totm dec 2019 Russian Launch and Mission Thread

[kerbiloid]

A suborbital subsatellite has been successfully detached from the multi-burn transorbital tug with a parasite subsatellite, speaking in human language.

[DDE]

In news surprising absolutely no-one, Rogozin claims he doesn't have to money to build the Zevs TEM, claims the Bank of Russia should, quote, "print money" to replace its arrested foreign reserves.

https://m.lenta.ru/news/2022/05/28/zeus/

[snip]

Edited June 6, 2022 by Vanamonde

[GearsNSuch]

Perhaps they should print the money and use it as a more cost-effective form of rocket fuel. 

[Beccab]

47 minutes ago, DDE said:

In news surprising absolutely no-one, Rogozin claims he doesn't have to money to build the Zevs TEM

 

[Codraroll]

54 minutes ago, DDE said:

In news surprising absolutely no-one, Rogozin claims he doesn't have to money to build the Zevs TEM,

What even is there money to build these days? Or if the current hodgepodge continues, next year? Or even if the hodgepodge doesn't continue. I wouldn't expect the space program to be very high on the priority list overall.

[kerbiloid]

1. RogoZHin.

2. Now we know who is guilty in a hypothetical TEM/Zevs project failure. The 'Muricans who arrested the money.

Looks unexpectedly.

[sh1pman]

On 5/28/2022 at 3:26 PM, Codraroll said:

What even is there money to build these days?

New Roscosmos HQ in the scenic riverside location in Moscow. Why? Because it’s funded entirely out of the city budget.

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

New Roscosmos HQ in the scenic riverside location in Moscow. Why? Because it’s funded entirely out of the city budget.

Because you can't deliver >4.4 m wide rocket blocks by rails. Only by river barges or by special planes like VM-T or An-225 like VM-T.

[tater]

 

[caecilliusinhorto]

Angara launch tower is scary...

[Codraroll]

Genuinely wondering if they will ever complete it, never mind launching anything from it. 

[DDE]

Rogozin hints at near-polar orbit being approved for ROSS.

https://ria.ru/20220604/kosmos-1793103128.html

Also, it's the first time I realized ROSS stands for Russian Orbital Service Station.

Edited June 4, 2022 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

https://www-rbc-ru.translate.goog/technology_and_media/04/06/2022/629b110f9a794774b42b8903?from=newsfeed&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru

Rogozin decided to resume the Spektr-RG telescope work, in spite of the recent circumstances having forced its stop .

[Codraroll]

On 6/4/2022 at 3:04 PM, DDE said:

Rogozin hints at near-polar orbit being approved for ROSS.

I guess it's healthy to have ambitions, at least. But colour me a little skeptical of the idea that Russia can sustain a space station as a solo project with things going the way they currently do.

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

But colour me a little skeptical of the idea that Russia can sustain a space station as a solo project with things going the way they currently do.

Spoiler

 

& 

 

 

 

VS

 

 

 

[DDE]

7 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

 

& 

 

 

 

VS

 

 

 

Then what is it doing at a low-inclination orbit?

[kerbiloid]

Just now, DDE said:

Then what is it doing at a low-inclination orbit?

?

They said about a high-inclination orbit (which was actually natural for decades).

[Codraroll]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

 

& 

 

 

 

VS

 

 

 

Again with the "ooh, our country did great things decades ago while ..."

Look at the situation today, and its prospects for improving whatsoever any time soon. Details may be to politics-y to be discussed here, but it seems pretty likely that Russia may not be able to afford a space station of its own at the moment, not with everything else that also has to be paid for somehow.

[Vanamonde]

Some off-topic posts removed, and please avoid arguing about whose nationality is better. 

[SunlitZelkova]

16 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Again with the "ooh, our country did great things decades ago while ..."

It’s a point worth bringing up.

If the Soviet Union, in near-total isolation (with some support from Germany) could do what took Western countries a century* in a decade and industrialize itself to become capable of defeating a European great power in mechanized warfare, considering Russia has actually done space before and is still cooperating with a nation (China), an indigenous Russian space station isn’t too outlandish.

Especially if a military mission gets tacked on. For comparison, China’s space program is still technically managed by the military** and all of China’s taikonauts are members of the military (also curiously, there were a lot of claims early in the Shenzhou program that it was somehow “dual purpose” and had a military mission, and similar claims have been made about Tiangong).

