NPO Energomash "V. P. Glushko" is a major Russian rocket engine manufacturer. The company primarily develops and produces liquid propellant rocket engines. Energomash originates from the Soviet design bureau OKB-456, which was founded in 1946. NPO Energomash acquired its current name on May 15, 1991, in honor of its former chief designer

Valentin Glushko Valentin Petrovich Glushko (; ; born 2 September 1908 – 10 January 1989) was a Soviet engineer who was program manager of the Soviet space program from 1974 until 1989. Glushko served as a main designer of rocket engines in the Soviet progra ...

. Energomash is noted for its long history of large scale

LOX Lox is a fillet of brined salmon, which may be smoked. Lox is frequently served on a bagel with cream cheese, and often garnished with tomato, onion, cucumber, and capers. Etymology The American English word ''lox'' is a borrowing of Yiddi ...

/Kerosene engine development. Notable examples are the

RD-107 The RD-107 () and its sibling, the RD-108, are a type of rocket engine used on the R-7 rocket family. RD-107 engines are used in each booster and the RD-108 is used in the central core. The engines have four main combustion chambers (each with ...

RD-108 The RD-107 () and its sibling, the RD-108, are a type of rocket engine used on the R-7 rocket family. RD-107 engines are used in each booster and the RD-108 is used in the central core. The engines have four main combustion chambers (each with ...

engine An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power ge ...

s used on the R-7, Molniya and

Soyuz Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз (Russian language, Russian and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (''profsoyuz'') or the Soviet Union, Union of Soviet Socialist Republi ...

rocket families, and the

RD-170 The RD-170 () is the world's most powerful and heaviest liquid-fuel rocket engine. It was designed and produced in the Soviet Union by NPO Energomash for use with the Energia launch vehicle. The engine burns kerosene fuel and LOX oxidizer in fo ...

RD-171 The RD-170 () is the world's most powerful and heaviest liquid-fuel rocket engine. It was designed and produced in the Soviet Union by NPO Energomash for use with the Energia launch vehicle. The engine burns kerosene fuel and LOX oxidizer in fo ...

and

RD-180 The RD-180 () is a rocket engine that was designed and built in Russia. It features a dual combustion chamber, dual-nozzle design and is fueled by a RP-1/ LOX mixture. The RD-180 is derived from the RD-170 line of rocket engines, which were use ...

engines used on the Energia,

Zenit Zenit, meaning "zenith", may refer to: Spaceflight and rocketry * Zenit (rocket family), a Soviet family of space launch vehicles * Zenit (satellite), a type of Soviet spy satellite * Zenit sounding rocket, a Swiss rocket Sports * Zenit (sports ...

and

Atlas V Atlas V is an expendable launch system and the fifth major version in the Atlas (rocket family), Atlas launch vehicle family. It was developed by Lockheed Martin and has been operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA) since 2006. Primarily used to ...

launch vehicles. , the company remained largely owned by the federal government of Russia, but

RSC Energia S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation "Energia" () is a Russian manufacturer of spacecraft and space station components. Its name is derived from the Russian word for energy and is also named for Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the first chief o ...

owned approximately 14% of the total shares. , NPO Energomash employed approximately 5500 workers at its headquarters in

Khimki Khimki (, ) is a city in Moscow Oblast, Russia. It is located approximately northwest from central Moscow, and is part of the Moscow metropolitan area. History Origins and formation Khimki was initially a railway station that had existed sin ...

, Moscow and its satellite facilities in

Samara Samara, formerly known as Kuybyshev (1935–1991), is the largest city and administrative centre of Samara Oblast in Russia. The city is located at the confluence of the Volga and the Samara (Volga), Samara rivers, with a population of over 1.14 ...

Perm Perm or PERM may refer to: Places * Perm, Russia, a city in Russia **Permsky District, the district **Perm Krai, a federal subject of Russia since 2005 **Perm Oblast, a former federal subject of Russia 1938–2005 ** Perm Governorate, an administr ...

, and

St. Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

. On 4 August 2016, the company announced that it would launch a new plant by December 2016.

