A Mysterious Piece of Russian Space Junk Does Maneuvers

schwit1 writes What was first thought to be a piece of debris left over from the launch of three Russian military communication satellites has turned out to be a fourth satellite capable of maneuvers: "The three satellites were designated Kosmos-2496, -2497, -2498. However, as in the previous launch on December 25, 2013, the fourth unidentified object was detected orbiting the Earth a few kilometers away from 'routine' Rodnik satellites. Moreover, an analysis of orbital elements from a US radar by observers showed that the 'ghost' spacecraft had made a maneuver between May 29 and May 31, 2014, despite being identified as 'debris' (or Object 2014-028E) in the official U.S. catalog at the time. On June 24, the mysterious spacecraft started maneuvering again, lowering its perigee (lowest point) by four kilometers and lifting its apogee by 3.5 kilometers. Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."

This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the "junk" was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite's maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications.

Comments

Send up the CIA Space Shuttle

[Anonymous Coward]

We should just send the CIA space shuttle up after this thing and bring it down to examine it.

And then we stick our balls in its mouth and tell it to lick our asshole until we ejaculate.

Re:Send up the CIA Space Shuttle

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet space program, you lick probe!

Maneuverabilty of Cubesat

[Anonymous Coward]

So what have we learned here today? Another mirky reason to not trust this government no matter what they say. Sound familiar?

Oh noes! Russkies at it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shall we bring up the X-37B and its lengthy stay in space and everything it got up to out there, or would that be sedition?

Jeez, just come clean

[50000BTU_barbecue]

It's pretty crowded up there, can we still afford to play "1965 Cold War" in 2014?

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[JoeMerchant]

Take a sailboat out in the South Pacific sea, get 500 miles from any port, and tell me how crowded the ocean surface (a 2D structure) feels.

The only thing that's crowded about space is the delta-V, there's plenty of room, but you really want that when relative velocities can be > 1 km/sec.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Savage-Rabbit]

It's pretty crowded up there, can we still afford to play "1965 Cold War" in 2014?

People like you are the personification of what's wrong with America today! While you latte slurping liberal intellectuals are debating history down here, the capability gap is widening, the Russians are winning the maneuverable space junk race. What we should be doing is get some maneuverable junk of our own so send your old VHS players, Pentium PCs, CRT monitors, ... to NASA so they can bolt thrusters to our old junk and and fire it into orbit by the meteric ton. I say, let's teach those commie pinko Russki bastards a lesson!

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Orbits are actually 1D structures.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

General Turgidson, sir, please login with your real name, sir!

Re: Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

We cannot allow... a maneuverable space junk gap!
-Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the orbits are 4-dimensional trajectories of various structures. In orthonormal basis, the spatial dimensions are usually referred as x, y and z, and the t is known as 'time'.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[CrimsonAvenger]

Orbits are actually 1D structures.

I find myself curious - what one dimension do you think describes any particular orbit?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to describe an orbit that doesn't include (as a minimum) a mass (properly, two masses, but for satellite orbits in particular, the mass of the satellite is trivial compared to the mass of the primary, and can be ignored), a position vector, a velocity vector, and a time that those three values were valid....

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: It's Russians choosing to replay the cold war. We have little choice but to match it.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[50000BTU_barbecue]

We're not talking about any particular orbit, we're talking about communication satellites in GEO. It's a straight line mapped on a sphere close to its equator.
Each useful GEO orbit is a line on that sphere. A line is 1D. It's crowded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Satellites in geostationary orbit must all occupy a single ring above the Equator."

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Orbit (without taking into account all non gravitational effects) are straight lines in space-time curved by mass. Straight lines are 1D structure, even in non euclidean geometry.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Sun]

GP assumes that the Earth's mass is the Earth's mass (i.e. - an orbital around Earth). I am not aware of any affect the mass of the satellite has on its trajectory, so I'm not sure why you included it.

Which leaves us, in your analysis, three parameters. Vector of position, vector of velocity, and a time scalar. Let's call it a trajectory triplet. This results in 7D trajectory space. Those three are not, however, orthogonal (or even linearly independent).

Just as an isolated example, take a certain satellite triplet. Then take that same satellite's triplet a few seconds later. None of the values of the triplet are the same, and yet it obviously describes the same trajectory.

I am not an astrophysics, so I will not claim absolute knowledge in this field. My limited understanding suggests that all trajectories pass around the equator. Furthermore, for a satellite doing a perfect circle, the speed (scalar) is a direct function of its height. We can, therefor, narrow down the trajectory parameters to:
Height when over the equator
degree of elevation above said height
degree of descent below said height
angle crossing the equator
two phase scalars (one of accounting where above the equator we are talking about, and the other for accounting the possibility of two satellites following each other in the same trajectory).

That's 6 scalars (as opposed to your 2 vectors and two scalars). As far as I can tell (but see disclaimer above), those six are orthogonal. I am not 100% sure the two phases are, indeed, orthogonal, but I am fairly sure you can arbitrarily change any one (or more) of the others and still get a valid and different trajectory.

Still not one dimensional (not sure where that came from), but at least one dimension less than you claimed it was.

Shachar

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Sun]

On reflection, I need to cut down a dimension from my calculation as well.

