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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.
we get to launch rockets without having to have a profit requirement for it!
You say that as if it were an advantage. Interesting.
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.
NASA doesn't currently have a way, aside from the commercial launchers, to launch those various probes you mentioned. NASA doesn't even have the capability to launch crew to the International Space Station.
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.
The government should not be run for profit. The government should be an alternative to markets, provide a safe haven for those who want to do things because they're interested in advancing knowledge, not selling something. Space exploration is in the General Welfare, not only for the 1%.
But the Fed is the issuer, and returns interest to the Treasury. Hence, zero cost funding.
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.
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
The gov't could at least lose less money if it issued its own currency (beyond just coins) instead of borrowing its money supply from privately owned banks.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Well considering that we wasted a couple decades on a "space truck" that actually met NONE of its original goals, not weight carrying, not turn around, and not cost per load, and was designed more for passing pork than anything else (just like the new one, which is why so much shuttle shit is included despite the boosters being what killed Challenger) while the Soviets were able to build the most dependable rocket family in history with Soyuz?
Frankly I give them better odds than I do the USA as it seems the only projects NASA has been able to get done has been the ones that are small enough Senator Porkus and Congressman Bribaton haven't gotten a whiff of. With the amount of money being shat into SLS? It will end up with each widget being built in a different state (and some states having a widget per district) so you end up with a bloated whale that when it comes together will probably leak like a sieve and be only good for blasting money into space.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Of course it isn't, comrade! That's an imperialist lie!
Ezekiel 23:20
What SLS can do that other rockets can't?
It can launch more suitcases of money into the right congressional districts. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
The "space truck" was actually a complete space station. It had living space for seven people, airlocks for EVAs, a shower and a toilet as well as having 20 tonnes of cargo space in the back of the "truck" and a payload arm/manipulator.
The Shuttle had considerable cross-range capability once in orbit with up to 18 tonnes of manoeuvering fuel (twice the total payload of a current Falcon 9) and could stay in orbit for up to a month if needed with a reduced crew. It did most of the heavy lifting of the construction of the ISS in orbit and carried out multiple Hubble repair and upgrade missions. At the end it came back down to Earth and landed on a runway.
The Dragon capsule is purely for canned monkeys with no toilet, no shower, no airlocks and no EVA capability. It has no cargo capacity, no manipulator arm, limited cross-range capacity in orbit and limited endurance and it certainly can't be used to carry out maintenance flights to the Hubble or its successors.
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
Hmm, just printing more money as needed...
Seems to me that's been tried a few times in history. Worked pretty well for Germany in the 1920's and -30's, as I recall....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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*
Soyuz is dependable because it's simple and because it's old. Today it's reasonably cheap (especially the Soyuz-U modification) because it paid itself off a very, VERY long time ago (although even with Russian labor prices, the old design is probably more expensive than would be strictly necessary with modern manufacturing). But even Soyuz also had something like fifty or sixty launch failures in the first two decades before the kinks got ironed out. The Shuttle cost more, but at least it didn't need that. In addition, the Russian attempt at cloning the Shuttle design (ultimately with some modifications) did basically the same thing as the Shuttle - wasted a lot of money, basically almost bankrupting the Soviet Union (some people postulate that it may have directly contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union), although without actually achieving anything meaningful (besides the RD-170 design that got used on the Zenit and eventually mutated into the RD-180 engines on the Atlas V). So with the Shuttle, for all its deficiencies, you got at least something for your money (ISS, Hubble, etc. etc.) instead of breaking up the country.
Ezekiel 23:20
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....
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.
The government should not be run for profit.
Profit is a strong indication that you are generating more value than you cost. If you aren't generating a profit, there should be a good reason why. You don't provide such a reason. Let's look in more detail.
The government should be an alternative to markets, provide a safe haven for those who want to do things because they're interested in advancing knowledge, not selling something.
First of all, no. There's no "should" here. Second, who gets this safe haven and who doesn't? We can't have everyone sucking up money just because they're more interested in advancing knowledge than in the alternatives. Someone has to generate that tax revenue in order for the scheme to work.
Then there's the matter of unintended consequences. If you put up this scheme, then someone will game it for profit. In practice, there's no real yardstick for what "advancing knowledge" means, so it's been long exploited by universities and businesses.