Of course, that’s not to say it will happen. But the future is extremely fluid. If you look at predictions made by one side or another during the early stages of a conflict in the past, they often end up being wrong.

Also as far as cuts to space go I am rather optimistic. After all, the last time the US economy looked like it did today, Apollo got canceled and the Space Shuttle’s funding got reduced. Today, no one seems to have done so much as bat an eye at SLS or Orion…

Is there reason to believe Russia will be more frugal than the US in regards to “passion projects” (i.e. no real positive impact on the wider economy)?

*Not the best example because these Western countries were doing it for the first time, but not many other countries elsewhere have done the same thing in the same period of time.

**Not a super clear statement, the control over it is complex.

Edited June 7, 2022 by SunlitZelkova

[Codraroll]

3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

It’s a point worth bringing up.

If the Soviet Union, in near-total isolation (with some support from Germany) could do what took Western countries a century* in a decade and industrialize itself to become capable of defeating a European great power in mechanized warfare, considering Russia has actually done space before and is still cooperating with a nation (China), an indigenous Russian space station isn’t too outlandish.

Especially if a military mission gets tacked on. For comparison, China’s space program is still technically managed by the military** and all of China’s taikonauts are members of the military (also curiously, there were a lot of claims early in the Shenzhou program that it was somehow “dual purpose” and had a military mission, and similar claims have been made about Tiangong).

Of course, that’s not to say it will happen. But the future is extremely fluid. If you look at predictions made by one side or another during the early stages of a conflict in the past, they often end up being wrong.

Also as far as cuts to space go I am rather optimistic. After all, the last time the US economy looked like it did today, Apollo got canceled and the Space Shuttle’s funding got reduced. Today, no one seems to have done so much as bat an eye at SLS or Orion…

Is there reason to believe Russia will be more frugal than the US in regards to “passion projects” (i.e. no real positive impact on the wider economy)?

Thing is, though, that Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore, and it isn't even anywhere close to what the Soviet Union was, relative to its competition, back in the days. It is also no longer a command economy, that can pick the best and brightest out of the universities and send them to the space program to work for peanuts.  Instead, the space program of modern Russia is notoriously underfunded, corrupt, and inefficient (That's not to say the US doesn't have similar problems, before Kerbiloid comes with another whataboutist rant, but the US can afford to throw enough money into one end of the program for some results to come out of the other end, despite the massive losses in between). The result is that the Russian space program has mostly "hobbled along" since the fall of the Soviet Union, but even in times of peace and prosperity the gap between ambitions and deliveries has kept increasing, and the budget keeps getting tighter. And now, well,  peace and prosperity seem not to be at the table. Even if peace is achieved, there will either be a continuation of the quite harsh sanctions, or tremendous war reparations to pay.  

Second, I don't think tacking a military mission on will help matters much, because it's not like the military will have money to spare either. The Russian army has essentially been obliterated in Ukraine.  Thousands upon thousands of pieces of equipment have been destroyed, including several expensive aircraft and a few quite large ships. Stores of ammunition, spare parts, and various other supplies are being emptied. The deficiencies of materiel in long-term storage (that it's dang near impossible to produce a single working tank from parts salvaged from a hundred rusting husks in a storage yard, never mind that it gets blown up five minutes into battle) have been laid bare. And it is revealed that the air force is incapable of flying complex missions in even lightly contested airspace, effectively implying the bulk of its planes can only be used as expensive airfield decorations. In short, the Russian military will have more than enough on its shopping list for the foreseeable future if it wants to restore even a semblance of what it was four months ago. Being asked to fund a space station in addition to all that would be a very tall order. There might be some funds for satellites and missiles, but a manned space station? Those don't come cheap, and they're not on the "need to have" list by a very long shot.

The problem is quite simple: Just Not Enough Money. A space program is expensive, having a large military is expensive, and Russia's economy used to be the size of Spain's before it leapt off a cliff in February. This does not appear to be the right time to try to expand its space program, considering the state it has been kept in for the past couple of decades, even when the country's economy was booming. 