The minimal and maximal heights can be replaced by the speed (scalar) of the satellite when crossing the equator.

So 5D at most.

Shachar

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Next question.

Despite what you've been lead to believe, the Cold War is hardly over. Google "Ukraine Crimea Russia," it will blow your mind. The only reason we didn't intervene directly was nuclear armageddon. Putin even loudly mentioned that they were a nuclear power and ready to use their nukes.... during the middle of the crisis. Or "south china sea dispute." The US sent ships there a year ago as a show of force. Google "china carrier killer" because between that and their nuclear arsenal, they totally aren't trying to intimidate the US into allowing them to bully their neighbors like Taiwan or the Phillipines. If you put the headlines from these stories into a cold-war era newspaper, you wouldn't think they're out of place unless you knew they had actually happened the other day.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be fascinated to know how you came up with that.

The minimum I can think of to mathematically describe a rather strange, effectively impossible orbit (apogee=perigee, on precisely the same plane as equator) is the radius (altitude). But that's assuming the object is a giant Halo ring (like, out of the game) wrapped around the earth. For a real satellite, you have to parametrize the orbit, since the object is effectively a point in space, so you have to factor time and position as well, making three dimensions, minimum.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cute. You think the Russians are the only ones telling lies.

Hate to break the bad news to you but America has become more known for keeping secrets from its allies these days. Maybe you might have heard of a certain Bradley Manning? The name Edward Snowden ring any bells?

The good ol' US of A is already stealing the secrets and the private communications of every person on earth that they can monitor. No country is under obligation to share any of its secrets at this point because the Americans have already made it clear that they'll just steal what they can't have.

Sounds like what you're really worried about is that even despite all this ubiquitous surveillance, despite the assurances of your elected officials, there are some things that the world can still hide from you...and keep hidden until it's too late for you to do anything about.

Sleep tight!

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[sphealey]

I'm not sure why Ars Technica took their well-written article about the Soviet decision to build the Buran off-line, but IIRC that was essentially the logic the Soviets were following at the time. All their calculations told them the Space Shuttle was a loser, but the Americans were building one so surely they must know something we don't.... 20 billion rubles down the drain.

sPh

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

"While you latte slurping liberal intellectuals are debating history down here..." You obese no-science Republitards are pretending history has nothing to teach us...

Re: Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does having allies mean that you share all of your secrets with them? Do your closests friends know all of your personal secrets, financial info, etc?

Also, please cite one example of the U.S. stealing information or IP and using it for commercial gain over a foreign entity. That is exactly the game that the Chinese are playing. I've worked for three companies that have had to deal with significant IP loss due to Chinese exfiltrating our data. Regardless of how you feel about the intelligence issue, the economic espionage and theft of IP should be of far greater concern.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Space Shuttle is NOT a loser if you can use it to grab the Other Guy's 3-billion-currency-unit recon satellite with it and bring it back to the ground for reverse-engineering.

I am not saying they ever did this, but surely they had the CAPABILITY.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

or 1d when you know what you are talking about

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[CrimsonAvenger]

for a satellite doing a perfect circle

A satellite "doing a perfect circle" is an imaginary satellite.

I'm not an astrophysics guy either, but my two vectors and one scalar (plus mass(es) of primary (and satellite)) is something I took from an old astrophysics textbook I still have laying around.

Just as an isolated example, take a certain satellite triplet. Then take that same satellite's triplet a few seconds later. None of the values of the triplet are the same, and yet it obviously describes the same trajectory.

Note that the fact that multiple triplets can describe the same orbit in no way implies that a particular triplet does not describe a particular orbit.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that is so terrible. Because the U.S. only made war on something like 20 states since 1990. Devastating many of them. If Russia were as bad as America, they would park 30 of their intermediate-range missiles in Iran and Syria and tell you to simply fuck off or have Mecca and your carriers roasted.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Lumpy]

A cascade up there would be quite nice, in a few thousand years it would flatten to a very pretty set of rings arond the planet.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Lumpy]

No it's not. there are HUGE GAPS in the Geosync orbit. if there was something every 6 arc seconds, then I'd agree with you, but there's not. and honestly a lot of really old crap up there needs to be deorbited and replaced. The problem is all the companies are pulling "profits are the utmost mission" bullshit and not advancing communications like they should be.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[X0563511]

I'm pretty sure that ANY orbit around one body is going to be a conic section.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[X0563511]

Let me save you some brainpower.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's a good question... if you can build a super-expensive craft that could withstand smaller space junk, would the cost be outweighed by the advantage?

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy right here... what a guy, this guy.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[sphealey]

Yeah, that's the scenario that affected every design choice on the Space Shuttle and led to the building of the Vandenburg shuttle pad. Many problems with it, including the one where it invites a strike by the grab-ee on the landing site leading directly to a Dr. Strangelove situation.

sPh

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can think of them as 6D trajectories through phase space (x,y,z, and v_x, v_y, and v_z).

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can call them bubblemints. And they're alright, but personally I prefer Winterfresh.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[TapeCutter]

It's a straight line mapped on a sphere close to its equator....A line is 1D

Yes but the sphere is spinning on it's axis and orbiting a point between itself and the moon. That earth-moon-satellite system orbits the sun, which in turn orbits the center of the milky way, which itself is dancing with andromeda. So you see, the actual line is more like a noodly appendage than a stick of raw spaghetti, it can only be described in 3 spacial dimensions + 1 time dimension.

