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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.
when your President steals $200 billion from your country's treasure and steals it for himself.
Sucks to be you, Russia!
Everybody back to beating each other over the head with clubs. Fight over scraps, stupid hairless monkeys. Don't forget to die on your pitiful lump of rock!
fuck that, bigger is better
roscosmos consumes 35 tons of grain alcohol weekly
we get to launch rockets without having to have a profit requirement for it!
That's why the US gets to launch big expensive, and awesome science projects like Hubble, Cassini, Voyager, Apollo, etc.., while Russia is stuck with shitty Space-X sized rockets that only has commercial appeal.
Russia is going to find out the hard way that commercial rockets are useless compared to government rockets.
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.
Due to the sanctions and drop in the price of oil, the Russians couldn't afford to pay for both Putin's chest waxing and the saddle for him to ride shirtless on the exterior of the rocket to the space station. So they just scrapped the whole thing because they were afraid to look bad when people realized he wasn't on it at the first launch.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Gayniggerseed tastes funny when it shoots out of a drunk nigger.
I love how the Russian "SLS" version had four boosters. Someone over there must play Kerbal Space Program.
just watch.
Translation: "Russia can't even afford the power points for it's super heavy booster, so it's going to concentrate on the development of an unproven booster that budget crunches have already delayed for over two decades."
Wow... Was the summary written by Putin? (Hello Mods: The author is even Russian!)
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
Also, I'm sure the US military and NASA will be excited to be able to launch heavier and heaver things into space and stop being reliant on Russian launch technology, especially with the Russians dusting off their 1950's era bombers to test NATO defenses.
Putin is indeed cocky, but our Congress takes the cake.
Why do we have to launch big loads all at once? Launch a booster first, and then have the payload rendezvous with it in orbit. It may take some R&D and practice to get right, but it seems the more logical way to handle big projects instead of supporting bigass rockets and launch platforms that are not used enough to pay their rent.
Plus, having a spare in place is easier with commodity rockets.
Table-ized A.I.
The government should keep it's dirty claws out of profit and let private enterprise work without having an 800lb gorilla breathing down it's neck. We want people who understand a market selling products, not a horse judge who happened to sleep in the same room as someone who later became a powerful government figure.
A government's role is to act for citizens when they are taken advantage of, not to fleece them for profit with no alternative.
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.
That's because they are a little startup without the resources to deal with such complexity and not a very large org that already has experience using that fuel.
Yes hydrogen has many issues, like the embrittlement problem that's been known about and dealt with since the 1940s, but it's a tradeoff that some can do already but is uneconomic for others to go near.
What SLS can do that other rockets can't?
I am not one who would stand in the way of progress, but no matter how I look at SLS, that thing just does not make any sense (and also cents) to me
If anyone can convince me that SLS is indeed needed, please do ... I am all ears, ... and eyes
of the old going and personal to you by Penisbird BSD style.' In the Benefits of being declined i;n market
I'd think that hydrogen is somewhat uneconomical for launch vehicles also because it generally gets used in upper stages, so you need more different pieces of launch pad infrastructure, and all-importantly, at least two types of engines. The fact that some other companies are not "little startups" still doesn't protect them from the effect of economies of scale. (And if you want to suggest unifying on hydrogen, check out the boondoggle named "Delta IV".) Look at how hideously expensive the RL-10 has ended up due to restricted production, and rejoice in the wisdom of Falcon 9 designers (which, besides unifying propulsion, gave them a landing level of thrust achievable in the first stage almost for free).
It also doesn't help much that when hydrogen does get used in launch vehicles, those upper stages are optimized for high energy missions and therefore end up on average more expensive (because they're built to be super-lightweight) even if all you want is to get some standardized payload to LEO. I'd really reserve hydrogen for the future, purely in-space vehicles, especially the large ones (with presumably improved volume/mass ratio for the hydrogen tanks that wouldn't involve exorbitant costs to achieve in smaller tanks, giving hydrolox better economies of scale). And even that only after some important technological progress - besides vastly improved Isp of up to almost 500 s, the lower pumping pressures and potentially much greater engine lifetime could come in really handy.
To sum it up, perhaps we're not doing those missions yet where hydrogen would actually be decisively beneficial from the economy point of view. Anywhere up to LEO, hydrocarbons win, especially with good engines, and even direct launch to GTO probably isn't a sufficient excuse.
