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dwmzmm

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I received my copy of Peter Alway's Rockets of the World today (ordered from
the National Association of Rocketry NARTS). Great book, I should say (who
wouldn't?!), but I'm surprised that there's little mentioned (and no diagrams)
of the USSR's Voskhod's. I have enough data I've obtained from various sources, but really thought ROTW would have detailed drawing(s) and specs
as well. Any thoughts? I'm planning on building a sport scale version of the
Voskhod in the near future.
 
Regarding Alway's book, he may have decided to pass on that one - only he could say for sure.

I'm curious to see what data you've collected. From what I understand, it seems that Voskhod was not significantly different than Vostok.
 
Hey Dave! I got one of those from NARTS too a few weeks ago... Lotsa GOOD stuff in there! You should see what those things go for on EBAY!!!! I bid on one up to the NARTS price and it finally sold for $125. There was one copy that went for $475!!!! Amazing!!

Now I need to get the supplements... one by one of course so I don't break the bank!

I'm still kicking myself for not buying them back when they first came out when I was in high school/just graduated... But hey, who had a spare $30 back then?? LOL:)

Good luck and see ya later! OL JR :)
 
Hey Dave! I got one of those from NARTS too a few weeks ago... Lotsa GOOD stuff in there! You should see what those things go for on EBAY!!!! I bid on one up to the NARTS price and it finally sold for $125. There was one copy that went for $475!!!! Amazing!!

Now I need to get the supplements... one by one of course so I don't break the bank!

I'm still kicking myself for not buying them back when they first came out when I was in high school/just graduated... But hey, who had a spare $30 back then?? LOL:)

Good luck and see ya later! OL JR :)

Thanks, Jeff. I could spend YEARS going through this book and NEVER get
tired of it. I think my wife is already pissed off since my book arrived Saturday :eek: .....
 
Well, that's what wives are for... LOL:) (tongue in cheek while I still have one!) :kill:

My wife is humoring me for the moment... Mikus lent me his "UFO" DVD's and I've been watching them every night this week after school during supper... She's commented on a couple of them being "weird" and I told her she'll have something to discuss with Mikus's wife at the next launch... enduring their weird husband's stuff... LOL:) She just gave me "a look"... :rolleyes:

I'm sad because the rocket stuff is banned from the dining room table til after Thanksgiving... and I've got new Zooch kits to build! I'd say Zooch kits take precedence over turkey and relatives anyday, but I've been outvoted... :(

Later! OL JR :)
 
LOL! I think my wife watched one of those UFO episodes and then conveniently found something else to do during the rest. :rotflol:
 
I ordered a couple of suppliments as I want Sprint and Spatran plus the Arianne V :) Cant wait to see them arrive but it takes a while to get up here :)
Cheers
fred
 
Regarding Alway's book, he may have decided to pass on that one - only he could say for sure.

I'm curious to see what data you've collected. From what I understand, it seems that Voskhod was not significantly different than Vostok.

The Voskhod's uses a longer upperstage (very similar to the Soyuz) and the
nose shroud is very different than the Vostok, especially the flight with the
first spacewalk. I'll give you all a little peek of what I'm talking about:

voskhod1-23.jpg

voskhod1-46.jpg

voskhod2-6.jpg

voskhod2-7.jpg
 
Ah, yes. I was thinking only of the spacecraft itself, not the booster. Sorry. :)
 
Only Peter Alway could give a definitive answer to this. But...

Doing a project like that, with scale data, there are multiple conflicting and competing issues.

Does one try to create a book with maybe a dozen rockets, with incredible detail almost down to the rivet level, that only the most die-hard of builders could make good use of? Or create a book that sacrifices extreme detail for the sake of brevity so that good basic data can be presented for lots and lots of rockets, even if most only get a couple of pages (or less)?