Re: Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

That's assuming that you are defining your datum at the center of axis between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. If your datum is at the center of earth's geoid, and the satellite is in geosynchronous orbit, then it's a just a 1D path about 265,000 km long.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[bloodhawk]

Firstly that so called little line is over 200,000 kilometers long. Secondly it ISN'T a straight line, there is a relatively large various (these objects are all farely small and a line "close" to the equator leaves a very large amount of space for them to play in. The ocean is thousands of times more crowded, go out in the middle of the ocean, you will be lucky to even see another boat let alone be at a huge risk of a collision.

Re: Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because satellites do perfect station keeping because there is no cost or shortage of fuel, and their orbit is not perturbed by the shape of the Earth, and the other bodies in the Solar system...

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we also know how they do it with the Drone Shuttle:

Launch, move to target, which is no longer transmitting because of age. Eject decoy. Grab original. Bring back to earth. Decoy soon burns in atmosphere. Everybody is feeling happy.

Bonus points if you can figure how they make the target sat look disfunctional. I guess it is a small Jamming Sat flying very close to the target sat.

That was easy.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[cyn1c77]

Actually, the orbits are 4-dimensional trajectories of various structures. In orthonormal basis, the spatial dimensions are usually referred as x, y and z, and the t is known as 'time'.

The GP's point was that satellite orbits are elliptical and thus can be specified with less than four dimensions.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[FatLittleMonkey]

There's nowhere near the mass required to create visible rings. We'd need to break up a decent size asteroid, say a few trillion tonnes, just to get wispy crap like the rings around Uranus.

[Saturn's rings mass about 30,000 times more than that. If they were collected into a single object, would make a medium sized moon or very large asteroid, about 400km wide.]

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[pellik]

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the 'milky way'

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars It's a hundred thousand light years side to side It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Altoids kick your mints.

Re: Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Orbits are a human constructed word they can be said to be of any number of dimensions. What is applicable for a certain calculation is different. But be certain that we will always have a hard time understanding eachother, when trying to define things exactly.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone didn't get the joke... It's also not fair to say the Republicans are anti-science; they tend to be more on board with vaccinations and GMOs. Both large US parties have problems accepting science that they don't like for other reasons.

Re:Jeez, just come clean

[Anonymous Coward]

We haven't declared war since WWII. Many of the interventions since 1990 were to stop genocides, and were carried out with approval from the international community. Of the rest, yep, that's bad on us. We are rebuilding Iraq though, and we haven't seized territory for ourselves like the Russians did.

No big issue

[benjfowler]

It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.

Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.

Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.

fak'in bot.

Re:No big issue

[X.25]

It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.

Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.

Mongoloids like you are the reason I barely read any news these days.

Re:No big issue

[ColdWetDog]

The recurrent weakness in US military thinking (and procuring) is that small numbers of fancy, high tech stuff can beat large numbers of low tech things.

That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.

Who is going to be raising vodka shots when the 10 million dollar piece of space junk annihilates a 10 billion dollar XB-37?

Re:No big issue

[ColdWetDog]

XB-37,,,,

That might have been a Freudian slip. Let's try X-37b.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.

So much for these mythical space spinoffs, eh?

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.

Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.

You must be an American. Ignorance is your name.

Re:No big issue

[ka9dgx]

The recurrent weakness in US military thinking (and procuring) is that small numbers of fancy, high tech stuff can beat large numbers of low tech things.

This is also the same reason the Nazis tanks lost their battle against he Russians... most of them failed due to mechanical problems, only a smaller amount of them were destroyed in combat. One might almost think that all those scientists from Project Paperclip infected us with the need to do fancy things.

Re:No big issue

[ganjadude]

all depends on what milestones matter to who is giving the talk actually. 45 years and the US is STILL the only country to have put men on the moon

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Captured German scientists did that, not Americans.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful grandpa, put the saber down, remember last time!!

Re:No big issue

[fustakrakich]

That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.

Actually those wars were "lost" because the US didn't apply the necessary brutality it takes to win a war. Public relations, not high technology, is the determining factor.

Re:No big issue

[SuricouRaven]

He may have a point though. Russia is one of those countries where one man pretty much dicates things: What Putin orders, Russia does. He depends upon maintaining a high level of national pride and patriotism, which is aided by showboating exercises. I doubt that's the case here, because it's just not being shown off - if this were a stunt, Putin would be proclaiming it on state TV, not trying to deny it.

It's a satellite. It's small. It's secret. So the obvious theories are more likely: It's probably a test platform for something Russia doesn't want rival countries to find out about, either because it has military applications or commercial applications. Maybe it's a new anti-sat weapon, or Russia is conducting their own tests on new thruster technologies.

Re:No big issue

[Tom]

Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.

Re:No big issue

[93 Escort Wagon]

Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.

Every person I know that has been to Russia - including a number of people who left the Soviet Union to live in the west - seem to share that assessment.

It sounds like it's somewhat better there now than in the 1970s though.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The US space program isn't as behind as you think and also not as clueless about the Russian sats as you think.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, more even? Like... NBQ?

