On 4/11/2010 7:35 AM, wrote:
On Apr 10, 7:47 am, Pat wrote:
Was organizing my bookmarks and ran into this strange "Rossiyanka"
Russian booster design by OAO Makeyev (builders of Soviet and Russian
SLBMS) that has a reusable first stage powered by liquid natural gas and
LOX that separates from the upper stages and does a vertical landing
under rocket thrust on a landing pad near the launch site:http://www.makeyev.ru/rocspace/rossiyanka/

That's interesting.

I found NASA reports from 1970, considering LNG as airplane fuel.
There's a 1984 paper about using the LNG/LOX combination ("High
pressure LOX/natural gas staged combustion technology"). Most NASA
papers concerning safety or tank design, if LNG is mentioned.

Looks like they've not built this. A pity: more is better.

"LNG" may have another meaning. Some abstracts use the acronym in
conjunction with a concept called "low noise flight guidance," without
making the meaning explicit.

The one that really threw the west a curve ball was the description of
Voskhod that stated it had "ion plotters of the direction of the ship's
velocity vector" no one knew what they were driving at...some thought it
was some sort of ion engines for maneuvering control.
What it really was is a system of ion detectors that would allow the
spacecraft to determine its orientation in relation to its orbital path.
These were later incorporated into the Soyuz spacecraft, although on
Komarov's fatal first flight it was found that the exhaust from the
hydrogen peroxide RCS screwed up their readings.
The Russians flew a converted airliner powered by liquid hydrogen, and
are apparently interested in building ones powered by LNG...which was
also rumored to be one possible fuel for the much discussed "Aurora"
Mach 6 aircraft:
http://www.tupolev.ru/English/Show.asp?SectionID=82

Pat