Then to what extent should be book include variants of the same rocket? That same launch vehicle is used for satellite launches and also for the “Progress tanker” unmanned spacecraft that have carried supplies to MIR and ISS. So a case could be made for including all versions of it, not just Voskhod but the Progress and other satellite launch versions (even if sometimes the launch vehicle itself is called “Soyuz” regardless of what spacecraft or satellite is onboard). But with a fixed limit of pages, then every extra page devoted to a sub-variant of a rocket means a page devoted to some other rocket gets left out.

The book has 17 pages on variants of the A-1/A-2 launch vehicles - the ICBM version, Sputnik-1, Sputnik-2, Luna, Vostok, and two versions of Soyuz. Compare that to the Saturn-V, which only has 5 pages. OK, if one throws in all of the Saturns including the Saturn-I (12 pages there) , that’s 17 pages total, no more than the Russian A-1/A-2.

Then there is the other most basic problem. Does the actual original data exist in an accessible manner? More importantly, was it available when Peter was compiling material the book? The Vostok was very famous, and there are dimensional drawings for it. The Soyuz had plenty of dimensional drawings around (ironically most of the Soyuz data coming from drawings prepared for FAI scale data documentation). The Voskhod version of that vehicle... not so much. Now, since I have not researched it, I do not know for a fact how scarce or hard to obtain that drawings might be. The level of accuracy and documentation that Peter uses for his work is not the sort of thing he could just take a photo and arrive at dimensions that way (well, it is possible to do it that way but not with a good level of accuracy. Sometimes done for small details, rarely done for major dimensions).

Also, the book was printed in 1993 and reprinted in 1995. I would not be surprised at all if dimensioned drawings could be found, now, on the Voskhod’s launch vehicle (the upper stage part). But there was a very tightly controlled trickle of information from the Russian space program until the early 1990’s. For decades we did not even know that Leonov almost died on his Voskhod spacewalk (almost not being able to get back inside), nor other things like the Nedelin disaster where hundreds were killed in a missile explosion on the pad. And of course most of us knew little or nothing of the World Wide Web in the early 1990’s, and “Google” was known then only as the definition of a huge numerical value.

Now if indeed it was lack of info on Voskhod that was a problem at the time, if some appeared now, I would not be surprised if Peter Away added it to some future update supplement. Or indeed maybe it could have been in one of the supplements and I do not recall.

- George Gassaway
 
George, thanks for that insight. Yes, I'm well aware of the difficulties of obtaining good, credible data on the Voskhods, I've personally been doing
some research on this subject at least over a year now. I've been corresponding with like minded space enthusiasts from Russia on what they
may know or have and the answer is basically the same: The Soviets kept
a pretty tight lid on details of the Voskhods and very little in photos/diagrams
of the hardware exists. I do think I have enough information that I can work
on a sport scale version of the Voskhod.

BTW, we really appreciate all the contributions you and the others made
for the Rockets of the World. Keep up the great work!
 
Pete Alway wrote a whole separate book that focused on Soviet missiles and launch vehicles. I'm not sure if it has info on the specific vehicles you are interested in, though. It's available at NARTS.

Mark \\.

soviet.jpg
 
...The Soviets kept
a pretty tight lid on details of the Voskhods and very little in photos/diagrams
of the hardware exists.

Your thread prompted me to do a bit of research (read: Google it for twenty minutes). From what I've read, the Voskhod project was simple grandstanding on the part of the Soviet leadership; those directly involved with the Soviet space effort were appalled at the dangerous shortcuts made in order to fly those ships. In fact, only two Voskhod flights were made.

So I wonder, even in an age of increased openness, if there is some residual embarrassment around Voskhod.


Just my two quatloos.
 
Your thread prompted me to do a bit of research (read: Google it for twenty minutes). From what I've read, the Voskhod project was simple grandstanding on the part of the Soviet leadership; those directly involved with the Soviet space effort were appalled at the dangerous shortcuts made in order to fly those ships. In fact, only two Voskhod flights were made.

So I wonder, even in an age of increased openness, if there is some residual embarrassment around Voskhod.


Just my two quatloos.