Good luck with that approach. Don't complain later when it come back to byte your very own ass in your very own home.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.

Not exactly. The Soviets tried to get to the moon in 1970, so 6 months after the american moon landing.
What killed the Soviet mission was the inability of the N-1 to not explode while going up. They even had a 1 man LEM module all ready for the landing on the moon.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.

Actually those wars were "lost" because the US didn't apply the necessary brutality it takes to win a war. Public relations, not high technology, is the determining factor.

We didn't "lose" the war in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden (we didn't really have a beef with the Taliban except that they wouldn't hand over bin Laden) and we accomplished both of those goals. Militarily we "won" in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The problem is, then we stuck around in both Iraq and Afghanistan for the wishy-washy goal of installing a stable democracy in a land that wouldn't recognize democracy if it bit'em on the ass. That's where we "lost". Although my impression is we came close in Iraq. Maybe if had kept a presence in Iraq, maybe in the northern part. The Kurds seem to have their act together.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

The world considered Russia a nation of potato farmers, then without warning they made the first ICBM, launched the first space satellite, the first creature in space, the first man in space, the first spacewalk, the first women in space, the first probe to the moon, the first lunar landing, the first moon rover, the first interplanetary probe. NASA and American commercial space ventures still uses Russian fucking rocket engines (admittedly Soviet designs but still the best).

I admit since going capitalist Russia isn't the amazing powerhouse it once was but to underestimate the potential of that place can only be due to having no knowledge of history.

Re:No big issue

[benjfowler]

The entire point of the X-37b, is that it's incredible value for money for what it does.

Re:No big issue

[fustakrakich]

I'm just saying it is foolish to say the US "lost" the war. It didn't happen that way. It was not a defeat, not when "winning" is not the goal. They walked away, and invested their energies elsewhere until the business climate became more suitable for investment, and now you see Coke and Pepsi. Riddle me this, did we actually "lose" the war?

On my other note, the war is not won until everybody surrenders. If you want to win, you do whatever it takes and use all of your resources at hand to make it quick. Otherwise you're just playing sadistic games, like a cat playing with its prey before killing and eating it.

Russia and China are wannabes. The petro-dollar rules the world. It is the center of the universe. Oceania will make sure it stays that way. This story is very movie like. Pieces of "junk" coming alive to attack. Who says obfuscation doesn't work? It only has to while the mission is in progress.

Re:No big issue

[benjfowler]

Concur. The notion that the US always loses wars is bullshit. Typically they achieve their military objectives in days, if not hours. And the casulties they take while doing so, are unbelievably low by historical standards. There is simply no comparison. If the Americans want to smash you, you're toast, no matter who you are.

Where these things are lost, is where politics gets involved: the utter catastrophe of the occupation in Iraq was brought to us by the utterly useless, moron American Right (mostly followers of Leo Strauss, who are criminally stupid, yet fancy themselves as philosopher-kings) and its lackeys, namely, Paul Bremer (who should be stabbed in the head because of his sheer stupidity -- EVERYTHING that right-wingers touched in Iraq turned to shit.)

Given the terrible leadership we see in the West these days, it's nothing compared to the joke the Russians must endure now. Everyone thinks that Putin is some kind of insane strategic genius and that he's playing chess while us stupid imperialists are playing checkers. See the state of their economy to decide for yourself whether or not this is actually true. At least when our moron leaders screw up, we can blame ourselves for electing them. The Russians, with their laughable Potemkin democracy, don't even get that.

Re:No big issue

[benjfowler]

Like the Soviet moon landings? Or the Soviet equivalent of the Viking or Pioneers probes?

Must've missed those. My bad.

Re:No big issue

[benjfowler]

The R7 was a straightforward extrapolation of the V-2. They had to change the fuel to synthetic kero, because the drunkard operators kept getting blind drunk on the rocket fuel.

Von Braun's team built mostly brand-new stuff.

Re: No big issue

[benjfowler]

Sadly, they only get their shit together in times of crisis.

In the meantime, they end up with people like Brezhnev, Yeltsin or Putin -- and they're massively the worse for it.

Re:No big issue

[fustakrakich]

We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden...

Yes, I'll accept that for the sake of argument that the mission was "accomplished".

...the wishy-washy goal of installing a stable democracy...

More like installing another, more complaint puppet regime. Let's not mince meat here. The locals know what the intentions are. They were not being offered "democracy". They only got an *offer they can't refuse*

Note, don't take any of this as singling anybody out. Empires are empires. Sure hope we have our own similarly rigged "junk" up there though. And we might want to relearn celestial navigation. Bombs in space are fairly indiscriminate. I'll assume the X-37 has lasers...

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem, you're an ignorant fucking American. The list of things you've missed is getting pretty long.

