Scientific and Production Association “Energomash” named after academician V.P. Glushko (part of the State Corporation “Roscosmos”) from the time of its foundation was famous for a strong engineering and design school and outstanding scientific and technical developments that made a real breakthrough in the world rocket engine building. It was these developments of Academician Valentin Petrovich Glushko and his followers that ensured 60 years ago the first manned flight into space and later the launch of the legendary reusable rocket-space complex Energia-Buran.
How is science developing at the enterprise now, what research and development are specialists and designers engaged in, continuing the work of the great scientist? Specially for the Science Day, the Press Service of NPO Energomash talked about this with Andrey Vladimirovich Ivanov, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Deputy Chief Designer for Science and New Technologies of NPO Energomash.
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– Andrey Vladimirovich, tell us how you chose the engineering profession?
– Maybe these are pretentious words, but everything around us is designed by designers. Everything that is created by humanity, engineers had a hand in it. It was interesting to me from childhood. I studied in an aircraft modeling circle. Making flying models and assembling constructors – there was always something to do, and it fascinated me.
My parents are engineers too, of course I looked at them. My father worked in the Design Bureau of Chemical Automatics (KBKhA, part of the perimeter of the Roscosmos State Corporation) as a design engineer, and my mother worked at an enterprise related to radio electronics.
– Why did you come to work at NPO Energomash?
– I was born in Voronezh, studied there and worked at KBKhA for almost 25 years. As part of the creation of an integrated structure for rocket propulsion, it was planned to work more closely at our enterprises (NPO Energomash and KBKhA), and I was offered to go to NPO Energomash. Now we are doing joint development, building interaction between design bureaus through a product lifecycle management system, and there is also a lot of other interesting work.
– What research and new developments is NPO Energomash engaged in now? Which of them do you personally manage?
– Energomash is engaged in several R&D projects to create and modernize engines for the first stages of the Soyuz-5, Angara launch vehicles and a number of other areas. Quite a lot of R&D works aimed at improving the design and methods of computational modeling are carried out at the expense of the enterprise’s own funds.