Space exploration is in the General Welfare, not only for the 1%.
One near universal problem that NASA has long contended with is that space exploration is just not that valuable to the US public. I don't mean just perceived to be not that valuable - public perception has always been lukewarm towards space activities. But truly not that valuable. It doesn't materially change the human condition to know a little more about our universe. And the vague intangibles which NASA supposedly brings, like inspiration to go into the STEM fields, could be achieved for a fraction of the cost by Earth-bound activities.
Finally, NASA is just terrible at its assigned role. It might not need to be profitable, but it certainly needs to be getting an order of magnitude more activity and exploration out of the money it currently spends.
The government needs a frame in which it can legally operate. For instance you don't want the government to get into iron mining, steel making and knife making just so it can run hospitals. It's fine for a government-run hospital to buy surgical knives from private companies.
The horror example where this separation from government subsidies never happened is the airline industry, where you have two giant corporations, Boeing and Airbus, that leech billions off of various governments.
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.
The Shuttle never lived up to what it was sold as -- cheap, reliable access to space. The most damning evidence of that is that the only major sponsor/user besides NASA, the US Air Force, abandoned it as soon as its actual operational limitations became clear. The Air Force went to the expense of developing new large expendable launch vehicles rather than try to stick with the Shuttle. For the last few years the Shuttle had only one mission -- support the ISS, every other mission had been taken from it. And, the US had a perfectly viable space station program without the Shuttle -- Skylab, and for that matter, so did the Russians. Speaking of the Russians -- they figured out pretty quickly that the Space Shuttle concept was operationally a loser and abandoned their Buran version after one flight. So, the Shuttle looked good in the marketing slides from the 70's and early '80s, but has to be judged an operational failure by the standards set for its justifications to be built. The Shuttle could do things that no other vehicle can do, but those capabilities, such as its huge cross range landing capability, just turned out to be not very useful and not worth the cost.
As opposed to what? Private power companies that stage brownouts to drive up their own prices?
False dichotomy. Government monopolies and private monopolies are not the only alternatives. What seems to work best is to separate ownership of the grid (which is a natural monopoly) from power generation (which is not). Whether the grid is owned by the government or by a regulated private utility doesn't much matter. The grid owner charges a fee, which can vary with load, for transporting power from producer to consumer. But the production of power can be done by anyone that can meet the technical requirements of feeding power into the grid, including individual homeowners with extra solar power or residential micro-cogeneration.
And the Fed's so-called "quantitative easing" is different from that... how?
It is different because the Fed is independent, and not subjected to short term political pressure.
The Dragon doesn't need any of those things. Its purpose is to take a few people into orbit and back and not to weigh too much in the process of doing so. The idea to put the things you mention onto something that has to be launched every time at a significant cost, and equipped with increased reentry facilities (which also have to be launched) to return all those things afterwards is preposterous. Shuttle's half-tonne arm alone has subtracted almost 60 tonnes of total payload from all the Shuttle flights (an equivalent of $3B). And the reason why you don't see the budget for anything beyond the Shuttle was formerly the effing Shuttle and now is the efffing SLS. The Shuttle completely killed most of the research in that particular area for decades. Today, the SLS is killing research in anything beyond refurbishing the Shuttle infrastructure. Smart move indeed!
Ezekiel 23:20
"The Dragon doesn't need any of those things. Its purpose is to take a few people into orbit and back"
Where are they going to go when they get to orbit? The ISS won't be there after 2020 or so. Bigelow is a lot of hot air. The Russian ISS-remnant will be serviced by Soyuz. So what's left for Dragon/Falcon apart from space tourism?
The Dragon alone can't build an ISS Mark 2 or even a Mars Expeditionary vehicle, it needs a workshop vehicle/microstation to dock to for the crew to do anything significant in orbit (and have a shower, use the toilet etc.). That's what the Shuttle was, as well as being the crew vehicle. A Falcon Heavy could launch such an unmanned microstation but they cost a lot of bucks so having it recoverable to be refurbished and reused would be a good idea. A heatshield re-entry system to splashdown on something that large would be cumbersome so tiles or another lightweight heat protection system on a lifting-body or winged vehicle would be preferable, like the X-37 or the new ESA re-entry testbed article flown recently on a Vega. Thus is the Shuttle reinvented, better and shinier than before with the lessons of the past learned.
