engine studied by Kuznetsov, namely the
NK-45, which had a vacuum thrust of 90 tons. In the mid to late 1980s a
combination of three NK-45 engines was considered for use on NPO Molniya's
MAKS spaceplane (to be launched from the back of the Mriya cargo plane). NPO
Molniya even built a mock-up of MAKS in this configuration. In the final
MAKS design the NK-45 was replaced by the RD-701 tripropellant engine of
Energomash. I'm not sure though when work on the NK-45 engine began. Was
this yet another NK engine originally earmarked for the N-1 and later
proposed for other projects? Or did its development begin much later?

Finally, Glushko is reported to have emerged with an idea for a 200 to 250
ton liquid hydrogen engine as early as 1968 (see Asif Siddiqi's "Challenge
to Apollo", p. 649). In other words, it does seem that at least some work on
bigger liquid hydrogen engines was done before the Energiya programme got
underway.

Bart Hendrickx