Yes, you're exactly right. That's why Kruschev got replaced during one of those Voskhod missions.....
 
Just finished reading "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski. It talks about Kruschev and Korolev and some of the political wrangling and fallout surrounding the first couple of sputnik launches. A good read if you are interested.

kj
 
Just finished reading "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski. It talks about Kruschev and Korolev and some of the political wrangling and fallout surrounding the first couple of sputnik launches. A good read if you are interested.

kj

Could you read it out loud and put it on tape for me Kevin? You know I can't read.:(
 
Just finished reading "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski. It talks about Kruschev and Korolev and some of the political wrangling and fallout surrounding the first couple of sputnik launches. A good read if you are interested.

kj

Thanks, I'll have to look for that title.
 
I made an 18mm powered Voskhod based on a paper model a couple years ago. I did the upper stage extension myself with the black and white roll pattern of Voskhod 1. Apparently Voskhod 2 was all gray, but even that's hard to tell from some of the photos. You've probably got all the photos I used, but I also had an old 1/144 resin model from Rho Models that helped.

Drew

Voskhod%201%20LV.jpe
 
Graylensman wrote to dwzmm:

>>>>
Your thread prompted me to do a bit of research (read: Google it for twenty minutes). From what I've read, the Voskhod project was simple grandstanding on the part of the Soviet leadership; those directly involved with the Soviet space effort were appalled at the dangerous shortcuts made in order to fly those ships. In fact, only two Voskhod flights were made.

So I wonder, even in an age of increased openness, if there is some residual embarrassment around Voskhod.
<<<<<

With the U.S., once Mercury had begun t fly, and the plans for Apollo program were being started, NASA realized the need for an interim step to learn about rendezvous, space-walks, and staying in space for a long time - up to 2 weeks. So, Gemini was created as a logical next step. The Gemini capsule was sort of like a bit larger Mercury but there were also huge differences (not just two crew members, but the opening hatches for EVA, consumables to stay up for 2 weeks, and most importantly the ability to rendezvous and dock. Mercury proved Man could go up into space and come back alive, Gemini proved man could literally “fly” in space and do key things (proving what needed to be done for Apollo to work).

The Russians had Vostok, and their next step was to develop a spacecraft that could also rendezvous in space and ultimately play a role in getting to the moon, Soyuz. But the kremlin wanted more space firsts. So, Voskhod was created as a modified version of Vostok, to send up a crew of three first, and to do a spacewalk first. There certainly were concerns, indeed one of the three members of Voskhod-1 was one of the engineers who was involved in producing it, in part to allay some concerns about the cosmonauts. But those sort of concerns were not made public till decades later. Ironically one of the fears of Voskhod-1 was the fact there was not room for three people to wear space suits, if there had been a cabin leak they would have died, Then with Soyuz, they did that same thing, which caused the crew for Soyuz-11, the one that stayed at Salyut-1, to die due to decompression when a valve stuck open when an explosive bolt firing knocked it open (when the orbital module was jettisoned).

I sort of think the lack of information is not any sense of embarrassment, but simply that there were just two flights of a spacecraft that was not really that much different in some ways from Vostok (the biggest physical diffrence is the second stage, but not the spacecraft itself). to the Soviet public, those were huge successes. NASA’s Gemini flights have sometimes been called “lost” among the public, since for even a lot of people who were alive in the 1960’s, Mercury was Shepard, Glenn, “the other guys”, and then Apollo was the moon. A lot of the public forgot about Gemini, or the kids born since then don’t tend to even hear aobut it since they are lucky to be taught we did send men to the moon, regardless of the moon hoax nutcases. And yet we flew TEN Gemini flights, four more flights than Mercury flew (and eight flights more more than Voskhod flew).

So, I think the lack of info is a combination of the secrecy at the time, and not as much interest in Voskhod compared to Vostok and Soyuz. And while the info has started to come out in more recent years, whatever was around then, and held in secret, may not have tended to be kept. Or, considering how some of the video and photos are being sold for profit, the profit motive is in digging up more popular things like Soyuz and N-1, and such, so if there is some good info on Voskhod out there, there has not been the incentive to dig it up as there has been.