Here's a few other things you might have missed while you were too busy tracking the #gamergate controversy and masturbating. Try and keep up, yank, if you can. Direct from Wikipedia:

1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka
1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1
1957: First animal in Earth orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2
1959: First rocket ignition in Earth orbit, first man-made object to escape Earth's gravity, Luna 1
1959: First data communications, or telemetry, to and from outer space, Luna 1.
1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first man-made object in Heliocentric orbit, Luna 1
1959: First probe to impact the Moon, Luna 2
1959: First images of the moon's far side, Luna 3
1960: First animals to safely return from Earth orbit, the dogs Belka and Strelka on Sputnik 5.
1961: First probe launched to Venus, Venera 1
1961: First person in space (International definition) and in Earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, Vostok programme
1961: First person to spend over 24 hours in space Gherman Titov, Vostok 2 (also first person to sleep in space).
1962: First dual manned spaceflight, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4
1962: First probe launched to Mars, Mars 1
1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6
1964: First multi-person crew (3), Voskhod 1
1965: First extra-vehicular activity (EVA), by Aleksei Leonov,[19] Voskhod 2
1965: First probe to hit another planet of the Solar system (Venus), Venera 3
1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9
1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10
1967: First unmanned rendezvous and docking, Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188.
1968: First living beings to reach the Moon (circumlunar flights) and return unharmed to Earth, Russian tortoises on Zond 5
1969: First docking between two manned craft in Earth orbit and exchange of crews, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5
1970: First soil samples automatically extracted and returned to Earth from another celestial body, Luna 16
1970: First robotic space rover, Lunokhod 1 on the Moon.
1970: First data received from the surface of another planet of the Solar system (Venus), Venera 7
1971: First space station, Salyut 1
1971: First probe to impact the surface of Mars, Mars 2
1971: First probe to land on Mars, Mars 3
1975: First probe to orbit Venus, to make soft landing on Venus, first photos from surface of Venus, Venera 9
1980: First Hispanic and Black person in space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez on Soyuz 38
1984: First woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaya (Salyut 7 space station)
1986: First crew to visit two separate space stations (Mir and Salyut 7)
1986: First probes to deploy robotic balloons into Venus atmosphere and to return pictures of a comet during close flyby Vega 1, Vega 2
1986: First permanently manned space station, Mir, 1986â"2001, with perman

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Putin ensured ordinary Russians get a decent share of the raw materials income. While the relatives of your NY banksters wanted to exfiltrate all the raw materials and pay for that with some measly billions into Jelzin's private account.

THAT is why the U.S. media+establishment hates Russia. And why the Kievians hate Russia. Russia is a country not under the control of NY billionare-maniacs and their relatives like Chodorkovsky and the wacky blonde gas-thief Timoshenko who "wants to kill all Russians".

Re:No big issue

[Lumpy]

Absolutely, we could solve this ISIS problem in 12 hours, yes in 12 hours we could kill 90% of ISIS......and most of the middle east at the same time.

11 of those hours would be a bunch of fat rich men waving their dicks at each other pretending to be leaders.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the fun you have with NY finance fucking up your lives at random occasions, I am not sure your description conveys any truth. Next think America will get is John F. Hitler, a U.S. marines corporal rising to the top after NY fucked up once more.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

That would not be in the interest of Raytheon, Lockmart, L3 and the like. They want a Never Ending Business Success Story. Apparently the War On Something is programmed to last for the next 30 years.

It's all about pork. And to ensure pork deliveries, they need to consume Human Meat.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not have had sex with those Fremde Heere Ost and SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt thugs in Munich, my dear Americans. Those nice chaps first killed Millions cold-blooded and soon later made YOU pay their nice salaries.

Bavarians really have some sort of hypnotic capability, it seems. First they hypnotized one Austrian and 80 million Germans, then they hypnotized American Intelligence, too.

Most of that "bad, evil Russki" is the product of their wicked, insane work.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Concise and spot-on! Thanks: I'm using your comment in future posts, when the conversation inevitably turns nasty against Russia or Putin.

The reason the leadership of the West so hates Putin is that he stands between them and their ability to violate Russia's natural resources.
In fact, Putin went one better and reclaimed former state-owned institutions that were sold for peanuts a couple of decades ago.

Of course, those same leaders are violating their OWN citizens back in the US / UK, but it's so much easier when the local media is also controlled.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Western elections are no more (or less) free than those in Russia.

Riddle me this:
Why did Obama need to raise and spend over a billion dollars to get elected?
And after such money is raised, to whom is he beholden? Big pharma? Car industry? Big tobacco? Food industry? All of them?

Everything isn't peaches and cream in Russia, but nor is it in the West.
Your hard-coded vitriolic response to anything Russian says more about you (and the powers that have moulded you) than anything else.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one thing that Russia is behind the west on, there isn't a single bricklayer who can use a spirit level. It doesn't sound much and even though houses in the US are made from the cheapest materials that'll just do, at least they're dry and draft free.

Re:No big issue

[thrich81]

Actually, von Braun's team (brought over in Paperclip) was very conservative in their rocket engineering. They preferred incremental improvements over big leaps in technology. Thus the V-2 begat the Redstone, which begat the Jupiter, which together begat the Saturn I which begat the Saturn IB which (and this was a pretty good sized leap) begat the Saturn V. Two explicit examples -- notice that the Saturn IB and Saturn V both had fins on the first stage -- what other space boosters had or have fins? Also, the Huntsville team flew the Saturn I four times with a dummy second stage before they tried it in the two stage orbital configuration. As a result no missions launched with any Saturn booster failed due to launch vehicle problems (though the second [unmanned] launch of the Saturn V was close). Some other engineering teams in the US were pushing the state of the art harder -- such as the Atlas missile which relied on constant pressurization of the fuel tanks to maintain structural rigidity.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, Putin is a danger who is more interested in the romanticism of the Soviet block than achievements. In fact progress is so dire that the two Russians who developed Graphene had to accept a lab in the University of Manchester, UK to do their work.

