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DDE

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  1. DDE
    Dear amateur areologists, what’s your take on the kimetic penetrator-style light landers of the variety attempted with Deep Space 2? Also, let us hold a minute of silence for the original Smash For Science, Venera-7 and its detection of a volcanic tuff surface via lithobtaking.
  2. DDE
    @kerbiloid, I shall ask the dirty question. VEB refused to cough up the cash for Sfera.
  3. DDE
    Another bunch of procurement docs reveal further “critical” problems with the ferroconcrete work on the Vostochnyi launch table. Bunch of leaks, improper welding, expansion joints not built to design - and test documents signed off before the tests. TsENKI claims to have fixed everything, so the procurements must be for long-term remedies and a new set of documentation https://ria.ru/space/20181127/1533604400.html Given the earlier discoveries regarding the whole project, “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” comes to mind.
  4. DDE
    Granted, it’s a lot more difficult for Anglophone speakers to distinguish a one-off publicity statement - also a dime a dozen in the Anglosphere - from a more or less concerted effort. Luckily, there’s 44-FZ, which makes Russian state procurement very transparent . So we know, for example, that Keldysh did run a program for development of a droplet radiator for a deep-space nuclear powerplant. In fact, at times it makes the situation far more transparent than desireable: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=45734.0
  5. DDE
    Khrunichev’s rocket LEGO that the Angara’s lead designer wrote a thesis on, yeah. @CatastrophicFailure, 4.1 m width - which is exactly that of Soyuz-5, or Proton without the fuel tanks/engine nacelles - is the hard cap for rail transport to Baikonur. Anything more is either airlift or N-1-style on-site rocket factory. And airlift requires taking over Ukraine and then essentially rebuilding Antonov from the ground up - it’s spent four years without building a plane, got liquidated last year, and the bulk of engineers apparently went of for redder pastures of designing catapults for Chinese naval aviation. On that note, the cap is 3.8 m for Vostochnyi. How they plan to get Soyuz-5 cores there is beyond me.
  6. DDE
    Zak’s got two new paywalled articles. Energia-5 now has something approximating asparagus staging, with two of the six strap-ons forming a second stage, and a core with an RD-180 - a very unexpected sight indeed. Evidently MS-10 is not fresh on their minds.
  7. DDE
    Bigger. Much bigger. http://www.russianspaceweb.com/5m-final.html
  8. DDE
    Typically this is somewhat simplified. The Mars orbit rendezvous can be omitted via a bigger ascent vehicle, and the potential death of the original rover is mostly a result of the... dubious? Half-arsed? ...way NASA approaches its supposed sample retrieval program (which, if we’re to judge by their previous megaproject, is going to get repurposed into a Moon sample return ). Hell, the more basic sample return programs don’t even use rover-based caching at all.
  9. DDE
    Not what the polls show, and utterly unsurprising given that anti-Americanism found in the tabloids and in the kitchens far exceeds that found on federal TV. We’re talking a catastrophic shortage of tinfoil. Among the sadomasochistics that trawl the worst bowels of the Internet, Russian conspiracy theories are regarded as the apex of kookiness, buttressed by appeals to classified Soviet research. And that’s before we discuss the late 1980s-1990s, when all sorts of junk got government endorsement.
  10. DDE
    I think it’s a result of the extreme emphasis on the threat of reverse contamimation. Excepting those that argue against any Mars samples being brought in contact with humans under any circumstances whatsoever, many consider an automated reentry to be unacceptably risky, and call for the sample to be retrobraked into Earth orbit and either studied in situ in a whole dedicated space station, or being brought down in a manned ship because that’s somehow safer. So yeah, best way. Same as the best way to study Martian life is to NEVER land humans on Mars.
  11. DDE
    Moon hoaxers are now a slim majority in Russia, so it’s a viable selling point. In short, second one had a whole chain of power and computer issues that eventually led to a formal decommissioning of the vehicle. Third one is currently non-operational due to failure of the high-bandwidth transmitter.
  12. DDE
    @monophonic, there’s such a huge organizational distance between Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Boeing Defense, Space and Security’s Space and Missile Systems division that they might as well be two unrelated entities. Edit: damn, preaching to the choir. Absolutely does not follow. If safety culture were top-down-driven, it would bave never been such a problem for everyone.
  13. DDE
    Roscosmos wants to include Marathon into the Sphera megaconstellation project. They think that voice comms are already taken, and the regular Internet will be taken by the time they’ll be rolling out, so they think a dedicated constellation for the Internet of Things is their niche. https://ria.ru/science/20181125/1533449358.html Meanwhile, it seems that Sphera is becoming a blanket term for Russia’s entire non-military and dual-use orbital group, including GLONASS.
  14. DDE
    Oh, please. It’s why I view all international projects somewhat dismissively - not only do the many cooks spoil the broth, they also try to get as much of the broth while doing as little as possible.
  15. DDE
    Rogozin: no nation is capable of handling a quote-unquote moon program alone today, therefore cooperation Also Rogozin: our job’s to check whether the Americans have actually been to the moon Rogozin’s seriousness: presense unknown https://ria.ru/science/20181124/1533425056.html
  16. DDE
    I heard whispers that the Luna-26 procurement docs are missing in action, meaning schedule slippage. Stow the bagpipes for now. Roscosmos is simply politicking and trying to get a larger role... which would likey lead to begging for cash down the line.
  17. DDE
    S7 and their Soyuz-7 already made a movkery of it. I say send them to Siberia. ...Wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S7_Airlines#Early_years
  18. DDE
    Duna flyby with a crew of three crammed into a Hitchhiker. Since I basically roleplay Kerbalism or your other cabin fever mod of choice, this was a mission of marginal survivability.
  19. DDE
    Likely Astra Linux, an FSB-certified fork. Could RSM actually be http://www.rscgroup.ru/mobile/news.html ? LOL, there’s a theme now.
  20. DDE
    Because each and every government always presents its motivations plainly, eh? But then we’ll inevitably albeit necessarily stray beyond the bounds of acceptable on this forum.
  21. DDE
    Let me just throw in a link. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3525/1
  22. DDE
    Most of the work I see involves barrages of questionnaires, questions with inobvious answers, and large sample sizes. But it can be jast as crushing to ask “You see a loose wire, whadda ya do?” Caveat: I work with banking, but operational risk management is not dissimilar.
  23. DDE
    My concern is with inclination mismatch and the resulting surface wait time for launch into target plane. Is NRHO so high that it’s easily reached from any LLO inclination? I still doubt the mechanics would play out.
  24. DDE
    The ultimate source of tin foil.
  25. DDE
    Yes and no. Unless your lander is really long-endurance, having an orbital element restricts destination latitudes. It’s the much-touted advantage of DA designs.
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