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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.
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%.
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.
Energia flew two times with four side-mounted kerosene boosters and it worked. Angara A5 also has four of them. Atlas V regularly has up to five large SRBs. There's no problem with that.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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*
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 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.
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
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.