Razgonoplan — a concept by Nizhny Novgorod engineer-physicist Igor Knyaginichev, known under the pseudonym Rastolkovskiy: a glider with a water-jet rocket engine that accelerates and launches another aircraft.[1] Its author called it a "flying airfield and super-cannon": the razgonoplan was designed to take off and land without an airfield, and in cosmonautics to serve as the zero stage of a launch vehicle, reducing gravitational losses during orbital insertion.[2] The concept never progressed beyond paper and a scale model; no razgonoplan has ever been built.
The Proposal
The razgonoplan is conceived as a large unmanned glider with neither air propellers nor a conventional turbojet engine. Thrust is provided by a water-jet propulsor, and the working fluid is water: it is free, can be drawn from anywhere, and by design can also serve as a runway for takeoff and landing.[2]
According to the author's calculations, the razgonoplan's takeoff and landing speeds are two to three times lower than those of a passenger airliner, and its takeoff and landing runs are roughly ten times shorter. Hence its primary practical application: taking off from and landing on any flat surface — sand, water, marsh, savanna — flattening tall grass and shrubs in the process.[2]
Water-jet rocket engine
The author referred to the propulsion system by the abbreviation WSRD — water-jet rocket drive. Its actual engine is a miniature high-temperature, ultra-high-pressure turbine modeled on a liquid-propellant rocket engine: fuel is kerosene, and the oxidizer is nitric acid or hydrogen peroxide. It needs to run for only a short time — fewer than one hundred seconds — just long enough for the acceleration phase.[2]
The propulsor is an annular-flow generator: a rotor flings water outward in jets and spray at an efflux velocity twice the peripheral speed of its outer rim. Water is stored in two tanks — one fore and one aft; in the author's diagrams he specifically notes the tilt of the water–air interface caused by the acceleration load.[2]
Zero stage of a rocket
The author regarded the space application as the principal argument for the concept. During the first hundred seconds of flight, a conventional rocket expends nearly all of its thrust simply gaining altitude: in his estimate, the gravitational losses of such a launch amount to roughly two kilometers per second of delta-v.[2]
The razgonoplan is intended to spare the rocket this phase entirely. The vehicle accelerates under its own power, lifts the rocket to an altitude of roughly three kilometers, brings its speed to approximately seven hundred meters per second, and releases it at an angle of about forty-five degrees — after which the rocket follows a ballistic arc. The author estimated gravitational losses for such a launch at fewer than two hundred and twenty-five meters per second, rather than two thousand.[2]
The total launch-system mass increases in the process, but the increase comes from water rather than propellant — therein, in the author's view, lies the advantage. Related concepts grew from the same cluster of ideas: Trebuchet-Cosmonautics and the Space Trebuchet — putting payloads into orbit by a rotating sling instead of a rocket.[3]
Other applications
Beyond space launches, the author listed terrestrial uses: airfield-free launch of aircraft and gliders, delivery of unmanned vehicles, training flights simulating weightlessness, and lofting heavy objects along a ballistic trajectory at the optimum angle.[2]
He tied his designs to events then making the news: razgonoplans deployed to Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake could, in his view, have handled aircraft across the entire stricken area where airfields had been destroyed; in Adler, where the airport is hemmed in by mountains and sea, a razgonoplan could have lifted the restriction on receiving heavy aircraft ahead of the 2014 Olympics.[2]
The concept in the author's own words
Knyaginichev set out his proposals himself — in pamphlets, presentations, and posts on the city portal. Below are his own formulations, quoted verbatim.
The razgonoplan is an original proposal by Nizhny Novgorod space-progress pioneer Rastolkovskiy — a glider with a water-jet rocket engine that could fly out into space. Wait, wait! That's far too bold a claim; it has no need to fly into space at all. The razgonoplan may in future be used to launch space launch vehicles as their zero stage. This will save fuel, since it will raise the efficiency of the orbital launch process, even though the total launch-system mass will increase as a result. But that increase comes from water, and water is free. The fuel-saving effect is achieved by reducing gravitational losses. And the razgonoplan's main application is, after all, airfield-free takeoff and landing of aircraft.
The flagship of Nizhny Novgorod non-rocket cosmonautics, aboard which one can explore space, take statesmen and other lovers of the good life for a ride "above the royally situated city," and protect them from nuclear blackmail.
The author
Igor Knyaginichev was born on 16 July 1960 in Yakutsk; from 1977 to 1982 he studied at the radiophysics faculty of Gorky's Lobachevsky University, and later worked at the Nizhny Novgorod Lenin Television Plant.[3] He adopted the pseudonym "Professor Rastolkovskiy" for popular presentations of his ideas: under it he ran a blog on the city portal and produced pamphlets and presentations. Since the mid-2010s he has lived in Moscow; on Habr he describes himself as a specialist in the application of slings to space systems.[4]
The razgonoplan is one of four concepts united by the common theme of non-rocket acceleration: alongside it stand Aerometro — city transport using rotating carousels near the ground — the Space Trebuchet, and Trebuchet-Cosmonautics.
The fate of the idea
The razgonoplan was never engineered into reality. The project never advanced beyond diagrams, calculations, and a desktop scale model that the author demonstrated in a video segment on the city portal nn.ru; neither a flying prototype nor tests of the water-jet engine were ever conducted.[5]
As a concept it endures as a monument to Nizhny Novgorod amateur cosmonautics of the turn of the 2000s and 2010s — alongside Trebuchet-Cosmonautics and Aerometro.
Sources
- razgonoplan.nnewer.ru — Razgonoplan — an original proposal by space pioneer Rastolkovskiy
- Professor Rastolkovskiy — Diagrams and slides from the author's presentation "Where Did the Razgonoplans Come From"
- razgonoplan.nnewer.ru — Professor Rastolkovskiy — pseudonym of engineer-physicist Igor Knyaginichev
- habr.com — Habr — Profile of Igor Rastolkovskiy-Knyaginichev
- NN.RU — Igor Rastolkovskiy presents a real scale model of his razgonoplan (video)