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Russia Bans US Use of Its Rocket Engines For Military Launches
schwit1 sends word that Russia will now ban U.S. military satellite launches using Russian-made rockets. According to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, this is retaliation for U.S. sanctions on high-tech items, put in place because of the dispute in the Ukraine. Rogozin also threatened to block U.S. plans to keep using the International Space Station beyond its 2020 mission end date. That's not all: 'Rogozin also said Russia will suspend the operation of GPS satellite navigation system sites in Russia from June and seek talks with Washington on opening similar sites in the United States for Russia's own system, Glonass. He threatened the permanent closure of the GPS sites in Russia if that is not agreed by September.'
Ok kids, everyone under your desk.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
This might be one of the best things to happen for SpaceX.
Wasn't it nice when at least space programs still worked together and were kind of outside the scope of international quarrels. Astronauts working together, at least to me, were a symbol of how we were still all civilized people who had a lot of common interests and could work together peacefully.
I believe they are talking about ground stations that are physically located in Russia. My understanding is that since they are fixed points on the earth that they can be used to calibrate the GPS signals/clocks to be more accurate when they are passing over that area of the world.
you should know by now that mother Russia has multiple personality disorder.
"That's right...I said it."
All HTTP connections to US websites will be redirected to a youtube video of Putin striking manly poses while riding on top of a grizzly bear.
We need to bring back the NASA programs and other things that are vital to national security in house rather then outsourcing to the lowest bidders...
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They are talking about the GPS ground stations that monitors the GPS signals (and is programed with its exact position and altitude) and determine what corrections, if any, need to be made to the GPS signals (so that what it knows to be its correct position is the same as what its GPS receiver is telling it)
Russia wants similar ground stations set up in the US for their GLONASS system, which I think is fair (and good for users of navigation systems, if not for the US military which would like to be able to turn off Russia's navigation systems).
One of the primary reasons given is that space exploration (in particular the highly speculative Mars mission SpaceX continues to look into) are high risk long term ventures and they don't want to be beholden to investors to meet quarterly numbers. To which I say put it in the company bylaws, mission statement, and investment prospectus and let the investors decide. I would love the chance to invest in a high risk, high reward, long term thinking company. There are so incredibly few of them out there, it would be a refreshing change of pace to force investors to look 10 years a head instead of 10 weeks.
This is exactly why comparative advantage is complete BS. When you let another foreign entity control your means of whatever it may be (rocketd, iPhones, car parts, tools, etc etc) you lose that ability to utilize it when the political poo hits the fan.
Watch the space shuttle program make a dramatic re-appearance. This is a massive national security issue that I bet no one brought up when they decided, "Gee, lets go and outsource our rockets and launches to a foreign power we've had cold relations with since the early 20th century."
This is what happens when people look solely at the bottom line. It gets a little hard to project your power into a region when that same region makes most of your equipment (I'm looking at you China!).
Russia has its own system called Glonass. Most modern navigation devices support it because all the GPS modules implemented it when Russia decided to impose massive import duty on GPS only devices. They probably wouldn't be hurt by GPS because Glonass is adequate for civilian use and the military would never trust GPS to begin with.
It won't just affect Russia either, it will affect nearby countries. If the GPS system can't be maintained with new satellites it will eventually degrade and fail, but presumably the US has a backup plan to keep it going with different launch vehicles. I imagine there will be some considerable cost involved though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The sanctions and bans clearly will not work to defuse the Ukraine crisis. The Russian public has bought into Putin's nationalist rhetoric. Putin completely controls the political discourse in the mass media within Russia. This year, Kremlin increased pressure even on web based news, social networks, and blogs. Every Western sanction is met with a counter-sanction from the Russian side. The Russian economy and standards of living may suffer (some have serious doubts about the effectiveness of these sanctions), but I don't think they will make Russia back away.
Moreover, it's not clear what is the goal of the western sanctions as their goal is often amorphously described as "deescalate the situation in Ukraine". What does this mean? Russians think that annexation of Crimea is a done deal. Not just Putin, average Russians too. They certainly won't back away from that. As for the instability in east Ukraine, it's not clear how you prove who is escalating what right now? The locals in East Ukraine are certainly as pissed off at Kiev as it gets, specially after deadly Odesa clashes and the coup in Kiev. I don't think they need a lot of encouragement from Putin at this point.
