Launch News A Wild Russian Monster Rocket has appeared! Angara-A5 test flight, December 23, 2014

[boogabooga]

Nothing like the DeltaII and Delta IV, or the Saturn 1b and the Saturn V?

No, it's the number of cores like orbitingpluto said. Get over it.

 

[orbitingpluto]

Nothing like the DeltaII and Delta IV, or the Saturn 1b and the Saturn V?

Myself, I would leap past modern day stuff like the EELVs or the famous Saturns and dive straight to the Delta 2's ancestor, the Thor as the rocket with the most variants, and the most complex list of versions. The Saturns have an almost equally confusing family history, but since most of them only existed on paper, I think it's the Thor that wins, at least for American rockets. I would guess the R-7 family(which the Soyuz is a member of) could be the Thor's only rival, and perhaps the true victor, but I don't know enough to tell.

But, both the R-7 and Thor have had over 50 years of evolution to have the complexity they have now, so maybe we ought to give Angara a chance: it's had it's first flight this year, and only has only two flown variants yet. Should Angara grow like it's hoped, it could be just as confusing as the best of them

 

[SiberianTiger]

As Alexander Il'yin, founder of one Russian space startup company called "Lin Industrial" pointed out in his blog,

Despite we are happy with the successful Angara A5 launch, and getting proud with our country, the idea of this launch vehicle is arguable, at best.

Firstly, the modular structure of the LV had been chosen mostly due to the reason that there would be a high demand for a lightweight launcher, and the single core version was regarded the most basic and widely used, with addition of the extendable set of the multi-core modular rockets. However, that demand have been overestimated and there's a competition for the small LV niche even inside Russian domestic market, comprising both of the legacy converted ICBM still in the stock and the new Soyuz-2.1v single core R-7 descendant from Samara. As a result, only the 5-core version of the Angara is now included in the Federal Space Programme, the 3-core is thrown out, and there's still a dispute ongoing around the single-core version.
Thus the modularity principle has grown into a big obstacle in reality, we didn't really need it to be modular.

Secondly, the cores are undersized. No one can assemble a super-heavy LV out of them, and the current LEO payload limit of 26 tons is hard to surmount. Even replacing the third stage by a big LOX-LH2 booster gives only 30 tonnes in LEO for a launch from Plesetsk. This is still too little for the 40 tonnes capacity we need as the least for our Lunar base building plans.

I've offered Rogozin to consider making bigger cores with a size alike the half-Ukrainian Zenit rocket which we will have to replace anyway, with LEO payload capacity of 15 tonnes:

Using them may allow to obtain a heavy booster (30-40 tonnes, 3 cores plus a LOX-LH2 upper stage) or even a super-heavy one (for 60-70 tonnes, out of 5 cores). Let's see if I am listened to, but in the meantime we are regarding the existing Angara A5 our primary vehicle for our Lunar missions (our Luna-7 project).

Reckoning tells us that the combo of the Angara A5, a big LOX-LH2 booster and a landing stage based on the big Fregat design can deliver 3.2-3.6 tonnes of payload to the Moon's surface. So we have to quantify all our payloads into such bits of mass.

We bet on delivering the fuel necessary for the back trip, to the Lunar surface, by two tanker crafts first, and this make it possible to think about a really small crew capsule. It's still doubtful if we can pack a spaceship consisting of the return capsule, the airlock section and the landing stage with legs into 4.4-4.8 tonnes. This would take a new comprehension of mass economy and technology level not quite we are used to with the Soyuz production cycle. But let me remind you: the mass of the Gemini spaceship, able to maneuver and dock in orbit, was just 3.8 tonnes...

 

[boogabooga]

Well, it looks cool anyway.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Wow. Anything on his thought of the (now cancelled) Rus-M? It was multi-core EELV design also.
Maybe if Angara didn't have so many delays and arrived earlier?

I was thinking that this rocket was build to replace/supplant those that use the horribly bad for us hypergolic fuels. I've got some text somewhere (I think www.russianspaceweb.com was the source) that mentions they don't want any UDMH at their new facilities at Vostochny (or at least severely curtailed). And it's an all-Russian built machine. So there's political reasons for it too?

 

[Astro SG Wise]

So, why did they build this? They have Proton-Ks.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Replaced by Proton-M. Still can only be launched from Baikonour, with that pesky and troublesome unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. It's bad for your digestion.

 

[orbitingpluto]

So, why did they build this? They have Proton-Ks.

It's complex.

One part has to do with the fact that Proton launches from Baikonur, which is a spaceport that Russia has to share with Kazakhstan- because Baikonur is in Kazakhstan. Furthermore, Proton is hypergolic, and the Kazakhs don't like that spent Proton stages(still with residual deadly hypergols in them) fall in their country, and Russia isn't keen on spreading Proton around, lest they too feel the Sliver Hypergolic Monster Rain.

Of course, there's a lot too it than that. Follow this link to RussianSpaceWeb.com, and learn more about Angara there. The link goes to the Angara main page, but there's a great deal of stuff elsewhere on the site about nearly every big Russian or Soviet space thing, from rockets to people. Exercise a bit of caution though, you should probably be spending time with family right now.

 

[boogabooga]

So, why did they build this? They have Proton-Ks.

:facepalm:

Why did the United States build the EELVs? They had the Titan IV.