Ezekiel 23:20
Skylab cost ~$2.6 billion, ~$11 billion 2015. The space station Freedom was expected to cost $8 billion in 1984, maybe $24 billion in 2015 dollars. The current cost has been over $75 billion.The ISS weighs 400 tons. The extra design, and assembly costs of modules outweigh the cost of bigger, heavier, cheaper modules, and just using a big rocket.
... Russia being in space. But given their conduct, I think they should have as limited capabilities as possible.
Russia is out of control and entirely unrepentant. If they have fewer capabilities their frequently bat shit crazy leaders will have more limited aspirations.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This "four booter rocket" configuration is not new to the russians. It was introduced by Sergei Korlev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... already in the 50:s, with the R7 line of rockets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... . In fact, it was one such R7 carrier rocket (8K71PS) that launched Sputnik-1 (and -2) into orbit. The detachment of the booster rockts were such a common sight, that it got its own name: Korolev cross https://www.google.se/search?q....
Yes, but in addition to that the trade-offs are inherently different for re-usable rockets. Embrittlement is probably a pretty big problem if you intend to re-use your fuel tank many times, like SpaceX intends to.
If SpaceX fails to make their second stage re-usable I would not be surprised to see them switch to hydrogen for that stage at some point down the line.
I have to agree with the summary, this could be a blessing in disguise for the Russians given the right future economic conditions. We're burning enough money here in the US just on DEVELOPMENT of SLS that we could launch the mass of a WWII aircraft carrier into orbit on commercial launchers in todays launch market let alone the economies of scale you would get if we tried to do so. And the "$500 Million" per launch claim that NASA is putting out is hysterical, It will probably cost at least $1.5 Billion per launch not including development. If our intention is to make space access more reasonable there simply is no good reason for a SHLV at this time, we can do everything and more with standard LV's and if we get enough yearly flights economies of scale and competition will kick in and help space access costs even more. SHLVs are currently only good for shoveling massive amounts of money into the bank accounts of a few well connected defense contractors.
a large trampoline instead?
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)
samzenpus is using this article to present his opinions as facts while completely ignoring the valid reasons for building the SLS. The SLS is not going to be used for launching communication satellites or taking tourists to space. SLS is not a commercial project but a scientific and exploratory project to enable mankind to escape low earth orbit while preserving the U.S. space launch capabilities.
More dependable than anyone else - by about .2%, much celebrated by the clueless, irrelevant in the real world.
LEO is about to become useless when a few more large pieces of space junk break up and collide with other pieces to cause the junk cascade that pollutes LEO such that we can't either orbit in it or launch through.
Don't take my word for it: go find the research. We're SO close to screwed that it's truly funny/scary/weird.
Only I'm not laughing...
If the price of oil stays low, look for an announcement next year they are abandoning Angara and contracting it all out to SpaceX.
So? I mean seriously, what is that elementary school level reply meant to accomplish?
I'll restate my point in a different way - a small startup is going to be spread thin if they have multiple engines while an established org may already have had them for years.
Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?
Deep space research and rhus launch equipment is not a profit project yet and might become so in a few decades. In the mean time it is the role of governments to join together I such huge and costly projects. Had the US amd Russia and China been buddies along with EU and Canada,all of the players could have had a piece of this deep space project but human primates being what they are, cannot agree jot to compete, fight threaten and otherwise waste time and resources. Okay but on to the other topic that slipped into the comments which is about power companies private and state run.
I live in Canada and we used to have a public electrical utilities. It was sold off to some US company. Our monthly charges are now broken into delivery line and a separate company,for energy costs. We pay at least five times what we did before. Do not be deceived by those fools who declare that public costs are always higher. Here we were being screwed by corporations who get away with lower taxes and a LAISSEZ faire provincial government in Alberta who gave away our birthright to foreigners. Some things work better as a private entrepreneurial system such as commercial entities such as SpaceX, a terrific innovative company but other things like running a power grid needs a wider net, a public one. One size does not fit all. It is childish frankly to think that private for profit is always better..yeah? Like the US medical establishment? Better? Don't make me laugh..ditto,for private insurance and power companies and the like. Ideologically driven economies are run by the 1 percent. Is this familiar?