History

Valentin Petrovich Glushko was appointed chief designer of the newly founded OKB-456 design bureau on July 3, 1946. The company was quickly tasked with the production of a Russian copy of the German V2 rocket engine, under the supervision of Glushko and 234 German designers added to the company in October, 1946. At the end of that year, OKB-456 took up residence in an aviation factory near the city of

, just outside Moscow. Here, the bureau constructed facilities to build and test fire its engines. The RD-100 performed admirably, and low-pressure LOX/Ethanol engine development continued, in the form of the RD-102 and RD-103. However, the development of high-pressure engine technology allowed propellants with a higher energy density to be used, and so LOX/Kerosene quickly replaced LOX/Ethanol as the propellant of choice. In 2013, the Russian government began a major effort to renationalize the Russian

space Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions. Modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless ...

sector, and created

United Rocket and Space Corporation The United Rocket and Space Corporation () or URSC was a Russian joint-stock corporation formed by the Russian government in 2013 to renationalize the Russian space sector. The government intended to do so in such a way as to "preserve and enhan ...

(URSC) to consolidate its space holdings. In December 2013 President Putin issued a

presidential decree A decree is a legal proclamation, usually issued by a head of state, judge, royal figure, or other relevant authorities, according to certain procedures. These procedures are usually defined by the constitution, Legislative laws, or customary l ...

setting up the URSC corporation. The decree stipulated that the corporation will take over manufacturing facilities. The industry reorganization continued into 2014 with a

Sberbank The Public JSC Sberbank (, initially a contraction of ) is a Russian majority state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow. As the Russian successor entity of the State Labor Savings Banks System of the USSR, it was ...

cooperation agreement.

Storable propellants and hypergols

In 1954, the development and success of the LOX/Kerosene

and RD-108 engines allowed the company to expand its engine development work further. The RD-214 engine, using a storable mixture of

Nitric Acid Nitric acid is an inorganic compound with the formula . It is a highly corrosive mineral acid. The compound is colorless, but samples tend to acquire a yellow cast over time due to decomposition into nitrogen oxide, oxides of nitrogen. Most com ...

and Kerosene, was developed for ballistic missiles with a short readiness time requirement. The RD-214 was soon superseded by the RD-216 and later variants, which used a

hypergolic A hypergolic propellant is a rocket propellant combination used in a rocket engine, whose components spontaneously ignite when they come into contact with each other. The two propellant components usually consist of a fuel and an oxidizer. The ...

combination of

UDMH Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (abbreviated as UDMH; also known as 1,1-dimethylhydrazine, heptyl or Geptil) is a chemical compound with the formula H2NN(CH3)2 that is primarily used as a rocket propellant. At room temperature, UDMH is a colorle ...

and Nitric Acid. This line of development later led to the highly successful

/ N₂O₄ engines

RD-253 The RD-253 () and its later variants, the RD-275 and RD-275M, are liquid-propellant rocket engines developed in the Soviet Union by Energomash. The engines are used on the first stage of the Proton launch vehicle and use an oxidizer-rich staged ...

and RD-275 used on the

Proton A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , Hydron (chemistry), H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' (elementary charge). Its mass is slightly less than the mass of a neutron and approximately times the mass of an e ...

launch vehicles – these were the most powerful hypergolic engine of its time, and remains in production to the current day.

High pressure engines

The RD-107 and RD-108 engines developed from 1954-1957 were extremely reliable and widely used. However, DB Energomash (renamed from the original OKB designation in 1967) saw great potential in the development of LOX/Kerosene engines with a higher chamber pressure. This presented many challenges to the engine designers, most notably the development of a

turbopump A turbopump is a fluid pump with two main components: a rotodynamic pump and a driving gas turbine, usually both mounted on the same shaft, or sometimes geared together. They were initially developed in Germany in the early 1940s. The most co ...

which could deliver enough propellant to keep the engine running at a pressure high enough to maintain combustion stability. The resulting engine, developed in the early 1980s, was the

, which runs at a chamber pressure of and produces of thrust at a sea-level

specific impulse Specific impulse (usually abbreviated ) is a measure of how efficiently a reaction mass engine, such as a rocket engine, rocket using propellant or a jet engine using fuel, generates thrust. In general, this is a ratio of the ''Impulse (physics), ...

of 309 sec, and of thrust at a vacuum

of 337 sec — one of the most efficient and powerful LOX/Kerosene engines in the world.

