dissident wrote:ronic how the Soviets lost the race to the Moon but came out ahead in rocket engine technology.
Well thank God at least you're not one of the moon landing deniers.
Wanking haters like Six$ can't even reconcile in their tiny brains the fact that Americans have had to import assembled Russian engines for over 20 years and lacked any indigenous capacity and knowhow to produce them.
We didn't "have to" import Russian engines. Dissident, it was the RESET BUTTON, it was GLOBALISM, it was outsourcing crap and supposedly Russia is our friend so we can just use their rockets and everyone can hold hands and be happy in globalism, we buy your rockets and you buy our Big Macs at McDonalds.
The intentions were good and the intentions were to be Russia's partner in space, Putin's the one that put a stop to it, but anyhow
I think it was foolish from the start and we never should have been buying Russian engines and become reliant on them to start with.And Elon Musk said it was foolish too, and that's why he designed his own engine rather than buying Russian ones.
And he was right about Orbital Sciences, too. And he was right about the Boeing Dreamliner batteries that were catching fire, too. And he was right about Boeing-Lockheed relying on Russian engines, too.
NASA doesn't like his radiation protection system or his docking port or his EVA suit ideas but you know what, I think I trust Musk at this point. He's been right about everything else.
By the way, Dissident, the Proton rocket blows up sometimes too -- I posted about the last one wasn't that just a few months ago? A Proton rocket blew up all over the place, satellite lost?
And I'm interested in Russian space stuff too, but you know what, Russia is still just standing on the shoulders of the Soviet Union and it's all old stuff. The Proton is old. The Soyuz is old. It's good, but it's all old, it's nothing new, step in a Soyuz and you're sitting in 1970.
Russia's going to ultimately fall behind in the space race because Russia is not innovating, you can't just use Soviet tech forever.
So in America some superhuman designer sits down and pops out a fully functional and super high tech engine design through sheer intellect? What a load of rubbish. Look up US weapon development, it is following the same universal methodology of testing for validation and improvement that this documentary tries to paint as some Soviet peculiarity.
In the cold war space race, both sides just had different styles. Soviet engineers were more tolerant of failures and blowups and then you refine it and launch another -- that's called iterative design. And then, US engineers like to spend more time on the drawing board first. Neither way is better, just different.
Although -- we had free speech and free media and could not hide our rocket failures, as the USSR could.
The N1 rocket itself was doomed to failure because it was a plumber's nightmare that was beyond the ability of Soviet engineers to debug via models. Perhaps if they did all 12 test launches they could have obtained a working version, but that is a bit of a stretch. If rocket engineers used modern software and computers to model the N1 design they could rectify its resonance mode issues and make a version that works. But there is no point in trying to resurrect an old design.
So we agree!
Orbital Sciences should have hired you to tell them to stay away from these engines they bought out of that warehouse in Siberia, it could have saved the US taxpayer $2 billion screwing around with this company using unproven experimental 1960s Soviet engines.
(to clarify I'm not putting the soviet program down but those engines were experimental and ahead of their time and they are 40 years old now and it's not worth the risk to use them. Wtf are these American companies thinking other than counting beans and cheap outsourcing, there needs to be some congressional reviews of this, that was idiotic to use those engines. They were cool in 1960 but they didn't even work back then, it's abandoned Soviet tech, if you want to study it and duplicate it then fine but don't put old Soviet engines on American rockets, Jesus H. Christ.)
