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Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort
An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"
I read the headline like some anonymous oligarch pledged the money out of its own pocket...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
It sure would be nice if this served as a wake up call to Congress. Our space program could use some attention too (...the good kind).
Yeah, we can get a new macbook for a euro now a days. It kinda sucks because everything costs 1 eurocent, which is a little over 13 USD. You pretty much have to buy in bulk.
Currently allocated budget for 2013 is $5.6 bn
Considering $51.8bn is going to be spent during 7 years then it is less than 5% growth per year.
Keeping in mind the inflation, there is no groowth at all!
The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by the catastrophic collapse of the USSR
Fact: the USSR basically owned space lock, stock, and barrel.
For perspective: the USSR was the first to put a person in space, the first to launch a satellite and the first to place an autonomous rover on the moon. they also invented the ion engine, the space suit, space food, the space station salyut 1, the luna 1 space probe, and quixotically the baikonur cosmodrome. they landed a rover on mars 30 years ago. the USSR was, for lack of more appropriate descriptor, the swinging dick of technology and science. at least until america decided with the truman doctrine to embark on a 45 year mission to shit all over it.
but hey. at least theyre not communist anymore.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Putin his money where his mouth is.
($51.8 billion, 38 million euros)
Am I missing something, or has the exchange rate really gotten that bad for the dollar?
According to this converter it is 39.6 million - but the same ballpark
a "Billion" in the US isnt the same as a "billion" in the EU. Most euro countries use the term "Billion" to mean a million million, which is the US "Trillion".
Not that it makes it right, since a Million is the same in the US and EU. They should have said "38 thousand million euros" or "38 milliard euros".
When I went to high school in the 1950s, we were were in an arms race and a space race with the Soviet Union.
A bunch of clever educators -- here and in the USSR -- used the the arms race to get broad support for science education. That was the easiest time I can think of to get a good education without too much money. Some of the best colleges, like CCNY, were free. The state university systems and land-grant colleges were almost free. They had to be. We were competing with Moscow University.
None of this bullshit about going into debt for the rest of your life to pay for college tuition. I got scholarships. Go read the autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web sites. Lots of scientists say they never could have afforded to go to college if it wasn't free.
They were spending money on basic science then like they're spending money on the military today. And there was a lot of spillover into the rest of education.
The Democrats and Republicans were competing with each other to see who could spend more for scientific research. They put a lot of money into basic research -- and it worked.
The one thing the Soviet Union did well was their education system. Talk about German rocket scientists. How many Soviet scientists and engineers came here during the 1980s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin
If competition is good, the Soviets were the best competitors we could have had. America would probably be better off if they were still here.
NASA internal shuttle replacement has slipped from 2014 to 2018 already. If I was a betting man, I'd double the time again.
I wouldn't bet on NASA ever completing a Shuttle replacement. And I am on occasion a betting man. I think by 2018, we're going to see performance deterioration with the Space Launch System (SLS) like was seen with the Ares I rocket design. Politically driven paper rockets suffer greatly when real engineers start looking at the design and someone actually starts to bend metal for them.
For example, they're still chained to ATK's solid rocket motors. I don't think they'll see thrust oscillation issues like the Ares I had (they're using the same trick that the Shuttle used to limit thrust oscillation), but they still have at least two big problems - the mass and risk of solid rocket motors.
That leads to several major infrastructure issues. First, expensive vehicle integration facilities are exposed to considerably more risk. If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites on a launchpad, you probably will be able to recover most of the pad. If not you can always have a back up one ready to keep the launch tempo going.
If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites in the Vehicle Assembly Building, you just lost a key part of your launch infrastructure and can't do anything until you make a new one in a few years. That incidentally should give you a good idea of how screwy NASA can be about risk management.
If that solid rocket motor ruptures shortly after launch, it will create a hotter and more dangerous fireball than a liquid fuel equivalent. Any crew on board would have to have a faster escape system to get further away from the fireball. That means more mass taken away from a payload and more risk to the crew. It also puts deeper constraints on launch trajectories to achieve that "manned certificate".
As I mentioned solid rocket motors are heavy. Because they are mounted in vehicle integration, they have to be carried as part of the vehicle stack all the way to the launch pad. You add at least 1,000 tons to the mass of the resulting vehicle and much more than double the weight you have to move (liquid propellants are pumped in on the pad). But if you had used liquid fueled rockets all the way, you could wheel it up on a heavy duty rail, faster and cheaper.
Similarly, they have lower ISP than liquid fuel rockets (though a bit more thrust). You need a higher mass fraction and hence more propellant mass overall for the same dry and payload mass.
Another traditional area of performance deterioration is cost per launch. Currently, I believe they are claiming half a billion per launch. I think, once you include fixed costs per year and the really low launch frequency of three a year, that the revised estimate per launch will end being well on the other side of a billion dollars - and they'll still be at least years away from launching.
By that time, we should have a working Falcon Heavy rocket which puts 50 metric tons in LEO for far less per kg than the SLS can ever manage. I think the SLS at that point will make so little sense politically, economically, and financially, that they'll deep six it.