Reply to post: Re: Depressing

Ex-Soviet engines fingered after Antares ROCKET launch BLAST

cray74

Re: Depressing

"You're spot on except for one minor point... these engines never had a successful launch. "

The NK-33 worked great in the Antares on April 21st, 2013.

"The second was that the designer was killed on the Launchpad when a rocket being fueled blew up."

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov died in 1995 at the age of 84 while far from a rocket. You might be thinking of the Nedelin Disaster, when a fueled ICBM blew up on the pad in 1960 (years before NK-33 development began). In that case, the general (Nedelin) who ordered the hurried launch was incinerated along with about 100 other technicians and scientists. Even then the lead designer, Mikhail Yangel, wasn't killed in the explosion - he'd stepped away from a smoke.

"He never finished refining the design. So... proven? err.... No!!"

The NK-33 was refined into the NK-43 (high altitude variant), and derivatives of its hardware were used on the RD-170/171, -180, and -191. The RD-180 is used in the Atlas V, which has had 49 successful launches as of this week (1 upper stage failure in 50 launches - ain't the RD-180's problem), while the RD-170 is used in the Zenit.

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