Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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).