"We showed the Americans: they will not have a technological advantage"
Vakhtang Vachnadze was the head of NPO Energia in 1977-1991. It was he who was responsible for the implementation of the Soviet project of the reusable space system. In a conversation with the Military-Industrial Courier, the industry veteran recalls that the Energia-Buran program brought the country what it could give and what we lost.
Vakhtang Dmitrievich, it seems that the super-heavy launch vehicle Energia was made almost from scratch, without using any earlier developments …
- In fact, the history of the heavy carrier must be counted from the N-1, "Tsar-rocket", as it was called. It was created so that the first foot of a Soviet person set foot on the moon. We have lost this battle to America. The main reason can be considered that the engines for the rocket were not made by Valentin Glushko - the work was carried out by Nikolai Kuznetsov's company, which specialized in aircraft engines.
- I heard the phrase "Glushko refused to make engines for the lunar program." But it does not fit in my head how in that system one could refuse to do anything for space at all. And actually, why did he refuse?
Photo: Yanina Nikonorova / RSC Energia
- At that moment, when the first grandiose successes of the Soviet cosmonautics were spinning their heads, everyone from the leadership of the industry went to the promotion. Since these people in space were able to do this, then on Earth they can do a lot. Dmitry Fedorovich Ustinov headed the Supreme Council of the National Economy, the "second Council of Ministers." Deputy Minister of Defense Industry Konstantin Rudnev became Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers for Science and Technology and so on. And it turned out that there was no man capable of making everyone work in one team.
Of course, Glushko did not just refuse - he had a technical justification, which was considered valid. He said that the engines that were required for the N-1 could not be created using kerosene and oxygen. He insisted on developing an engine based on new high-energy components based on fluorine. And that his design bureau does not have the infrastructure necessary to create such engines. But technical disagreements were still the reason, not the reason for his refusal.
- It's no secret that Korolev and Glushko were not best friends. But all the previous time they collaborated very effectively …
- They walked the same way for a long time, both were sent to Germany in a group of specialists who collected all the information about missile weapons. But upon his return, Korolev was appointed the chief designer of the missiles, and Glushko remained the chief designer of the engines. But then he said that the engine is the main thing, tie it to the fence - and the fence will fly where it needs to be. In some ways, he was right then. If we take the first missiles - R-1 or R-2, then the engine was really the most difficult component there. But when the missiles became larger and more powerful, so many systems appeared there, very different and very complex, it's easy to list them - and it will take a lot of time. But both continued to receive awards and titles, in fact, according to the same decrees. Hero of Socialist Labor, twice Hero, Lenin Prize laureate, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and Academician - everything is absolutely synchronous. But this continued until it came to space. And it turned out that Korolev, figuratively speaking, ascended, and Glushko with his engines - magnificent! - stayed on the ground. All applauded "Vostok" and "Voskhod", but the glory, albeit not public, only in the leading circles of the USSR, went to Korolev. So there was a certain jealousy in Glushko.
- And if the Soviet lunar project had become successful, Korolev would have ascended even higher.
- The project was very difficult. We joined the lunar race, and many decisions were made in rush mode. Four launches were made and all unsuccessful - precisely because of the first stage. Note that the first two were performed before the Americans landed on the moon. At the beginning, there were 27 engines on the first stage, then thirty. When the Central Committee decided on the reasons for the failures, Glushko's opinion was voiced. He wrote that three dozen engines cannot operate simultaneously, and the abnormal operation of any of them leads to an accident - which, in fact, happened in each of the launches performed. The work on the project had to be suspended. The perpetrators were punished. They removed Academician Mishin, who was the general designer after Korolev, removed Kerimov, the head of the 3rd central office in the Ministry of General Chemistry, who was directly involved in the N1-L3 program.
My opinion: the rocket could be finished or at least keep all the developments.
Due to the huge size, the 1st stage tank (product F14M) was made directly at Baikonur, where a branch of the Kuibyshev Progress plant was created. Funding was lame, Khrushchev allocated money to Koroleva and Chelomey for the project of a heavy carrier - the situation was not easy, everyone fought for their interests. It all ended with the fact that at first the N-1 project was frozen, and then destroyed, right down to the documentation. As if the rocket did not exist at all.