The best way to defuse the crisis in Ukraine, is to help this country rebuild its democratic institutions and economy. While Ukraine is viewed as the victim in this dispute, its government must do more to accommodate the concerns of its Russian-speaking citizens in the East regions. For one, they should be allowed to elect their local government officials.
Then Russia would just be hurting itself as the satellites around the rest of world will continue to function.
IIRC, Russia has a law requiring all domestically produced/sold GPS devices to support GLONASS.
Turning off the GPS ground stations wouldn't anything to limit Russian's use of GPS/GLONASS devices.
Worst case scenario, it could limit precision for devices that actively use both satellites to derive the location.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
GPS is normally only accurate to within a few yards, and when the system was opened up to civilian use in the late 90's the military put in a discrepancy to the civilian signals so that they'd be off by a few dozen yards.
Then someone hit upon the idea of checking GPS against a known good reading.
GPS base stations do this. They know where they are, exactly. They listen to the GPS satellites report of where the satellites think they are, then broadcast the margin of error out to nearby GPS receivers. As a result, the accuracy of the readings can be gotten exact down to a few feet.
So successful was this that the military eventually discarded the idea of putting in an intentional margin of error for civilian signals.
I think the intent is to get more Russians to use Russia's GPS equivalent.
Kill shuttles, kill the DC-X, kill spaceplanes, kill research, find the cheapest possible source of launchers. Make a business out of manned spaceflight. So now we're hostage to Russia, because they were cheaper than building a reusable launch system. SpaceX ain't ready yet. So, we're screwed. May Elon Musk get what he wishes for, and may he be able to deliver. Next month.
I have no faith in our leaders here in the US or in the EU to stop Putin.
Stop him from doing what, exactly?
So far, we have a bunch of former Soviet satellites holding referendums on independence. Pooty hasn't actually "done" anything yet.
This makes the US and EU situation particularly laughable - Whether or not Crimea really wants to join Russia or not, we have imposed sanctions against private individuals because unrelated third parties held protest-votes that make the UN look bad. And the closest we can come to even calling those votes/referendums illegal, they violate the will of a group of thugs who overthrew the legitimate, democratically elected Ukraine government a few months ago.
We need to stay the fuck out of this debacle before we start WW3 over literally nothing.
The RD-180 is used by ULA for all their heavy lift rockets.
ULA has a stockpile of them that will last at least a few years but until the SLS with the F1-B or the Falcon Heavy with the Merlin fly the RD-180 is the only heavy lift engine we have.
The closest second is the Falcon 9 which is already using Merlin engines but it is running about 40% of the lift capiability of the largest ULA rockets. If the Falcon Heavy is ever launched then SpaceX will have a launch vehicle that can finally put the RD-180 to rest. Likewise when the SLS launches it could replace the heavy lift rockets from ULA but it's not being designed for LEO operations.
Not just feet anymore. I work with a product that is accurate within a few centimeters. Civilians have access to it.
A GNSS primer:
GPS will still function fine. It's a cold war technology: it was designed with the understanding that Russia would try to thwart it, not maintain it. There is zero danger that it will "degrade and fail" without Russian support. Ground stations are useful because they are known positions which should be very constant moment-to-moment (though there can be inches of movement in the long term). That makes it good for calibrating out error. The sort of errors it's good for calibrating out are pretty much only notable at the cm level, if you are actually in Russia. Russians with GPS systems won't notice.
GLONASS is the Russian program. It pretty much JUST covers Russia. It covers it well, making it good enough for civilian use. But then again, so is GPS, even without Russian ground stations. The notion of adding GLONASS ground sites in the U.S. is kind of meaningless. They could put up satellites that actually provide good coverage of the U.S., but I can't imagine any real tactical or economic advantage. It's saber-rattling aimed at people who don't know what they're talking about.
Meanwhile GPS is long in the tooth. Planned errors are inserted into the signal to degrade performance if you don't have the "key" to correct for them... but any government who cared to have military-grade GPS has it, either through the black market in Israel, or basic reverse engineering and intelligence. As such, the U.S. actually offered the proverbial keys to it's allies (read: everyone, especially Europe), but Europeans decided that they could not stand to ride the U.S.'s coat tails. They want an independent, European-controlled GNSS system. (This is not imprudent, as the current NSA- and Ukraine-related tensions show.) This is when they started pouring more money into Galileo. This was originally envisaged as a 50/50 joint public/private venture, but no companies actually stepped up to take part in the expensive R&D effort of re-building something that already exists. It is now a (very underfunded and behind schedule) 80% public venture.
