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75% of Russia's Satellite Electronics Come From US
schwit1 writes: One Russian aerospace industry expert noted today that three-quarters of all their satellite electronics comes from the United States: "According to [Nikolay Testoyedov], up to 75 percent of the electronic components for Russian satellites come from the US. Consequently, if it retaliates should Moscow refuse to sell RD-180 rocket motors to Washington — which Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has threatened — Russia's satellite program would be frozen for at least two years. "The imported electronic components in our satellites represent 25 to 75 percent of the total in communications; in military ones, somewhat less; in commercial ones, more," Testoyedov says. Of these imported components, approximately 83-87 percent come from the United States thus giving Washington the whip hand." If we stop providing these electronics he estimates that after their present stock runs out in about a year it would take at least two years before Russia could replace these American-made parts. As the above linked article at The Interpreter mentions, this is relevant in part because of recent talks about U.S. sanctions which could affect this kind of commerce.
They'll just find another French shell company to source from. Piece of piss.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
And 75% of electronics in USA satellites come from Taiwan. - Lev Andropov
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Fuck you Obama
uh... a movie quote presented as fact??
This is about as believable as the rest of the movie.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
What does 'comes from' mean in this case? Are they made in the USA? Designed and marketed by an American company? Or just sold through American resalers.
I find it hard to believe that it would be hard to find suppliers from other countries for most of these components.
Not the electronics that go in space satellites. Almost all of that fabrication is done in the USA. Hell, almost the entire industry is in the USA.
We aren't talking about video cards and motherboards.
This is why Putin cannot afford to retaliate with their own economic sanctions. Economically, they are about the same size as Italy. Putin and his cronies can talk as much as they want to about shunning the West economically (or not cooperating with America in space), but if it really came to a trade war, Russian society and their military would suffer far more than America and the rest of the West. Aside from oil/gas exports, Russia makes nothing of use for the West.
If I were an official in Russia, I would just keep my mouth shut about sanctions and just hope everything blows over in a year.
That title is terrible, and not supported by the article.
The article presents some numbers, quoting Nikolay Testoyedov:
Now, I think Slashdot gets off the hook for the misleading title, because the firggin article attributes the 75% from the US number to Nikolay Testoyedov and used the same number in its title. But the article title demonstrates some terrible critical math and reading comprehension skills.
Having lived through the cold war, and then not the cold war, and now a little miniature cold war again, I liked not the cold war better.
Aren't ULA building engines to the RD-180 design in Alabama?
No.
Early in the program there was a plan to co-produce RD-180 in the US, as a backup to the Russian RD-180, but this was never implemented.
They should just get their stuff from HobbyKing and save a bundle of cash
If only there was another country that sells cheap, knock-off electronics...
Seriously, they launched it. Regardless of the origin of the tech, someone outside the US did it -- get used to it, we're catching up with you, and I'm not just talking about Russia!
Russia has the shuttles though, which might help when it comes to space related stuff.
I was told in no uncertain terms that 3D printing is *THE* game-changing anti-Luddite post-engineering digital reality revolution.
Can't the Russians just download all the parts they need? Or better yet, put the printer in orbit and 3D print everything needed already in space?
You can't expect a bunch of IGNORANT PEONS to understand a plane the way somma our boys can!
They've got little more than rusting cold war hand-me-downs that are horribly obsolete and few Potemkin village weapons platforms that look cool but don't actually work.
Half of it is about as scary as the death star from the star wars movie "actually" is... aka not at all because it isn't real. It's a model with some special effects.
I'd worry about most of their shit about as much as I'd worry about dinosaurs eating people in my city.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Most satellite electronics to date have been specialized "space qualified, rad-hardened" parts, and these indeed are still made in the US. They are needed because the space environment, and especially the radiation environment, is hostile for commodity electronics. However, the space industry is very rapidly changing, and one big change is toward the use of commodity electronics. (COTS or "commercial off-the-shelf"). You get system reliability via redundancy instead of by using specialized parts. This works because space-qualified parts are several generations older than the COTS state of the art, so 3-to-1 or even 10-to-1 redundancy consumes less size, weight, and power (called "SWaP" in the space industry) for the same functionality and reliability as the old space-qualified parts.
Sure, but whoever does the buying of the space rated parts (which are not, in general, available from DigiKey) will get them with a nice notice saying "these parts are subject to ITAR, export may require a license"
If they then transfer them to someone who's not a US person without a license, they've just committed a federal crime. And oddly enough, there's a nice paper trail to the person making it very easy to find them.
Espionage and smuggling are omnipresent, but probably not a good way to run a satellite industry.
Nope, not old low density chips. they tend to have worse radiation properties. Unless you're talking 4000 series CMOS.
Yes, SiGe and Silicon on Insulator are popular for radiation tolerance.
A lot of modern parts are reasonably radiation tolerant: very small feature sizes helps, because it requires a lot of doping to make the junction work in such a small size. Large doping levels means less likely that a particle will upset the apple cart.
The real issue is process controls: in some cases radiation tolerance depends on things that don't affect conventional yield, so they're not well controlled in commercial parts. You might get a lot that's great, and the next lot from the fab is different.
There's also a lot more to space parts than the fab process. There's also the testing and inspection.
Also bear in mind that there's a difference between latchup (fairly rare these days) and bit flips: the latter can be handled by EDAC or good design, and is a "soft" failure. SEGR (Gate Rupture) is another problem, but that's more about biasing levels.
Time to put in a Backdoor into the chips....
The simpleton always wants to see a single other guy and some abstract philosophy as the cause of international struggles. It's easy and simplistic to say "Hitler started the war because he was evil..." or "If only Stalin and Truman had gone golfing..." etc as though there was no larger issue and every hot or cold war is just an inter-personal pissing match between people who accidentally found themselves in power. In reality, the populations of nations support their leaders (either by actively elevating them or buy passively refusing to remove them) and those leaders engage in hostilities in support of the views and demands of their populations, as informed by their views of history and threats. The population of Germany largely supported Hitler as he rebuilt their country and then took them on a path of conquest, just as today's Russians are giving Putin very high ratings as he wages war in Ukraine and pokes and probes NATO members. The population of Imperial Japan supported their leaders as they plundered their way across Asia in search of resources, just as the population of Iran supports their leaders who back much of the world's terrorism and are seeking nuclear weapons (which will lead to nuclear proliferation in the mideast).
If you removed the leader of each of these nations at the times you think would end what you simple-mindedly think would fix things, the likelihood is that some other similar person would arise to fill-in the gap and produce similar results. This is not fatalism, it's the recognition that the causes of war (no matter what some lame-brained stupid feminist professor might say) have nothing to do with the measure of the human male's member, but rather are a complex web of the needs of societies, the beliefs and desires of their populations, perceptions of injustice or deprivation, and so on.
The other problem with your kindergarten view of international affairs, which is now pushed by so many post-hippie morons in academia where such stupidity is the norm, is that it leads directly to the cro magnon idea that all sides in any war are of equal merit. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was an absolute moral chasm between Churchill and Hitler for example; that's not to say Churchill was personally a saint, or that his actions were Holy - but the causes of the two leaders were by no means equally valid. The world would have truly been plunged into darkness and barbarity had the wrong side won in that struggle.
Just these three brands, and all military and aerospace of Russia and former soviet union will go out for gardening and farming.
The U.S. is #1 in manufacturing and has been since WWII. http://www.wisegeek.org/what-a...