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Russia Abandons Super-Rocket Designed To Compete With SLS
schwit1 writes Russia has decided to abandon an expensive attempt to build an SLS-like super-rocket and will instead focus on incremental development of its smaller but less costly Angara rocket. "Facing significant budgetary pressures, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has indefinitely postponed its ambitious effort to develop a super-heavy rocket to rival NASA's next-generation Space Launch System, SLS. Instead, Russia will focus on radical upgrades of its brand-new but smaller Angara-5 rocket which had its inaugural flight in Dec. 2014, the agency's Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, decided on Thursday, March 12." For Russia's space industry, it appears that these budgetary pressures have been a blessing in disguise. Rather than waste billions on an inefficient rocket for which there is no commercial demand — as NASA is doing with SLS (under orders from a wasteful Congress) — they will instead work on further upgrades of Angara, much like SpaceX has done with its Falcon family of rockets. This will cost far less, is very efficient, and provides them a better chance to compete for commercial launches that can help pay for it all. And best of all, it offers them the least costly path to future interplanetary missions, which means they might actually be able to make those missions happen. To quote the article again: "By switching upper stages of the existing Angara from kerosene to the more potent hydrogen fuel, engineers might be able to boost the rocket's payload from current 25 tons to 35 tons for missions to the low Earth orbit. According to Roscosmos, Angara-A5V could be used for piloted missions to the vicinity of the Moon and to its surface." In a sense, the race is now on between Angara-A5V and Falcon Heavy.
SpaceX found that hydrogen fuel is not an improvement over methane when you include all the extra complexity (and weight) of dealing with super cold and very small atoms, both resulting in brittle metals. SpaceX does intend to switch to methane, which is a small improvement over kerosene, and unlike kerosene does not leave difficult to clean residue in pipes and engine parts.
I love how the Russian "SLS" version had four boosters. Someone over there must play Kerbal Space Program.
He's talking about a single person, Putin not the whole nest of thieves. That's 10% of Russia's annual GDP. The equivalent in the US would be Obama making off with $1.6 trillion in assets just by himself.
while Russia is stuck with shitty Space-X sized rockets that only has commercial appeal.
Russia regularly launches Proton-M, which has a Shuttle-like LEO payload capability. With the exception of Apollo, it should have been able to launch any of those things, and at a much lower cost. The problem for the Russians is that they hoped that Angara would be cheaper than the Proton-M. In retrospect, achieving that turns out to be quite problematic. Angara's saving grace is that it is - yet again - a military rocket, and unlike Energia, it's a military rocket for which they have no replacement (at least not after the Proton gets retired). It could have commercial appeal, but if Falcon Heavy works out well, which is very, very likely, few people are going to bother with Angara. Between ITAR, costs, transportation issues, general shunning of doing business with Russia these day, etc., I'm not sure there's a lot of potential. It may very well end up just launching scores of spy sats.
Ezekiel 23:20
See state owned power utilities regulated by the state that owns them for an example - eg. price rises of around 500% over 8 years and no alternative other than putting a solar panel on your roof.
As opposed to what? Private power companies that stage brownouts to drive up their own prices?
At least state owned power utilities have to face a public board of inquiry before they can raise their rates, and the state regulates how much of their income has to go to keeping their own services repaired. Unlike telecoms letting wired phone service wither because they can make more money on cellular.
Yeah, the private market has always been such an example of fairness and customer service. *eye roll*
The Dragon has no airlocks, no space (heh) for spacesuits, no external cargo capacity in the service module (although they're working on it) to carry spare parts, no manipulator arm to tether and position EVA personnel around the Hubble or other large space infrastructure item like, say, an ISS Mark 2. It's a minimal spam-in-a-can meatbag-to-orbit delivery system, not a lineman's truck with a cabover as the Shuttle was.
The Shuttle's OMS fuel load could be maxed out to 18 tonnes if lots of in-orbit manoeuvering was planned at the cost of a reduced payload bay manifest. Most flights it didn't carry that much fuel but it didn't need to be rebuilt to take max fuel/oxidiser if the next flight necessitated it. Any Dragon plus disposable workshop mission is going to cost more and take longer as each workshop will have to be built and individually tailored to the expected mission's requirements. The other option is to build a son-of-Shuttle recoverable workshop/living quarters spacecraft, a bit like the autolanding X-37, but I don't see any budget for that anywhere.