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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."
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.
Triple the vodka for ruskies!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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?
So the Ruskies follow the Ballmer Peak when it comes to rocket building?
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
Ultimately I think we need to be trying radical new ideas as both us and the ruskies are basically using the same tech we stole off the Nazis at the end of WWII. We are never gonna get very far using nothing but chemical rockets and the cost per pound even after improvements is frankly nuts so we need to be working on tech that will let us launch material cheaply and effectively so we can then look beyond the moon towards mars and maybe even the outer planets. If we could send up the pieces via space gun we could then assemble the rocket in LEO and with a little luck we might even end up with a Mars base in our lifetime, but sticking with chemical rockets I doubt we're gonna be able to move the amount of cargo we'd need to be moving to make longer trips feasible.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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)
You really don't understand the maintenance of alcoholism, do you? To much booze, and they're worthless. To little booze, and they are worse than worthless. You have to know the individual alcoholic, and maintain him at the proper level for maximum production, while keeping an eye on that weak link, the liver. At some point, the liver will fail, but you want to maximize production, while balancing a possible reduction of useful life.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
The atmosphere is the problem with cannon-style launches as Bull proposed. The higher up you can position the muzzle of your launcher, the less muzzle velocity you need, and therefore the less energy you need, and the less accelleration the payload must endure, and the less heat the projectile must resist. So an island at sea level is the very worst place to position your laucher (save perhaps for Death Valley).
Inside a mountain in the Himalayas or Rockies would be a far better choice, with the muzzle emerging at the peak which is already halfway out of the atmosphere (and completely out of the dense, dusty, insect-filled, and humid part of the atmosphere).
The launch accelleration is a more serious constraint than probably any other aspect of the project.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
There's also a limit to how much an ablative heat shield can endure. After a certain point, the contents behind the heat shield will bake.
It would be best if the mountain was near water so that if there's a launch failure there's less danger of ground casualties and it also gives a splashdown option for the astronauts.
Perhaps Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a good spot for such a launch. It's near the equator too so there would be a little extra velocity from the rotation of the earth for a prograde orbit.