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  #1  
Old 07-23-2020, 10:25 PM
PeterAlway PeterAlway is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 89
Default New booklet: Sixteen Rockets of the Spaceflight Dreamers

Wheeee!!! I've just finished printing up and binding a new booklet, so here's the announcement:



Sixteen Rockets of the Spaceflight Dreamers

In the 1930’s. an idea spread through Europe and Americal. Theorests like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Oberth is Romania, and Robert Goddard in the United States had each independently proven that space travel was possible. Experimenters—crazy dreamers and engineering geniuses (sometimes both in the same person) in Germany, The USSR, and America began building liquid-propelled rockets ad a first step in the conquest of space. Sixteen Rockets of the Spaceflight Dreamers covers rockets by Johannes Winkler and the Verein Fur Raumschiffahrt in Germany, GIRD, RNII, and KB-7 in the Soviet Union, and the American Rocket Society in the US (Goddard’s rockets are covered in a separate booklet).

Some of these drawings are based on scans of original GIRD blueprints, others are reconstructed from a mix of partial dimensions, diagrams, and photographs. Some of the rockets are primitive “blumber’s nightmare” designs, while others, most notably the Soviet designs, are sleek shapes, looking more like futuristic spaceships. All of these rockets flew, whether they exploded shortly after liftoff or reached miles into the air. And all of them had a place in the story of spaceflight.. Designers of these machines went on to build the V-2, Sputnik, and even the descent engines of the Surveyor moon lander.

Rockets include Winkler’s HW-I, HW-IA, and HW-II; the VfR’s 2-stick, 1-stick, and 4-stick repulsors; GIRD’s GIRD-09 (Index 1 and 13 versions), GIRD-X, and GIRD-07; Len-GIRD’s LRD-D-1, RNII’s AVIAVNITO; KB-7’s R-03 and R-06; and the American Rocket Society’s ARS No. 2 and ARS No. 4.

38 Comb-bound pages, 20 photos, 17 drawings.

Here's the info you need to order:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535...f46b6d43f_b.jpg
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Old 07-23-2020, 10:40 PM
PeterAlway PeterAlway is offline
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And just so that I don't spam you without some sort of content as compensation, here's an excerpt from the new booklet:

GIRD-07

When GIRD became part of RNII, the Reaction Propulsion Research Institute, there were a few GIRD projects not yet brought to fruition, including projects 05 and 07. Before flying the GIRD-09, Mikhail K. Tikhonravov had also been working on project 07, a hybrid between a winged missile and ballistic rocket. Designed to burn kerosene with liquid oxygen, this rocket was to ascend vertically and then fly horizontally to a target on the ground.
Tikhonravov chose a striking cruciform flying wing configuration for this project. The GIRD-07 hardly had a fuselage at all; its two oxygen tanks and two gasoline tanks were concealed, one each, in the four large, thick swept fins. The rocket was built from an aluminum frame covered with sheet aluminum—A lightweight but fragile structure. The fuselage at the junction of the fins held a combustion chamber, along with a tank that held air compressed to 15 atmospheres to force propellant from the tanks into the engine.
In its original 1933 form, the rocket was supposed to reach an altitude of 10 km (6 mi), and eject a parachute from its nose at apogee.
GIRD gave up on the original GIRD-07 engine in 1933 when it concentrated on the GIRD-09 and GIRD-X. With the success of both rockets, GIRD was absorbed into the RNII before the GIRD-07 rocket was finished. While the details of the 07’s development are sketchy, we know that there were failures on the way to its ultimate flight.
Static tests of the original GIRD-07 engine invariably resulted in explosions connected to the use of liquid oxygen as a coolant. The group then tried to re-use the GIRD-X engine, which suffered its own failures. In the end, they dusted off Tsander’s old OR-2 rocket-glider engine, updated it (renamed 02) and mounted it in the GIRD-07.
While the old GIRD hands were bringing their 07 rocket up to flightworthiness, things at RNII declined for them. Ivan Kleimenov was the director of the new institute. A military engineer from the Gas Dynamic Laboratory (GDL) side of the RNII, he was actively hostile to GIRD’s spaceflight aspirations. The GDL people saw liquid oxygen as impractical for weapons, and so he opposed spending resources on any rockets, like the GIRD-07 that used it. By the time GIRD-07 would fly, many of the old GIRD rocketeers were fired, demoted, or had resigned.
On November 17, 1934, the former GIRD crew attempted to launch rocket 07, but there was a fire in one of the wing fuel tanks. The GIRD/RNII crew tried again on June 25, 1935. This time, the wings/fins of the rocket were not perfectly aligned. The OR-2 engine ignited perfectly, but the rocket looped about the sky, reaching an altitude of about 150 meters (500 ft) before chasing after the launch crew. Fortunately the GIRD-07 hit the ground, rather than any of the experimenters. Evidently the damage wasn’t too bad, as the rocket was repaired in just three weeks.
Finally, on July 16, 1935, the GIRD-07 was truly ready to fly. GIRD-07 roared off the pad and disappeared from sight. Somehow it was tracked to an altitude of 3.1 km (1.9 mi), a record altitude for the time (both inside and outside the Soviet Union). The GIRD-07 hit the ground 3.4 km (2.1 miles) away, demonstrating the extended range the wings provided.
Whatever promise the GIRD-07 showed was lost on the leadership of RNII. Kleimenov and his GDL colleagues banned the use of liquid oxygen in RNII in 1936, and the GIRD-07 program ended with its successful launch. RNII concentrated future efforts on solid-propellant rockets like the RS-82 and Katyusha, which would play a significant role in World War II. Liquid propellant engines were limited to using nitric acid (deemed more practical for military rockets) as an oxidizer.
While the RNII group did not pursue the unusual configuration of the GIRD-07, the idea of a missile with large cruciform wings reappeared in the forms of both Soviet and American anti-aircraft missiles in the 1950’s. Those missiles required additional control surfaces in the tail or nose, along with sophisticated guidance and homing systems to be practical, but the resemblance is there.

GIRD-07 Specifications

Launch weight: 35 kg (75 lb)
Propellant weight: 10 kg (22 lb)
Payload weight: 2 kg (4.4 lb)
Thrust: 830 N (190 lb)
Duration: 22 sec
Total impulse: 18,000 N-s (4100 lb-s)
NAR Designation: N 830
Length: 2.01 m (6 ft, 7.5 in)
Span: 1.074 m (3 ft, 6.3in)




Museum display with part of wing skin removed to show propellant tanks:



Another museum shot showing the profile of the GIRD-07:

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Old 07-24-2020, 01:08 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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One of Korolev's group's rockets, which you covered in the booklet (one or both of the two "right-most" rockets depicted in the first row, on the cover), was--as you know--actually a hybrid propellant rocket, burning LOX with napalm (gelled gasoline), which was held in a wire mesh "cage" in the combustion chamber, so a scale model of it could be flown, for greater scale realism, using a hobbyist hybrid rocket motor. Also, a scale model of the "all-fins" GIRD-07 could be flown as a boost-glider, if desired.
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Old 07-24-2020, 10:45 PM
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Gus Gus is offline
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Friends. I proofread the booklet for Peter. It is truly fascinating. Lots of amazing history. Another great production by Peter.

And as I've mentioned before, proofreading Peter's books means I do something most don't, which is to read ALL the written descriptions. I know these started as collections of scale drawings for modelers but Pete views the entire ROTW project as a history lesson. Just wonderful to see him filling in all the missing niches. And I highly recommend actually reading these new booklets from start to finish. Just wonderful writing about REALLY interesting topics.

Steve
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