Re:No big issue

[TWX]

Yet, in the grand scheme of these things, the Soviets and subsequent Russians didn't really use these firsts to build on each other in most of the later cases.

The Russians haven't had long-term scientific exploration rovers on other planets with multiyear missions. The Russians haven't expanded their human presence in space beyond a token few individuals. At this point, Russia doesn't even have its own launch facilities within its borders- it relies on Kazakhstan. The Americans and Europeans are unlocking Mars' secrets with numerous successful scientific missions, and even India is getting in on the act.

Fact of the matter is, Russia has its strengths and weaknesses, just as everyone else does. Russia's initial space overtures were helped by their challenges in building small nuclear weapons, as the launch vehicles for ICBMs had to be bigger, directly leading to more payload and being able to repurpose that technology for space. Americans built smaller nukes, and had to play catch-up when it came to space, but as the event on July 20, 1969 showed, Americans were very good at achieving results when they felt they needed to.

And America is headed there again, in the form of private ventures like SpaceX, that are attempting to recreate the capabilities of the Saturn rockets but with significantly less cost. I fully expect that they will succeed.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

So, do the names Plesetsk cosmodrome and kapustin jar ring any bells in your head?

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Putin does not fancy the CCCP but the tsarist russia.
Problem is this. Young people in russia do not like the communism, but they like the strong russia, so russian officials are talking about glorious past and russian derzava, meaning the tsarist russia, that ruled Poland and Finland and states in eastern europe.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, they only get their shit together in times of crisis.

In the meantime, they end up with people like Brezhnev, Yeltsin or Putin -- and they're massively the worse for it.

Putin is vastly better than Yeltsin ever was. Yeltsin was a robber baron who was selling Russia's assets for pennies. That's why he was the darling of the west. Democratic leader my ass. He was a fucking criminal. Putin while an authoritorian man put an end to Yeltsin's backyard sales. He made the state owner of the country's assets and he improved the life of milions of russians who were sidestepped by Yeltsin's economic miracle.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Utterly untrue. If you think the R-7 was a V-2 derivative you are entirely ignorant of rocket science. It used different fuel, vastly different aerodynamics, different combustion chamber design, verier thrusters instead of control surfaces, strap on boosters, and an entirely original launch pad. The redstone rocket, on the other hand, was just a V-2 derivative.

Re: No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy this is becoming more common knowledge, if only on technology sites.

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

...the wishy-washy goal of installing a stable democracy...

More like installing another, more complaint puppet regime.

We spent billions of dollars installing a "puppet regime" that subsequently kicked us out.

Doesn't sound very "compliant" to me.

Re:No big issue

[fustakrakich]

Petro-dollar still rules. *Mission Accomplished!*

Re:No big issue

[Anonymous Coward]

"Putin ensured ordinary Russians get a decent share of the raw materials income. While the relatives of your NY banksters wanted to exfiltrate all the raw materials and pay for that with some measly billions into Jelzin's private account."

Yes, that's why the average Russian has a poverty level low enough to rival the poorest African nations and why the average American has a poverty level that's actually first world.

What?

People hate Russia because it's a fascist and increasingly far right dictatorship, whose leaders allow so much corruption to occur that your typical $10bn Winter Olympics ended up costing $51bn.

There's a reason that half the billionaires in London are Russian- because Russia is like what you say America is, but worse. NY bankers are amateurs at taking wealth for themselves compared to Russia's Oligarchs and ironically that's precisely why Ukraine wants to get the hell away from Russia - because the Ukrainian people have seen the Russian way where the Oligarchs (like Yanukovych) get insanely rich, whilst the average person stays poor.

Still, keep sipping on your Putleraide. You obviously enjoy it.

Re:No big issue

[tsotha]

And for the military it was a ridiculously good value, because NASA paid $109 million of the initial development before it lost interest.

Re:No big issue

[tsotha]

Because there wasn't then, and still isn't, any reason to send men to the moon. There are today about a dozen countries that could do it if sufficiently motivated. The problem (if you want to see it that way) is finding a reason to go.

Revenge of the Fallen

[Anonymous Coward]

Waa waa waaa! The fallen is alive!

I don't like the sound of that

[Anonymous Coward]

"Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."

That's is very worrisome. The nerve of the Russians controlling their satellite that pretended to be a piece of junk to incessantly and oppressively maneuver around in space without telling us first! Well, I never!

Looks like ...

[PPH]

.... we'll need to call the Space Cowboys out of retirement.

Re:Looks like ...

[Anonymous Coward]

.... we'll need to call the Space Cowboys out of retirement.

Yeah they'll hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz. Lol.

Sputnik 2.014

[Bob_Who]

In post soviet space race, space debris spies on you!

Hm...

[aaaaaaargh!]

