I’ve heard on occasion that there are some good Russian textbooks on rocketry. I’ve always been curious about them but until recently I was never able to find any. A break finally came on a comment on Amazon about Huzel a Huang mentioning an actual title Design and engineering of liquid rocket engines by GG Gahun. Even with the English title my searches came up with nothing. It wasn’t until I translated the title to Russian and searched in the Russian version of Google that I got any leads. I fond a web site offering a DJVU version of the text which I got converted to a PDF.

I can’t read it of course. I tried an online OCR (optical character recognition) software and an online translator. The combo didn’t work very well the Russian OCR had a lot of errors which significantly hampered the translator winch did an imperfect job itself. Those tool or similar ones could probably be used to create a usable English version of the text but it would take a long time for someone to go through the whole book line by line. Never the less some of the figures are informative. For example these 3 figures on how they make the corrugated regenerativly cooled nozzles. Most figures of the same thing in English texts I’ve seen are less descriptive.

I’d like to add this to the RRS online Members Library. (Even though not many will be able to read it) However I’ll hold off until some of the copyright issues are clarified. From what I understand of copyright law, depending on how we use it, we would be exempt by fair use for educational purposes. But only if we did it the right way. Plus the issue is complicated by the fact that it is an international copyright (that is if it even has a copyright on it, which I don’t know that either.) Investigating this is defiantly hampered by my having no working knowledge of the Russian language or legal systems, or international copyright. If I figure it out I’ll post an update.

-Richard Garcia