LOL!! The Fed may be independent of gov't but it's not independent of corporate plutocracy. Indeed, this is the crucial struggle of our times, wresting control of our politics and our economy from these fat-cat SOBs.
Get thee hence to Wolf-PAC.com and pitch in to help save our democracy from these blood-suckers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Every Shuttle flight needed spacewalks
Wrong.
, the cargo bay,
The thing is that one shouldn't be forced to haul large payloads with such a useless reusable vehicle in the first place. So some cargo capacity is certainly desirable but not for 300 m^3 and 24 tonnes. Even the lousy large launchers we already have are much more economical for such things.
the spacelab,
A thing like that could have stayed in the orbit.
the manipulator
A thing like that could have stayed in the orbit, too.
The ISS couldn't have been built without the Shuttle though, not without a (non-existent at the time) SLS that could throw a complete space station or large ready-to-go part of it with spacesuit airlock(s), manipulator arm, power systems etc. into orbit in one launch.
Mir was assembled without the Shuttle. Granted, even with the additional modules, it was smaller, but it could have been assembled into a much larger station if something like Canadarm2 had been available at that time. The core of the Mir was exactly the kind of "a complete space station" you describe, and it even though Russian-built, it weighed so little that the Proton was able to launch it. (And I'm pretty sure that today, we would be able to do an even better job than what Russians did twenty years ago.)
Even then a "fork-lift truck" spacecraft like the Shuttle would probably have been needed to move shit around as more parts arrived in orbit -- the ISS is over 400 tonnes as is, nothing larger than about 16 tonnes in one piece. Either a workshop/fork-lift spacecraft would have been recoverable to Earth as the Shuttle was or it would have been disposed of into the upper atmosphere and a new one built, furbished and launched every time a new task needed to be accomplished.
Why would you dispose of it? Is there a rational need for that?
Sure the Shuttle never succeeded in what it was originally designed for, nor was its launch tempo (50 launches a year was mooted at one time!), costs or other factors met.
I think the "kills astronauts every fifty flights or so" part would have become quite problematic if such a high launch cadence had been ever achieved. The same goes for the cost which never allowed for the flight rate anyway. Nobody really needed extra people in space just to launch satellites, and the expenses associated with it. So satellites stopped being launched on the Shuttle. I can't say I'm surprised by all that...
It did the job though when the ISS was built
Because nothing else was avaiable. Nothing else was available because the Shuttle sucked out all the money.
There's lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking about how things should have been but having the Shuttle to hand made things a lot easier when it was needed.
The Air Force backed out of the Shuttle on Saturday, not on Monday.
Ezekiel 23:20
I forget which scientist was asked by a general if it had "military use, if it could protect America?" and he replied "no, but it will make America worth protecting."
This is the reason we should do things. Not for profit, for material gain, for defense, or any other flimsy reason. It should be done because it is beneficial to us all, because it advances us all as humans.
They also decided that they didn't have the money to make the first stage design reusable so they tacked together a fuel tank with a couple of solid rocket boosters to do the same job. Then they gave the task of building the solid rocket boosters to ATK. The worst of both design choices. Why? So the pork could be spread to Utah as well. Then Challenger happened.
That article is old news.
Aborted launches happen all the time in the industry. Let alone in a new launch vehicle.
The Angara A5 vehicle they are talking about in that article was successfully launched last December.
They could use a better second stage for the rocket (i.e. the A7 version) but what they have is working fairly well. It would have been ready earlier if they didn't keep stalling the funding all the time. But it is ready now.
All that's needed is for them to finish the construction of their new launch site at Vostochny and Proton can be killed.
There are also plans to retrofit the KVTK LOX/LH2 second stage into A5. The whole A7 may or may not happen. It doesn't matter as A5 with KVTK would have more performance than Proton.
The cost of handling hypergolics can be quite high. That is one reason why everyone is moving away from them. The costs for manufacturing the actual rocket may be higher but I kind of doubt it. Angara A5 is manufactured with more modern tools and it has less engines and parallel stages than Proton. Once it goes into full production the cost per unit is bound to be lower.