This is fundamentally wrong. For military space, a heavy carrier is simply necessary. N-1 could have been brought to mind, and what is important - to further increase the mass of the withdrawn cargo. There would be no need to create a new product for the same tasks later. Could, when the need forced, make only a spaceship … And they would be ahead of the Americans with the Space Shuttle program. N-1 was designed for 75–80 tons of output load, but even then there were solutions and developments on how to increase it to a hundred and more tons: hydrogen engines were already made for blocks "G" and "D" by the design bureaus of Arkhip Lyulka and Alexey Bogomolov …
- And then the Americans forced us to take up the development of a heavy launch vehicle - Energia …
- The reason for the government decree of 1976, which began the project of the reusable transport system Energia-Buran, was the information that the Americans are developing their Space Shuttle program for use, including for military needs. Keldysh wrote to the Central Committee that, according to calculations, the Shuttle, having a lateral maneuver of 2200 kilometers, could, while in the atmospheric phase of flight, drop a nuclear charge on Moscow, and then safely fly to the Vandenberg airbase in California. Later, new potential threats were voiced, which also had to be taken into account.
The military-industrial complex gathered specialists, they ask: they are going to destroy us, how will we answer? Then we had a lot of projects on the topic of war in space: electromagnetic guns, space-to-space rockets, Chelomey developed a fighter satellite capable of changing orbits … But the decision was tough: the Energia-Buran project to fend off all threats that arise with the appearance in the United States of a fundamentally new technical means, to exclude any surprise from its activities. To close all projects, to make a similar system with characteristics not lower than the Space Shuttle.
In 1979, Mstislav Keldysh informs the country's leadership that for weapons based on new physical principles (laser, accelerator and beam) for war in space, an energy source of 250–850 tons will be required in orbit. A little later, all these plans were formulated in one way or another in the Reagan concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was also about laser weapons for various purposes, beam, high-frequency, kinetic. Essentially a full-fledged war in space. But then I wrote a certificate to the Central Committee that the program announced by Reagan was technically unfeasible for the Americans today. According to the scheme, they did not have a heavy carrier. The shuttle has a maximum payload of 28 tons. That is, the creation of giant space platforms for placing weapons using only the Space Shuttle is impossible.
However, Leonid Smirnov, chairman of the military-industrial commission of the Council of Ministers, set the task to amend the project. Everyone who worked on the topic was sent an instruction: keep in mind that with the further development of the Energia carrier, it is possible to launch a payload of up to 170 tons by increasing the number of side boosters, and by expanding the volume of the central unit's tanks - up to 200 tons. That is, if we implemented all the developments, we would be able to withdraw 800 tons of Keldyshev in four launches.
But the Americans set their sights on a war in space then seriously, hoping to overtake us in this. When Reagan announced the SDI program, a layered missile defense system, the Pentagon created a Star Wars Directorate. It was headed by General James Abrahamsson.
- That is, we followed the Americans - it is necessary to have the same capabilities as they?
- Initially, our question was different: to do at least as good as theirs, and preferably better. Even our ships differ in many ways. According to the scheme, the main engine and fuel tank of the Americans were installed on the ship, and it was lifted by two solid-propellant boosters. "Buran" was launched into space on a full-fledged heavy carrier with a thrust of 105 tons. "Energia" remained quite independent, capable, as I have already said, when installing additional side blocks to launch any commercial load into space. In this, I believe, our project compares favorably.
The achievements of the Energia-Buran project can be enumerated for a long time. First, the most powerful rocket engine to this day, developed under the leadership of Valentin Glushko RD-170. Each of the four side accelerators was equipped with it. Each "side" is essentially a separate carrier, designed to remove 10 tons of cargo. The rocket, created within the framework of a general project under the 1976 decree and manufactured at the Yuzhnoye design bureau in Dnipropetrovsk, later acquired the name Zenit and was widely used in commercial launches. We also developed a lightweight version of "Energy", it was called "Energy-M". This is a wonderful medium - there was nothing new to do there. Hydrogen tank "Energy" is 7, 7 meters in diameter and 34 meters in length - a ten-story building. We reduce the hydrogen and oxygen tanks by half, install not four, but two RD-0120 oxygen-hydrogen engines in the central block, and reduce the number of "sidewalls" from four to two. And we get a rocket from 25 to 40 tons of payload. The niche of the currently used UR-500 ("Proton") up to 20 tons and everything on top could be closed with our reduced "Energy". The demand for such loads is very high. When I was the head of the central office in the Ministry of General Chemistry, the general designer of satellite systems Mikhail Reshetnev persuaded me: give me the opportunity to increase the weight put into geostationary orbit by at least two tons, then we will be able to place such repeaters there that it will be possible to receive their signals with the smallest devices - "Orbita" stations with huge antennas will not be needed.
