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Russia Botches Another Rocket Launch
astroengine writes "Three hours before a new crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, bringing the outpost back up to full staff for the first time in months, Russia racked up its fifth launch accident within a year. A Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a military communications satellite failed to reach orbit after blastoff from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia. The botched launch is again due to an upper-stage engine problem."
No more vodka for ruskies!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The summary reads like an angry teenager implying that they could do better.
Really? Do yo have any idea how hard it is to actually manage launching something like that in to space? We should be more amazed when everything goes right and a rocket actually makes it there. The rocket failing is, of course, not a good thing... but at least they are trying in the face of failure, instead of giving up and whining about for a decade like the US did after the shuttle disasters.
Launching a rocket into space is a marvel of just about every discipline involved.
Couldn't the submitter couch the phrasing in something sympathetic. Yes, it's the Russian's 5th failed attempt, but rocket science is...rocket science. It's not easy.
A lot of Russians put effort in trying to get it right. Why verbally piss on them like that?
Disclosure, I'm American.
I would actually call this a partial success, since usually when an American rocket "fails" it tends to explode horribly but I guess that is the down side of using two huge solid boosters on your rockets.
P.S. American here
They ditched it at the right time, the problem is that we let budget cutters prevent NASA from funding the replacement we should have had 15 years ago. I remember in the late '80s seeing speculation about what the next space vehicles were going to look like. It's been over 20 years since then and they still haven't produced a final prototype.
This stuff is complicated, but it's hard for me to believe that they couldn't have produced a retooled shuttle with newer innovations in 20 years time. At very least they ought to have been able to redo the controls and keep the same basic design. It's complicated, but hardly new territory like it was when they built the first shuttles.
FTFA:
"There is aging of many resources. We need to optimize everything. We need to modernize," Popovkin said.
"It’s also aging of human resources," he added. "Given the troubles we had in the '90s, quite a lot of people left and nobody came to replace them."
Maybe some of those things should be done before you just fire off another rocket. Those sound like serious, deeply-rooted issues. To do "rocket science" you need "rocket scientists" and apparently quite a lot of them have left the program.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
It seems most people see launching things into LEO is routine but talking with people who actually do the work (instead of armchair QB and paperpushers on the upper floors), rockets are very complex with so many parts and components. All (with exception of items covered by redundancy) must work in order to achieve speed and altitude to sustain orbit. Are they scaling back someplace that impacts quality? Of course USA hasn't had big failures with human carrying vehicles since 2003 (but then we don't fly such anymore).
Sorry, I cannot come up with a "In Soviet Russia..." or a car analogy. But this thread is just begging for one.
mfwright@batnet.com
Nothing seems to work quite right these days, does it? The Russians can't launch rockets from a family of launch vehicles that has over half a century of heritage. The currency of continental Europe is on the verge of collapse and the French and Germans are near powerless to stop it. Stimulus packages on top of bailouts have failed to make a dent in a global crisis that has now been going on for three fucking years.
Do we have some kind of species-wide dementia or something? Why can't we do stuff anymore that we used to be able to do?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Did the US brain drain all the engineers in Russia?
No, China did.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually we should have ditched it a decade earlier as it was a dead end and never fulfilled its original purpose. What i don't understand is why we aren't working on man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V as those rockets have been pretty damned successful and would take less time than the clusterfuck that was the Orion program since you'd be starting off with a well vetted system.
Sadly though without the Cold War to keep their butts in line we'll just have to let private enterprise take care of it because anything built by the government will be met with demands by Congressman Porkus and Senator Kickbackman to have pieces put in their districts so they can "bring home the bacon" or they'll withhold funding so we end up with the thing splattered like a shotgun blast all over the country and costs shooting through the roof. sadly its pretty damned clear now that congress can't do jack shit for the good of the nation anymore, its just a bunch of piggies all squealing and shoving and fighting for the biggest portion of the trough, country be damned.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... if USA didn't ditched the Space Shuttle program too soon...
Of course they did. Yeah, the Shuttles were expensive. But you do not replace a platform until you have a replacement ready to go. A real replacement, not pie in the sky stuff like the Orion program.
The reality is, it would be too expensive to refurbish existing shuttles. We'd be better off just building new ones in that case. But either we have to come up with a new rocket soon, or try something like bundling several Titan rockets together. Because it's not terribly bright to leave the fate of our heavy lift needs in the hands of Russia.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think you need an "s" on the end of "replacement". NASA has shut down a staggering number of Shuttle replacement projects over the years. Politicians also caused many of the problems that eventually killed the Shuttle (such as causing the boosters to be chopped up for long-distance transport, removing the escape mechanisms that the original Shuttle design was supposed to have, slashing the budget to the point where the Shuttle was too small to carry the payloads intended and/or needed, etc).
There was an effort to keep the Shuttle program going for a couple of years, but by the time it was in a position to do anything, all the factories had been shut down, all the expertise had been dissipated and all the infrastructure had been repurposed. So the effort came to nothing.
It would have been good if NASA and Russia had been free to work together to get the Russian Shuttle fully operational, but US law prohibited any such international project at the time and still interferes horribly with collaboration with other nations today. You don't do space solo. You especially don't do space solo on a shoestring budget, a packet of airline peanuts and a promise by Government appointees to not blow you up next time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The only access to the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz, right now, and this will remain the case for at least 20 years - the time it'll take for a functional Shuttle replacement to be designed, built, tested and launched given the current available funding (or lack thereof), the very limited number of rocket designers in the US (rockets are updated regularly, but when was the last time the US actually invented one from scratch through to completion?) and the extreme age of all existing launch facilities.
If a Soyuz carrying US astronauts reaches orbit but cannot dock with the ISS, the astronauts will be stranded. There's no rescue service possible. (Even with the Shuttle, there was a case where Russia almost did lose a Soyuz capsule with astronaut in space - it would have taken far too long for a Shuttle to have been readied and the altitude would have made it extremely difficult if not impossible.) More likely, if a stage failed, the rocket would be remotely destroyed along with the crew. Or it would smear itself over the landscape with much the same effect. We're increasingly aware that space is unsafe, but nobody is willing to stump up the cash to make it safe enough. It would also require total trust and cooperation between the US and Russia - and that would be political suicide for anyone in either country to suggest, let alone try.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)