I got intrigued by this so did some more checking around. I think you should go to the “space-modelers” group on Yahoogroups and ask. That group is oriented towards making static (non-flying) models mostly, though there are some there who also build flying model rockets. So, you should join, and ask there.

The files section has a lot of stuff. It has tended to get pretty full over time (getting close to the old max of 100 megs), so every year the files get “archived” to another site for long-term storage, at Ninfinger’s (Steve Knudsen) vault of Space-Modelers files:

Look for “soviet” in this list of files from 2000 thru January 2004:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/vault.html

Inside there is this links for some Voskhod pics:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/All kinds of Soviet space 3./index.html

Also look in the same place for “voskhod”. Included in there is this one with some pretty good pics which seem to be scans from a book:

https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/Voskhod-2/

Interesting that the second stage portion seems to be painted black and white.

Then from the 2007 archives, lots of info on the R-7 (A-1/A-2) launch vehicle, with a lot of detail even if none seems to be about the Voskhod version:

https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault2007/R-7/index.html


Mike Mackowski has model-oriented documentation a booklet on Soviet Spacecraft. It is not clear to me if it might include drawings of the Voskhod launch vehicle, or only the spacecraft. You may want to get in touch with him to find out:
https://www.spaceinminiature.com/books/sim4.html


I did some Google searching using keyword pairs like voskhod space, voskhod drawing, and voskhod rocket. And I did so by using Google images, so I could see and easily ignore the hits that did not show rockets (such as motorcycles).

This photo of a model:
https://www.spaceistheplace.ca/voskhod_2_launcher_1_144.jpg
As found only in a link on this page (in the text about the Soyuz-T launcher):
https://www.spaceistheplace.ca/page_3_jan_07.htm

1/240 scale drawing by Mark Wade:
https://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs/vos11a57.htm
From:
https://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvfam/r7.htm

Voskhod-1 page (photo of rollout to pad at bottom of page):
https://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/voskhod-1.htm

https://www.spacefacts.de/graph/drawing/large/english/voskhod-1_rollout.htm

- George Gassaway

r7cut.gif

voskhod-1_rollout.jpg
 
Thanks for all that (better) research, George! Good points about Gemini and Voskhod being forgotten programs (though it's debatable to call Voskhod a program).
 
George,

Your response above is great! I've seen your replies to questions and I am typically blown away by your thoroughness. I just want to say I appreciate your efforts in these replies and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Thanks!

John
 
LOL! I think my wife watched one of those UFO episodes and then conveniently found something else to do during the rest. :rotflol:


Yeah she picked the one to watch where Straker's son dies... she didn't like it very much and commented "that was just weird" when it was over...

Just finished the first season... pretty cool... Man if I'd known there were purple page-cut hotties waiting for me on the moon maybe I'd have applied myself more in school and actually tried to become an astronaut... LOL:)

Yall have a good one! OL JR :)
 
Yes, you're exactly right. That's why Kruschev got replaced during one of those Voskhod missions.....

Weeeelllll.... I'd tend to think nearly plunging the world into a global thermonuclear war over placing medium range missiles in Cuba had a bit more to do with his removal than placing three cosmonauts in danger crammed into a one man capsule did... Course that's probably what you meant anyway...

The Soviet Union would have come out on the worse end of that one... they're 300 warheads against our 3000+... would have been quite a mess... OL JR :)
 
Just finished the first season... pretty cool... Man if I'd known there were purple page-cut hotties waiting for me on the moon maybe I'd have applied myself more in school and actually tried to become an astronaut... LOL:)

AFter years of reading about UFO, I've finally seen some episodes myself - second series, as the Brits would say. ;) While some of the science is laughable, the overall tone of the series is very weird. And Straker has the coolest haircut EVER.
 
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