Current work

Variants of the RD-170 are still in use today on such vehicles as the

Zenit 3SL The Zenit-3SL was an expendable carrier rocket operated by Sea Launch. First flown in 1999, it was launched 36 times, with three failures and one partial failure. It was a member of the Zenit family of rockets, and is built by the Yuzhnoye Desig ...

used by

Sea Launch Sea Launch was a multinational—Norway, Russia, Ukraine, United States—spacecraft launch company founded in 1995 that provided orbital launch services from 1999 to 2014. The company used a mobile maritime launch platform for equatorial l ...

. The modern

Soyuz rocket The Soyuz (, meaning "union", GRAU index 11A511) was a Soviet expendable carrier rocket designed in the 1960s by OKB-1 and manufactured by State Aviation Plant No. 1 in Kuybyshev, Soviet Union. It was commissioned to launch Soyuz spacecraft a ...

uses updated versions of the

and RD-108 engines. The

engine, developed with

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (PWR) was an American company that designed and produced rocket engines that use liquid rocket propellants, liquid propellants. It was a division of Pratt & Whitney, a fully owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corpo ...

through the RD AMROSS partnership, is a direct descendant of the RD-170 line and is used as the propulsion system for the first stage of

. The most current engine listed on the NPO Energomash website is the single-chamber

RD-191 The RD-191 () is a high-performance single-combustion chamber rocket engine, developed in Russia and sold by Roscosmos. It is derived from the RD-180 dual-combustion chamber engine, which itself was derived in turn from the four-chamber RD-170 ...

, developed for the

Angara The Angara (; ) or Angar ( мүрэн) is a major river in Siberia, which traces a course through Russia's Irkutsk Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Krai. It drains out of Lake Baikal and is the headwater tributary of the Yenisey. It is long, and has ...

and Baikal launch vehicles. NPO Energomash works with other Russian companies (

Keldysh Research Center The State Scientific Centre Keldysh Research Center () is a research institute in Moscow, Russia. It is based at 8 Onezhskaya Street ( street article in Russian Wikipedia). History Prior to World War II it was known as the Reactive Scientific ...

and

KBKhA Chemical Automatics Design Bureau (CADB), also KB Khimavtomatika (, KBKhA), is a Russian OKB, design bureau founded by the NKAP (People's Commissariat of the Aircraft Industry) in 1941 and led by Semyon Kosberg until his death in 1965. Its origi ...

), and in cooperation with European companies on the Volga rocket engine project. The company continues to research and explore new engine concepts, such as the tripropellant, bi-modal engines of the RD-700 family (

RD-701 The RD-701 (', Rocket Engine 701) was a liquid-fuel rocket engine proposed by Energomash, Russia (USSR at that time). It was briefly proposed to propel the reusable MAKS space plane, but the project was cancelled shortly before the end of USSR. ...

and RD-704). On 1 June 2016, the company successfully tested first-stage engine named RD-181, a modified version of the

for

Antares Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. It has the Bayer designation α Scorpii, which is Latinisation of names, Latinised to Alpha Scorpii. Often referred to as "the heart of the scorpion", Antares is flanked by ...

. On 10 August 2016, the company successfully tested first-stage engine named PDU-99 "ПДУ-99" for

RS-28 Sarmat The RS-28 Sarmat (, named after the Sarmatians; NATO reporting name: SS-X-29 or SS-X-30), often colloquially referred to as Satan II by media outlets, is a three-stage Russian silo-based, liquid-fueled, HGV-capable and FOBS-capable super-h ...

List of orbital launchers

References

External links

NPO Energomash website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Npo Energomash Aerospace companies of the Soviet Union Companies based in Moscow Oblast Soviet and Russian space institutions Rocket engine manufacturers of Russia Government-owned companies of Russia Roscosmos divisions and subsidiaries Khimki Design bureaus Engine manufacturers of the Soviet Union