How to make a private rocket in Russia

The founder of the private rocket company Kosmokurs , Pavel Pushkin , after the success of his overseas competitors, shares his experience and talks about the Russian specifics of rocket design.



As many know, Blue Origin has once again launched its suborbital rocket with a suborbital spacecraft. The first time the launch was shown live, and the safety of the chosen flight pattern and its fault tolerance were demonstrated (this time one of the three main parachute domes was not released). For our part, we congratulate our colleagues on approaching the first launch with passengers on board. After all, this is the overall success of a new and such promising market for suborbital tourist flights.
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Against the background of Blue Origin's success, we were bombarded with various issues to promote our project, often with complaints that we are not doing some kind of a piece of hardware and marketing and advertising are quite weak. We will try in this post to tell you more about our current position and vision of the whole process.

As many have already heard, in March 2016 we coordinated the TTZ for an advance project on the creation of a reusable suborbital space complex (MSC) at the Roscosmos State Corporation. This is a comprehensive document of more than 30 pages in which all the requirements for the complex and the order of its creation are given. At the same time, Roskosmos State Corporation has coordinated these requirements as a federal executive body and will continue to control the quality of work and compliance with the requirements of reliability and safety according to these requirements. After the implementation of the preliminary project, we will defend it in Roscosmos, as all enterprises of the rocket and space industry do. It should be noted here that we are developing not a rocket, but a complex, which also includes ground infrastructure, testing and production facilities, as well as issues of selection and training of potential tourists. Naturally, we will create a lot in cooperation with other enterprises, most of which are part of the Roscosmos State Corporation.

Now we are at the stage of selection of cooperation, which together with us will create a complex. At the same time, we are now working with more than 30 enterprises, coordinating with them the TZ for individual products and determining the scheme and procedure for interaction. We have already coordinated the TZ in many elements (products) and are ready to start work. In this case, often we can not perform advanced work on individual products. First, we must coordinate and mutually coordinate the requirements for all the products of the complex, and then begin in-depth design. Otherwise, we risk doing work that will no longer be relevant, and we will just throw money down the drain. Therefore, we do not have a piece of iron. Where we are sure, there is no point in creating pieces of iron, since everything is clear. And on other systems, we are not yet ready and we must first put everything on paper. Another limiting factor is the limited access to the regulatory documentation of the rocket and space industry. Due to compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), a large amount of documentation is marked with particleboard and classified as secret.

But at the same time it is in this documentation that the requirements are spelled out, the fulfillment of which guarantees the creation of high-quality rocket and space technology, which will not permanently refuse and upset us with various surprises. For example, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been admitted to such documentation from the United States, as they are purely American companies and they are subject to ITAR restrictions. We, as a purely Russian company, will also be admitted to this documentation, and we are actively working on it with the assistance of Roskomos. This imposes a lot of obligations and restrictions on us, but it is worth it.

Our serious problem is a very limited number of specialists and competencies in our industry. SpaceX had similar problems, but it seems to us that after all it was somewhat easier for them because of the specifics of the US labor market. So we need a qualified and experienced specialist who would supervise the creation of the LRE and pneumo-hydraulic delivery system (in sum, the entire propulsion system of the rocket and the apparatus). If there is a Russian Thomas Muller, who can lead the creation of LRE independently, it will be just fine. Also, due to the large number of systems, the load on our designers is very large. After all, even one TZ has a volume of more than 30 sheets, and each specialist has at least five of them. Therefore, we are looking for another experienced designer who is ready to understand various systems, perform design calculations, search for subcontractors, communicate with them, write TK and oversee the creation of these systems. We also have a fairly good staff of specialists with whom we need to interact daily, and preferably every minute. There is also a vacancy for the chief technologist of the project, whom we are also looking for and are ready to consider candidacies of people with experience in organizing industries that know and understand the issues of mechanical processing, welding, testing, assembly, etc. It should be noted that in the near future we will move to a new, more spacious room and we will recruit young specialists, the vast majority of them will be designers and linkers. Also, we do not refuse experienced specialists, including other specialties. These can be specialists in reliability, flight dynamics, temperature control systems, aero- and gas dynamics. In general, write to us and maybe it is you who we need.

According to the technique, we conduct a very large amount of design and layout works ourselves. We have both models and drawings. We know all the inertia tensors, the second distribution of the position of the center of mass and other things. We have even worked out the thickness of the edges to be welded and the schemes for working with the product at the cosmodrome. We do not publish all this, since many things are still invariant, much can change, and there is also a privacy mode. At the same time, many schemes and pictures are overloaded with service information and must be cleaned. As soon as there is a good data set for placement, we will publish them. I think that closer to the fall we will publish a new scheme of our rocket with the device.

The device has changed significantly in form.



During the aerodynamic calculations of the old form, we found areas of instability during descent in the atmosphere. It is worth mentioning that the descent vehicle of the Soyuz spacecraft has a problem with stability, it has two stable positions during the descent - the bottom into the stream and the hatch into the stream, which was realized during the descents. We managed to find an acceptable form, where there is a very good margin of stability during descent in the atmosphere and the apparatus does not have a second steady state in an inverted position. Now we finish all the calculations and change the layout of the device. Then we will conduct aerodynamic tests to confirm the calculated circular aerodynamic characteristics. Therefore, if someone can help with the planning of purging and the implementation of purging at speeds from 2 to 0.3 mach, please contact us.

We are often asked why we have such a weak site , ugly pictures and no animation. Unfortunately, all this needs time and energy, and sometimes money. The site must be filled with information and pictures. We have pictures, but they are very overloaded and need to be made in good quality. Even for the flight pattern, according to the available models, we made pictures for several weeks. That light is not that, that quality suffers, then some kind of axis passes through the whole apparatus. For animation, it also takes a lot of time to form the initial data and money for actually creating animation. Therefore, even if we are offered help in some issues, we sometimes cannot accept it because we need to prepare a lot of source data in a form convenient for presentation. But we do not refuse to help, and we very much hope for volunteers to whom our private space is not alien.

To summarize, we have a normal routine process of creating a complex. He is now very paper and stressful. It would be desirable, of course, that everything move faster, and the future will be more definite. After the protection of the advance project, everything should go much faster, the first hardware will start to appear and the tests will go. We are very inspired by the fact that the Blue Origin scheme similar to us, everything is going well and they confirm the cost of inter-flight service at the level of a couple of thousand US dollars.

Now we will have to decide on the spaceport. Initially, we focused only on Kapustin Yar in the Astrakhan Region, and now we are waiting for a solution to the issue of our appearance there from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Also on the part of Roskosmos there were proposals for other space centers, and we will work closely in this direction too. As good news, we can say that we have the first tourists who plan to book tickets with us. It is good that we have already started working with the CPC. Yu.A. Gagarin and IMBP RAS on the selection and training of tourists. So the work is moving and I think in the fall you are waiting for more interesting news about our project!

Pavel Pushkin.