The Most Launched Rocket - A History Of The R-7

hello its scott manley here for Maney October 4th 1957 marks the beginning of the Space Age because on that day Sputnik 1 was launched onboard a Soviet rocket that particular rocket was an r7 rocket designed by Sergei Korolev and that rocket would actually go on to have a long and illustrious career so I figured it would be a good time to talk about the r7 rocket and how it became the Sputnik launcher and how it ultimately became the launcher of soyuz and still supplies the international space station to this day the development of the r7 began in 1953 led by sergey koroliov it was originally designed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile intended to carry a 3,000 kilogram payload over 8,000 kilometers enabling the Soviet Union to strike at the USA they used a two-stage design with four boosters and one core with all the engines being lit at launch fully fueled it would be 280 metric tons 34 metres high that would be a hundred and twelve feet at the time this would be the largest rocket in the world and to push something this big into the air required some serious engines now the r7 used for booster engines and a single core engine they all burned liquid oxygen and a kerosene the turbo pumps were actually powered by the decomposition of peroxide the engines were designed by valentin glushko who would later go on to run the whole Soviet space program the the engines themselves they used for combustion chambers fed by a single turbo pump now the four booster engines were called our d1 o 7s and each of em came with two steerable vernier thrusters for control the core engine was an RD 108 essentially the same but it came with four vernier thrusters instead the our D 107 really was a miracle of technology for its era it was one of the first engines with active mixture control which was really Orton because the boosters all had to balance their thrust and fuel consumption during the launch they would of course light all five engines on the ground and then about a hundred seconds into flight the for exterior boosters would peel off any cross light formation referred to as the Corolla across meanwhile the core booster would continue burning carrying the payload further along on its journey launch testing began in 1957 at what would ultimately become the Baikonur cosmodrome the first launch on may 15th failed due to a fire in the tail section which triggered engines shut down after 98 seconds it still delivered the test payload Hall 3,000 kilometers downrange the first successful flight would be on August 21st 1957 however the payload disintegrated on re-entry it had proven itself as a rocket but not as a weapon but that was enough to get karoli of his chance to actually launch a satellite the r7 had a designed range of 8,000 kilometers to actually make it work as an orbital launcher required stripping it way down there was no need for the warhead or guidance hardware and stripping that out brought the launch mast down to about 267 tons the scientists had designed a spacecraft stuffed with scientific instruments it was known cryptically as object D but delays and concerns over his rising mass led to it being replaced by a much simpler design the prestige Sputnik 1 meaning simple satellite Sputnik 1 launched on October 4th 1957 and it ultimately carried the satellite into a 215 by 913 kilometer orbit along with the core booster stage it's worth noting that many people who claim to have seen Sputnik in orbit actually saw the much larger and brighter booster Sputnik 1 also came very close to failing the block G booster engine did not reach full power before liftoff and for the first few seconds the guidance system had work hard to compensate for this almost reaching the limit before the engine stabilized the rocket also suffered a failure in the fuel regulation system that resulted in higher consumption of kerosene than intended and the result was an unintended shutdown of the core stage about a second earlier than expected but by that point the spacecraft was in orbit a month later Sputnik 2 would use an identical design to launch Leica into space Leica was the first living space traveler who unfortunately would die errors after launch due to a failure in the temperature regulation system small improvements to the engines enabled Sputnik 3 to carry a much heavier payload and so object D was finally launched as the next payload but the first launch attempt resulted in the loss of the rocket and the satellite a new spacecraft and launch vehicle would take Sputnik 3 to orbit in May of 1958 the next significant iteration of the r7 added a third stage powered by an RD 105 which was itself based off the vernier thrusters on the Rd 107 s this design launched a total of nine times however six of those were failures but that does mean that three of them were successes and they all achieved important firsts Luna 1 was supposed to hit the moon but instead it missed and became the first artificial object to reach escape velocity Luna 2 was the first probe to impact the moon and Luna 3 was the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon in 1960 the first Vostok test launches began the tank on the upper stage was stretched enabling payloads of four and a half tons to be delivered to orbit and later the RD 105 engine was replaced with an improved RT 109 engine which ultimately powered Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961 while the Vostok spacecraft was only used for a small number of crewed launches the Vostok 2 and Vostok 2 M rockets were evolved versions which launched satellites all the way up till 1990 the Vostok spacecraft itself was also the basis to