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Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
In 1983, a Soyuz rocket exploded on the launch pad. The crew was lifted to safety by the launch escape system, and there don't seem to be reports about any casualties on the ground due to this this incident.
Get your facts straight. USSR has existed for 73 years and despite many people think otherwise, Stalin died in 1953 and Stalinism died with him, thanks to Khrushchev.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'. The reason they use hydrazine is, l-hyd isn't that easy to handle. Fact is, it's a real pain in the ass. You have to store it in a Thermos tank, vented for the boiloff. You can't hope to store it for more than a few hours in a 'fuel tank' on a rocket. Hydrazine can be handled in ambient room temperature, it's already liquid. Saves weight as well on the tankage, you only have to insulate the liquid oxygen. And let's not even go into the problems of cryogenically frozen pump components when dealing with pumping l-hyd. Lox is bad enough, but l-hyd is liquid at -253C thereabouts, almost absolute zero. Materials do strange things at that temperature range...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Actually if you read your history, and not just the American propaganda spins on history, then you'd know that for most of his tenure Khrushchev was trying to open things up and be more liberal, with artists and commerce being allowed much more freedom for the majority of his rule, which is why he ended up getting run out on a rail in favor of Brezhnev who was more a classical Soviet style communist which was much more what the old party heads wanted. Of course what followed was a long period of stagnation that was later named the Brezhnev stagnation which lasted for the most part all the way up to the fall of the wall.
As for TFA it just shows that money can't buy common sense or as we say in the south "Give a billion to white trash and all you get is white trash with a lot of money" or if this case give a ton of money to a dufus and you get a dufus with the money to do really dumb ubernerd things.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.