Meanwhile, governments that may become unfriendly in the future -- like China, which always speaks of "when we invade Taiwan", never "IF we invade Taiwan" -- can't trust anything that the U.S. might shut off. Hence, they are building out their own system, BeiDou. The main focus of their "limited" version of the system was obviously South China Sea, but they supposedly plan a global build-out.
Except that basically all phones on the market have been dual-constellation (or more, some support Galileo too) since early 2012 or so.
Russia put MASSIVE import taxes on navigation devices that didn't support GLONASS, so all phone manufacturers switched to dual-constellation chips as it was FAR cheaper than the tax penalty.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Last thing I read about this, the secret sauce in these engines, is the metallurgy -- the Russians have developed alloys that allow them to run them oxidiser-rich without everything getting destroyed by the extremely corrosive preburner exhaust. You can build as many engines as you want, if you don't have the recipe and process, you're literally going to go nowhere.
man, Americans are learning a lot of geography lately...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Any payload launched with Atlas V can be launched with one of the Delta IV rockets. That was the whole purpose of the EELV program to begin with. The problem is a lot of payloads are dimensioned to fit in a Lockheed Martin Atlas V with Russian RD-180 engines and won't fit into anything smaller than the Boeing Delta IV Heavy with US RS-68 engines and the Delta IV Heavy costs... a lot.
As one of about 3 operators who turned it off in early 1990s, your information is a bit dated. The signal isn't degraded, but the mathmatical solution WAS. However, after the Russians shot down a civilian airliner (aren't Russians AWESOME!) President Reagan made the decision to turn it off, and it was implmented a few years later. We sent the "SA/AS = 0" (or turned it off) and "Bias=0" (or turned any bias amount to zero) commands around 1993. SA is Selective Availability. AS is Anti-Spoofing. Spoofing is the process where someone pretends to be GPS to throw your solution off, or they might jam to just outright deny usage. Your keys comment might also confuse as we (the US) can also encrypt GPS signals. Meaning AS turns on keys, SA turns on bias. They are mutually exclusive, as AS denies usage (aka, encryption) and SA denies precision (aka, dilution of precision).
In terms of economic impact on US it is pretty toothless. ULA has already stated that they have two year supply of RD-180 engines and that they are perfectly capable of manufacturing the engines themselves. The reasons for buying these engines from Russia are mostly political - US supports Russian engineers so they don't go and build rockets in Iran. On the other hand Elon Musk must be laughing out loud. The Russians just created the perfect political environment for the congress to act and allow SpaceX to compete with ULA for military satellite launches, something that only few days back was made impossible by a court decision. Good job Ruskies, you just open the door for your most aggressive competitor.
As far as the shutting down GPS ground stations in Russia goes, this will only impact the accuracy of the system on Russian territory. So the only way somebody in US may feel pain is if they fall off their chairs laughing.
Yes, but the link you provide also shows there are NO GPS monitoring stations in Russia. Ascension and Kwaj Islands, Diego Garcia, Colorado Springs, Hawaii, and Cape Canaveral. Ground Antennas are about 5 of those (drop Hawaii, Cape, and Colo Sprngs). Hence, none of the sites that affect GPS are Eastern Europe or Russia. Remember, GPS was originally built during Reagan's years, before the Cold War ended.
Presumably Elon wants to build rockets, not have another company owned by Wall Street where profit is all that matters. You can put it in the bylaws all you want, but the first time the CEO makes a decision for the long term health of the company rather than short term profits, the major shareholder will get together and sue him out of existence.
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GLONASS is the Russian program. It pretty much JUST covers Russia
My Nexus 4 in the UK regularly picks up Glonass GPS satellites. I guess I'm not that far from Russia...
Unless they actually believe the crap they see on state sponsored TV and really think they are the good guys stopping an evil Nazi regime sponsored the US and A to bully innocent Ukrainians and Russia?
The short answer is: they do.
In the Spanish-Mayan conflict, both sides committed atrocities at about the same level of barbarity, in my opinion.
There was one significant difference: The Mayans never invaded and conquered Spain.
Putin apologists remind me of battered wives. If only you could stop making him mad, everything would be okay.
There's a reason why Eastern Europe was rushing to try to join NATO. And they were right. They're going to be rushing even harder now.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.