the Zenit reconnaissance satellites and over 500 of those were flown right up until 1994 as a net payload would be the first spacecraft launched from processed cosmodrome in 1966 alongside the Vostok development a crash program rushed to make an R 7 capable of launching interplanetary missions known as pneumonia this used a third stage powered by a derivative of the Rd 108 used in the core and a fourth stage powered by an s-1 5400 which had the ability to restart in flight however the early versions of molniya were unreliable with only two successful launches out of a dozen attempts Venera one headed to Venus and Mars one headed to Mars obviously both would be the first of their kind and both would fail in flight before reaching their destination despite this rocky start Manya continued to be developed the third stage engine was replaced by an RD 110 giving better performance in the vacuum and a variety of upper stage options were developed ultimately the Manya M designed would launch almost 300 times with the launch last launch being in 2010 but back in the 1960s the next step would be a Voskhod which was similar to the Vostok spacecraft but with enough extra hardware to make it heavier and necessitate a bigger launcher the launch vehicle was essentially ammonia but with the upper stage removed Voskhod 1 was the first multi crew mission with three cosmonauts crammed inside the capsule and Voskhod 2 allowed aleksey leonov to perform the first spacewalk November 1966 saw the maiden flight of the soyuz rocket carrying the first test version of the soyuz spacecraft the rocket was similar to the Voskhod with small iterations on the engines but the payload was a huge step forward in terms of spacecraft design inevitably Soyuz had many early problems the first spacecraft spun out of control the second had its launch system trigger on the patch due to an unforeseen interaction between its gyroscopes and the rotation of the earth and of course the first crude launch was a disaster with multiple system failures ultimately culminating in a parachute failure that killed Vladimir Komarov in what was to be the first in flight fatality in space travel the engineers of course continued to iterate and solve problems on both the launch vehicle and the spacecraft the rural number of small iterations made the Soyuz rocket design designated by appending a letter Soyuz b V and R were designed but never built Soyuz L is notable for being the launch vehicle used to carry the soviet moon lander into orbit for testing and Soyuz M was a short-lived military variant with which very little is known however Soyuz you first launched in 1973 would go on to be the most launch rocket design the booster engines were upgraded to rd1 17s which supplied about five percent more thrust and the core engine became an RD 118 with about 20% more thrust so as you was used for more than 40 years and 765 launches carrying Soyuz spacecraft progress cargo shuttles and occasionally other satellites perhaps most notably one of the first launches carried Soyuz 19 into orbit for a historic rendezvous in space with the last Apollo spacecraft the final launch of a Soyuz u rocket carried a progress supply spacecraft to the ISS in February of 2017 there was also a Soyuz u2 variant which was essentially the same vehicle but it replaced the kerosene fuel with senton this was an expensive synthetic high-energy rocket fuel that improved performance allowing a hundred and fifty extra kilograms of payload this was used from 1982 to 1995 Soyuz FG is the current iteration it was first tested in 2001 and since 2002 it's been the rocket launching crewed Soyuz spacecraft engines were upgraded electronics were modernized and also use launches to the ISS have used this design but other payloads used the even newer so used to series of launch vehicles first launched in 2004 one of the major upgrades has been replacing the old analog guidance system with digital hardware which now lets the rocket roll to the correct launch azimuth prior to this the soyuz launch pads had to rotate the rocket to the correct orientation the engines and stages on the 2.1 a are the same as the soyuz FG and could deliver a 7 ton payload to low Earth orbit but the 2:1 be introduced a more efficient upper stage raising the capacity to 8.2 tons in 2011 these Soyuz 2 series rockets started launching commercial payloads from ESA's launch facility in Kourou it's also worth mentioning the frigate variants of the soyuz which replaces the molniya the forgot is a series of hypergolic fuelled upper stages using an engine originally designed for the ill-fated full boss program payloads headed - geostationary orbit or interplanetary space use this design and it's been around since about 2000 finally in what must be a moment of heresy in rocket design we have this so used to 1v this abomination gets rid of those 4 launch boosters and by extension the corolla of cross it replaces the main engine with the NK 33 the engine originally developed to power the ill-fated in one moon rocket the NK 33 doesn't have any thrust vectoring so they also have an RD 110 R which basically puts four little small rocket nozzles around the main engine and uses that for air control this small Rockets payload capacity is about 2.8 tonnes and it's only launched three times so far which some might think is too many because as a great man once said a Soyuz launch without a koroliov cross is scarcely a Soyuz at all Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 496,738

Keywords: sputnik, vostok, molniya, luna, venera, voskhod, soyuz, fregat, gagarin, komarov, roscosmos, semyorka

Id: KzGsWw47sMY

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017