It could be a spy satellite and space junk at the same time. Perhaps the Russians like irony.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least their space junk actually, you know, makes it to space. Unlike the two supply rockets you've tried to send to the ISS and Richard Branson's personal space-learjet crashing into the ground. While the Americans were busy investing on technologies to spy on anyone and everyone connected to the Internet, the Russians have been busy. Very busy. They've already beaten you to space once, now you can't even keep track of what they're launching.

Your space program is a shambles, your politicians are more interested in stealing corporate secrets and personal information than investing in NASA. Ignorance is bliss, eh? Right up until the Russians beat you to the punch, then all of a sudden it's not quite fun and games any more, is it?

Re:Hm...

[TeknoHog]

Shirley, you're joking, Mr. Fey-man.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The X37b has words for you. Our super secret gear can do large plane changes and can loiter for years.

Bring it down

[ziggystarsky]

Get it down now. Then you can claim you were testing technology to remove space junk from orbit. Once the Ruskies admit it's a satellite that's no longer a valid option.

Re:Bring it down

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia these days neither admit nor make up fake excuses. They just give you the finger, and why wouldn't they? Is NASA going to slap their fingers, or ESA? NASA and ESA depend on the russian space program a whole lot more than the other way around. Tomorrow, everyone except the conspiracy theorists will have forgotten. The USA will classify their tracking of this space junk as secret (guess where the russians copied their giving the finger trick from), Europe doesn't care enough to do any tracking at all because Russia has a lot more much scarier stuff on the ground than they could ever put in space anyway, and that will be the end of it.

Re:Bring it down

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, they have it on the ground, moving. But, they can put it into space by means of a shortwave command from HQ in a matter of minutes.

Re:Bring it down

[FatLittleMonkey]

Even if it were space junk, that would still be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty and probably an act of war.

Gotta be for spying somehow

[amjohns]

Why else wouldn't you announce it? Especially if it's the size of a cubesat but can manuever, that's a breakthrough.

At least the US admits the X-37B is there, even if nobody has a clue what it's doing...

Re:Gotta be for spying somehow

[Anonymous Coward]

So they have to tell you or does a merklin land want to be the space police as well?

Re:Gotta be for spying somehow

[TapeCutter]

The US can't disguise the X-37B as space junk anymore than they can disguise a battleship as a fishing boat. The military of any nation will only tell you two things; 1) what they want you to believe and 2) what you already know.

Delta V

[Anonymous Coward]

these orbital changes seem rather large for a cubesat's payload. does anyone know the delta-v's / mass-equivalents involved?

It is probably business as usual

[estestvoispytatel]

They used to launch satellites and then call them debries or test missions or something like this if they aren't behave well from Soviet times. It could be one of these satellites which responded in some limited way after launch, but guys at the mission control still tweaking with it.

Re:It is probably business as usual

[umghhh]

I think it is Putin's dick out there and CIA says it is small. Now I know what all the quzillions of tallars or whatever they call the funny money of today are going into. I also know now that our dicks are bigger than Russian, whatever interpretation of this sentence you take it must be correct!

Re:It is probably business as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, American intelligence resides in the dick, while Putins resides in the brain.

clean up space

[slashmydots]

I know! We should help clean up space junk by blowing it up and launching it out of orbit with a laser or catching it with a giant net or any of the other proposed junk cleanup methods. If they want to call it junk, that's the space equivalent of leaving it on the curb. Now it's public domain for the snatching!

Re:clean up space

[FatLittleMonkey]

I know! We should help clean up space junk by blowing it up

That's not how "cleaning" works.

or catching it with a giant net

That's not how "nets" work.

If they want to call it junk, that's the space equivalent of leaving it on the curb. Now it's public domain for the snatching!

That's not how international law works.

Tom Clancy mode ON!

[GameboyRMH]

It's a Russian X-37B equivalent. The Americans used the X-37B to plant jammers and/or deorbit drives on the GLONASS constellation, and the Russians are returning the favor ;-)

If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldwar"

[Rujiel]

The the NSA is waging a cold war on every nation on the planet. But trolls here are of course more concerned with the russian and chinese boogiemen.

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask yourself this, would you rather have the Russians or the Chinese rule the world? Me, I prefer the more civilized pirate...

One Man's Junk

[Anonymous Coward]

One man's junk is another man's X-37B

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

How about neither of the 3?

Time machine

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article, you will see that the end of the article contains details about what happened - past tense - on November 12th, 2014.

huh?? u sure it's the russians??

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard from a very high ranking US official that the Russians don't make anything, so I don't think it was them.

It is probably business as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be that the satellite fails for it to look like or be called debris. The US has done similar things before; some people think that the Misty program (which is positively known to have included satellite camouflage research) involved faking a satellite explosion and cutting the radar cross-section of the actual satellite with sleight of hand so that it seemed to be part of a "debris" field from the explosion. See http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077830/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/spy-satellites-rise-faked-fall/ for details.

The Misty program shows that radar cross section can be misleading, and that's the only real data suggesting that this is cube-sat sized. This could be an experimental stealth satellite, a Russian Misty, or, given its apparent intercept course with the rest of the original craft, an experimental satellite-killer, proving concepts of stealth and asat warfare.

Typical pig-ignorance from the pig-capital.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot anything you can't understand, kill anyone you can't control.

