Slashdot Mirror
Russia Tops With 45% of Spacecraft Launches in 2006
knight17 writes "This year was a really good year for space exploring nations, but Russians may be the most happiest among them, because they grabbed a huge 45% of the spacecraft launching market this year. The coming year is also very good for Russian space programs, since next year they will finish the GLONASS navigation project. The US is in second place, and China & Japan in third with six launches each. The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen."
Clearly, Slashdot has the most best editors of all the internets.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I wonder if it'll become worthwhile to build a hybrid gps/glonass/galileo receiver to cross-compare data from all three and get better precision...
The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen.
This must have been literally translated from Russian. Most other languages are hilarious when literally translated without changing cases or tenses - "Throw me down the stairs my hat".
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Ok- so that means that Russia had what - 26 launches or so? I don't recall many of them making the news in the US. See - that is the kind of stuff I want to see make the national news for the masses- not the OMG moment of some political nut job of the day-
xxxxxxxxxx
It's your mess. YOU clean it up!
Hurray for Russia!!
Perhaps they can teach NASA how to run an economical, yet highly effective, space program.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
For those interested, Arianespace toped 5th with 5 Ariane5 (omg 555????) successful launches in 2006. http://www.arianespace.com/site/launchlog/launchlo g_sub_index.html
"The US is in second place, and China & Japan in third with six launches each. The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen."
And, by the way, Kazakhstan is in first place! Little known secret is that rockets are actually launched from Baikonur, which is in Kazakhstan, greatest nation in the world! All other nations have inferior rockets!
-- Borat
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
As a NASA engineer who works on the expendable launch vehicle programs I can tell you that the comments made so far are born out of ignorance. NASA contracts launch programs to launch satellites for itself. ULA, ILS, etc. sell rides to space. Russia's launch services have a high degree of American engineering and participation (I have US citizen friends who work in Borat'ville).
NASA makes satellites such as STEREO and then buys a ticket on a Delta II or an Atlas V. IT then oversees the launch process. Contractors make the rockets (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.)
The process is far more complex than that, but regardless this 45% capture does not reflect poorly on NASA whatsoever. Delta II's and Protons are tried and true and the current workhorses of the international space community.
If you want to see NASA at its finest look at the Mars missions or STEREO or Cassini. They are marvels of engineering.
NASA does rule the scientific field and does the best job in engineering spacecrafts for scientific purposes mostly because you got the bigger budget (but how long?). The Russians have always been superior to U.S when it comes to launching stuff into space and in my opinion they still are. And isn't that what really matters? But hey, maybe that's why the U.S is hurrying up the new Moon missions and replacing the shuttle with the good old rockets. Why on earth did you replace the Saturn family with the space shuttle? Would have it really been too expensive to have them working side by side, the shuttle for the manned missions (repairs, visits to space stations etc.) and Saturn for the bigger payloads. Now that's where the U.S system fails, everything has to be always done in such a high and mighty manner.
What failure? The US designed the ISS. We are using the Space Shuttle to build it. The Russians have launched 2 small station modules. The US has launched 12. We were the first and only nation to make it to the moon, and we will be the first back with no competition in sight. Is any other country even attempting to build moon-capable launchers?
an ill wind that blows no good
It's what they do.
On the Russian side, it sounds like much of that activity is from commercial satellite launches. Useful, but not all that interesting. On the American side, a big chunk is pointless, outdated shuttle launches. Some of those will be useful, such as fixing the Hubble, but most will just be the make work project that is the IIS.
Seemingly the Russians with their outdated technology are winning the space race. The USA with all its money, trying for reusable spacecraft, lost!
I'm not sure what you mean by that, since we didn't just try for reusable spacecraft we actually built them. They're called "Space Shuttles". We've put lots of stuff into Earth orbit using the Shuttle fleet. Granted, the launch cost was far greater than originally projected, but show me a single government on this planet that doesn't incur major cost overruns on a big project. Let's also remember that we didn't spend enough money up front to build the spaceplane that NASA originally wanted: the Shuttle is a flying kluge and it's amazing to me that it works at all. Sometimes it doesn't. Congress, in more ways than one, screwed us by getting cheap after the end of the Apollo program.
In any event, since you seem to think the U.S. space program has been a failure, let me point out that the U.S. Global Positioning System has been operational for decades while Russia's satellite network never achieved more than partial functionality. The entire planet has benefited directly from the U.S. investment in GPS (not that I expect any expression of gratitude at this point) so much so that now entire economies are dependent upon that kind of technology. Sort of like the Internet, for that matter. As I understand it, GLONASS wasn't working at all for a long time and at its peak had nowhere near the global impact of GPS.
Besides, "winning" a race depends upon the nature of the race, and what you are trying to achieve in the first place. Seemingly you need to do some more research before posting.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The budget for the Saturn V wasn't sustainable. Neither was the high launch rate (roughly 40 Shuttle launches per year) that the Shuttles were supposed to have. Now, NASA could have done something like Ares I and V back then. Ie, a smallish manned launcher and a heavy lifter designed to be cheaper to manufacture and launch than a Saturn V. But they didn't.
I am not surprised at all by this statistic. Every few months or so I've been hearning something about russia's space program in the major news sources (like CNN); this while the US space program was completly grounded.
Sometimes, it almost seems like beating the Russians to the moon killed the US space program more than anything else. It meant that we no longer had anything to proove, and could just sit back and watch space-planes evolve on their own. Well, that ain't happening.
What would happen if Russia became the first nation to have a semi-permanent lunar settlement? That I could see happening.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Google tells me 24 billion Russian rubles = 911.085634 million U.S. dollars. The poorly written blog has inaccurate information...
The Ares I and Ares V designs draw from the launch technologies developed over the past 25 years. The SRB Ares I first stage is fantastically reliable and cost efficient. The parallel staged Ares V combines the best of lightweight shuttle tankage and newly developed LH2 RS-68 engines. It is a smaller simpler design than the Saturn V that will have a 40% greater payload. The Orion spacecraft will support missions of many months and has huge interior volume compared to anything else ever flown. No other nation has a capability remotely comparable.
an ill wind that blows no good
Russians developed several versions of the GLONASS satellite. The original model was designed for three years. The first satellite of this type was launched in 1992. GLONASS-M is designed for 7 years (first one launched in 2005), and GLONASS-K - for 12 years (to be launched in 2008).
How does one create a commercial space program capable of manned missions to space and interplanetary scientific probes?
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this. The payoff from NASA's current activities will come decades, maybe centuries in the future when manned spaceflight has matured enough to allow humans to colonize other worlds. The reward from this is no less than the continued survival of the human species in the event of a planetary cataclysm. (which is only a matter of when, not if)
Mining asteriods and the greater solar system can reduce the environmental impact of terrestrial mining operations and might be quite profitable if it can be done efficiently enough. Everything that has been learned (and continues to be learned) from NASA's probes will be of tremendous help in figuring out how to tackle something like that.
A lot of good science is being accomplished with NASA's robotic missions. This may be of little value to some, but it's the life's-work of others. Some might sneer and call the martian rovers "expensive toys humping rocks on another planet," while others view it as another step on the very long path to humanity leaving its cradle.