So if the Energia-M project were kept, now it would be very profitable. And now, even hydrogen in the required quantities cannot be obtained, everything has been eliminated.
And there would be production, there would be technologies, moreover, payback. As soon as the need for a super-heavy carrier arises - everything is there, everything is ready, collect and launch, one hundred tons - please, but you want two hundred. This is if we talk about possible lunar or Martian expeditions.
A separate conversation about the "bird", about the ship "Buran". Heat-shielding tiles with different characteristics … There were so many problems with them. By the way, in that single flight we also had tiles, but, fortunately, only three and in those places where the heating did not exceed 900 degrees. Had it happened where the temperature reaches 2000 degrees, trouble could not be avoided, as happened with the shuttle "Columbia".
- So the flight of "Buran" - is it a missed victory or is it not?
- Actually, the main result of all our work on the Energia-Buran project can be considered the fact that we showed the Americans: they will not have a technological advantage, we are able to adequately respond. And six months after the automatic flight of the Buran, Abrahamson's management was disbanded.
Perhaps thanks to this, space exploration came into the 21st century not in the form of military rivalry, but in the form of international cooperation.
A heavy carrier solves many issues - and the development of near-earth space, and flights into deep space, and asteroid safety, and energy, and even radioactive waste is not drowned in the ocean, but burned on the Sun. It does not seem real now, but after some time it will surely become relevant.
Today, all the issues of large-scale energy in space remain. This is electronic suppression, cleaning the main orbits of debris, solving the problems of the raging planet's climate. And we are not going anywhere from the creation of a super-heavy rocket, life will force.
- Then the whole country was working on the project. Is cooperation on such a scale even possible in principle?
- And what does the cooperation have to do with it. Now build another one. There was a single fist, this could only be done by a centralized government. And there was a developed industrial state. What is now being built at the Vostochny cosmodrome is ten times lighter than what we did when creating the launch complex for Energia. But we made both the starting position and the entire huge infrastructure in three years! On Earth, the cold war is going on, and in space they fly together and are friends. This means that on Earth we will be able to be friends and work together, no state can independently cope with the challenges that threaten our civilization.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev said: "Never catch up - you will always lag behind, and take the leading tasks." Today, the leading task may be the development of the Moon for the future use of its resources and energy, the development of energy transmission by microwave and laser beams, including for recharging spacecraft on electric motors. This project will stir up all scientific departments and the Russian Academy of Sciences, many sectors of the national economy and will pull the whole country with the help of electronics and robotics to a new level.
Monologue in a museum, or forgotten technologies
Vakhtang Vachnadze at the RSC Energia Museum
What we have done, that technological reserve will be enough for a long time. Hydrogen tank. It is made of a hardenable aluminum alloy. If all the previous rockets were made of the AMG-6 alloy, the maximum breaking force there is 37 kilograms per square millimeter, the material of the Energia tanks at normal temperature is 42 kilograms, and when filling with liquid hydrogen - 58. The tank itself is also the latest technology, its the inner surface has a waffle structure to reduce weight and increase rigidity. And all this was milled out automatically, the machines were specially developed. Another know-how is the thermal protection of tanks. It must be strong and very light, it has seven components, called a ripor. We did it better than the Americans.
Here is the cone - the top of the "side", where it adjoins the central part. Made of titanium, there are four electron-beam welded seams. It is performed in a vacuum, and for work with large-sized elements, special overhead cavities have been developed that create a local vacuum at the welding site. Many things have survived, but also lost. On the occasion of one of Energia-Buran's anniversaries, I was invited to make a report for the employees of the Ministry of Defense. During the break, they tell me in a private setting: here you insist that the project needs to be resumed, but this is impossible. Even the oil used in the steering drives of engines can no longer be found, since the plant that made it no longer exists. And so on many positions.