Look how well that's worked out for you in Iraq. "Mission accomplished," oh you're absolutely right, you accomplished your mission. You came to royally fuck things up and it's exactly what you did, now you have people ISIS rolling over your CIA-backed government and satellites being launched by the Russians that you don't notice until they're literally doing cartwheels in space.

Maybe you should do the world a favour, turn the guns on yourselves. You know, like your own soldiers are doing. At least they still have their morals intact. Better to die a hero than live to see yourself become the villian, etc.

Re:Typical pig-ignorance from the pig-capital.

[umghhh]

It was mujahedin in Afghanistan and it all well relatively well. At least Ruskis went back home. In Iraq it was a magnitude bigger fuckup than in Afghanistan and it looks like it will take a while to bring it back to the 'acceptable' level. It is also closer to the Western world. I am waiting in excitement where is the next place US is going to 'help'. I guess this may be Ukraine - it is again a bit closer to center of civilization and although the opponent lacks jihadist credentials it has a friend with nukes just across a border. I know that I am now a thankless bastard and apparent Putin's shill but I would prefer if US military tried to help Canada or Mexico. I am sure there are enough targets in these two countries to keep the boys and girls busy for a while.

Re:Typical pig-ignorance from the pig-capital.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have completely fucked up your analogy. Ukraine does not have a friend with nukes. Russia is Ukraine's enemy. Your analogy might make some sense if you had said we are going to "help" the Russians. Considering that 80% of the Russian people approve of what Putler is doing, they certainly could use some "help". Perhaps we could help this 80% of their approving public understand the hole their adored Putler has dug for them. Perhaps we could help some of their "lost" soldiers that wandered into Eastern Ukraine on their vacation to fire Buk missiles at commercial airliners?

Re:Typical pig-ignorance from the pig-capital.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe YOU could start to reign into your nice leader Timoshenko, who wants to "castrate", "kill" or at least "ethnically cleanse" all Russians.

I assume that would ease the situation. Also it helps to remove the multi-swastikas from your uniforms.

And please, rot in hell.

That's not a piece of junk

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a space station!

Re:That's not a piece of junk

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the classic monologue :

"You see that building behind us? I'm supposed to go over there and have lunch in half an hour, of course there is one good thing about a reactionary president, he's not into health food, last lunch we didn't have lunch, we grazed.. wanna know what lunch was about? Tell ya, We've got two more aircraft carriers off the coast of Honduras, the Russians are moving some of their big subs, now we've got the joint chiefs screaming about Russian satellites with antimissile lasers on them, so we've gotta send up our laser satellites to counteract theirs. So the President has come to the conclusion that the NCA should be placed under the jurisdiction of the defense department, and not with the crazy scientists spending all this money trying to talk to "Martians"! So here we are on the actual break, I've got a president with his finger poised on the button, and you want me to walk across the park and tell him, we want to hitch a ride with those very same Russians, have I missed anything? I didn't want your job you know, I wasn't the one that forced you out, I didn't blame the whole thing on you, so if this is your plan to try to get me killed.. haha, you've got the wrong guy!" - NCA chairman and Heywood Floyd at the beginning of 2010 Odyssey 2 .

Standard Imperial Operating Procedure?

[Irate Engineer]

The Russians lifted this idea from Han Solo in ESB - just hiding out in the Imperial Destroyer's garbage dump. If Boba Fett can see through that ploy, so can the US.

Hahahahaaaa

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the SS Unterscharführer von Braun America would never have reached the moon before the Russkies. You simply dont grok Newtonian physics, thats all.

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the Chinese then?

more santcions needed?

[umghhh]

I think this is yet another proof how devious and barbaric Russian regime really is. We cannot allow Putin to do such things like putting (???) a satellites in orbit and doing maneuvering with them. Only one country on earth is allowed to do such things. If we allow Russia commit acts of such treachery all sorts of bad things may happen or even Klingons may materialize in orbit!!!!

Re:more santcions needed?

[pellik]

I thought the Klingons were the russians?

Typical pig-ignorance from the pig-capital.

[Anonymous Coward]

ISIS does all the MIC wants them to do. And that includes the NSA portion of the MIC. They want this thing to go on for 30 years, so that all they jobs in comfy chairs are secure.

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know the damn Chinese! They skin and boil live cats!

no one knows to fear satellites.

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing could be a psychotronic weapon w/ brain imaging capability. The US has dozens of satellites that work like this, in their TAMI / Thought Amplifier Mind Interface system.

Everyone stands around not even knowing what these beasts are allowing governments to do .. In terms of surveillance and weapons.

obamasweapon.com

Re:no one knows to fear satellites.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really should take your medications.

Here is a protip: They will simply tap your phone and internet in order to "read your mind". And they will also make a TV program for one day "just for you", if they consider that a useful tool in order to silence you. If that is not enough, Mk1 Eyeball and Mk1 Mock Dog Attack will be used on you.

No need for the crap ideas you are promoting.

Update your tactics to be a bit more covert and dont stick out the head for some time. Then all will be in order.

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russians ?

Who cares?

[SuperDre]

It's not like the US hasn't got their secret crap up there... So it's ver hypcritical to judge the russians...

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a cat.

Re:If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldw

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't matter. They do it to people too. They don't care. They think suffering is good.