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(Such rockets work well in space, though, where a steady push suffices.)Ī rocket engine, much like an aircraft jet engine, burns fuel together with an oxidizer-often oxygen-to create hot gas that expands down and out of the engine nozzle, accelerating the engine the other way. Conversely, a rocket with high specific impulse but low thrust would never leave the ground. A rocket with high thrust but low specific impulse won’t reach orbit-it would have to carry so much fuel that the weight of the fuel would necessitate more fuel, and so on. There are two key measures of a rocket’s performance: thrust, or the amount of force a rocket exerts, and specific impulse, a measure of how efficiently it uses its propellants. To understand why Glushko’s engines were such an engineering achievement, we need to get a little bit technical. Oxygen will burn most things if you provide a spark." "There was so much invested in the shuttle that no one at NASA wanted to talk about developing an oxygen rich staged-combustion engine. In Russia, that astute person was Glushko. As William Anderson, who studies liquid-fueled rocket engines at Purdue University, explains, “The rates of energy release are just extreme.” It takes someone with a really astute imagination, Anderson says, to understand the crazy stuff that’s going on inside rocket engines’ combustion chambers. The key difference: staged-combustion engines can be more efficient, but they’re at greater risk of exploding. By contrast, the F-1 engines in the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, which launched Apollo to the moon, were of an older, simpler design called the gas-generator engine. The US space shuttle main engine, also developed in the 1970s, was another.
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The RD-170 was among the first rocket engines to use a technique called staged combustion. The Russian RD-180 engine has powered dozens of Atlas V launches, some carrying satellites designed to spy on, among other countries, the one where it was built.
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The result was the RD-170, the RD-180’s older brother. Glushko was given resources to build the best engine he could, and he was good at building engines. Soviet leaders wanted to build the world’s most powerful rocket, the Energia, to sustain their space stations in Earth orbit and to lift the Buran, a would-be Russian space shuttle. In the case of the RD-180, that someone was named Valentin Glushko.Īfter the USSR lost to America in the race to the moon, designing the best possible rocket engine became “a national priority,” according to Vadim Lukashevich, an aerospace engineer and Russian space historian. Though hundreds of people collaborate on rocket engines, having someone with an instinct for good design in charge is vital: the trade-offs are too complex to be figured out by brute force or by committee. If you want to understand what made the RD-180 such a good engine, it helps to understand that there is a great deal of craft involved. This has forced the Air Force to find a new rocket to succeed the RD-180-powered Atlas 5.Īll of which raises a question: How did a decades-old Russian engine become the bar against which America’s best rocket scientists measure themselves? But as relations with Russia frayed, congressional opponents of the engine, led by Senator John McCain, succeeded in passing a prohibition against the engine’s use in American rockets after the end of 2022. Defense hawks had long been uncomfortable with the arrangement, but the engine was both very good and, given its capability, cheap-and so it stayed. Raptor, he said on Twitter, had exceeded the record held for several decades by the “awesome Russian RD-180.”Īfter Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014, the RD-180’s days as a staple of American rocketry were numbered. When, in February 2019, Elon Musk announced a successful test of SpaceX’s Raptor engine, which is intended to power the company’s next-generation rocket Starship, he bragged of the high pressures reached in the Raptor’s thrust chamber: over 265 times atmospheric pressure at sea level. The RD-180 is remarkable not only for the geopolitical peculiarities of its rise to prominence, but because it was in many ways simply better than any other rocket engine of its time. NASA’s launch of New Horizons to Pluto in 2006 and Juno to Jupiter in 2011 were both made on the back of the RD-180. On the Atlas 3 and its successor, the Atlas 5, the RD-180 carried at least 16 American spy satellites to orbit, along with 13 military communications satellites, a half-dozen GPS satellites, two military weather satellites, and three missile warning satellites, designed to detect rocket launches from, among other countries, the one where it was built.