As you say, the future is very fluid, but it's hard to imagine a path where Russia manages to restore a level of prosperity where it can fund everything a country needs plus a manned space program of its very own. Its behaviour in Ukraine might cause it not to be invited to participate on the ISS' successor. Some cooperation with China might be possible, but as far as I know, Tiangong orbits on a too low inclination to be reachable by spacecraft launched from Russia. A future partnership may thus involve cosmonauts launched on Chinese spacecraft from China, as part of Chinese missions whose main mission language won't exactly be Russian, to put it like that.

[steve9728]

“Money, Money, and Money”

There are few remaining dividends from the Cold War left, either for the US or for Russia. As a Chinese - and as a ‘third-party observer’ - there are "Cold War fossils" politicians in both the US and Russia who have nothing to do with pragmatism. And what's even more deadly is that they can often really influence relevant national policy decisions. No offense, but I sincerely wish there can have more people in this world could understand "As big a head as you have, so big a hat as you wear."

“Looking up to the stars, keepping your feet on the ground”

Edited June 7, 2022 by steve9728

[SunlitZelkova]

@Codraroll I will recommend we agree to disagree and simply repeat what I said in my first post: the future is fluid. What we are talking about (ROSS) is something for the latter part of the decade, which is difficult to predict. If you look at what people in 1982 thought the world would look like in 1989, most were wrong. No one in 2012, perhaps apart from a few doomsday nuts and dazed and confused homeless people, thought the world would end up in a pandemic in 2020.

Part of the problem nowadays is that information is so accessible, it seems as though people think lies and inaccuracies are an impossibility. This is probably part of why science denialism is so prevalent. Another danger of this is not recognizing the potential for propaganda and the hazards of falling into an "abyss of complacency". To use an example of history, during the Cold War, all past empires had collapsed in either foreign or domestic conflict, thus people were rather surprised when the USSR collapsed. In a reverse of this, many foreign observers had written off the Soviet Union as a corrupt, backwards undeveloped country in the 1930s, and thus were very surprised when the Red Army stopped the Germans outside of Moscow, as they had expected it to collapse in a matter of months. These mistakes very well could be being made today when discussing the Russian Federation, including it's space program.

I don't think anyone can say for certain whether the ROSS will succeed or fail. With the level of information that can be cited here regarding the wider situation of the space program, both statements arguing it will succeed and those predicting it will fail are valid.

By the way, there is no true "ISS successor". Once it goes down in 2031, there will be no Western human presence in LEO unless Axiom, BO, and Sierra Nevada succeed. The closest thing to an ISS successor is Artemis, which Roscosmos rejected prior to the conflict.

Note- This is a presentation of my personal opinion, not an attempt to change yours 

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Thing is, though, that Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore, and it isn't even anywhere close to what the Soviet Union was, relative to its competition, back in the days.

Spoiler

Mishka & Grishka, as we can remember.

 

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

It is also no longer a command economy, that can pick the best and brightest out of the universities and send them to the space program

, including 2..3 lunar programs at once.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

(That's not to say the US doesn't have similar problems, before Kerbiloid comes with another whataboutist rant, but the US can afford to throw enough money into one end of the program for some results to come out of the other end, despite the massive losses in between)

Most part of every space money stay on ground, just a little flies into space.

And Americans always choose the most expensive way, like launching 15 t modules inside a 70 t ship, instead of making self-propelled modules and a relocation arm, like others do.

So, the dependency is non-linear. The more money you have for space - the more money won't fly there. The flying rest doesn't depend on the original sum.

If sum all  previously listed US projects and see what's actually in space (Falcon / Dragon, and to some degree Starlink), we can see that Roscosmos has saved billions of dollars by using KSP for others.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Even if peace is achieved, there will either be a continuation of the quite harsh sanctions, or tremendous war reparations to pay.  

Looks like not so many governments share this point of view for sure, when it comes to practical actions and longer than several months perspective. Don't bet on this too much.
The world economy is not linear, and Russia is not the easiest party to ignore, even if it's unpleasant.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The Russian army has essentially been obliterated in Ukraine.

It even hasn't started to be, for objective and well-known reasons, too unpleasant to mention here. 

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Thousands upon thousands of pieces of equipment have been destroyed, including several expensive aircraft and a few quite large ships. Stores of ammunition, spare parts, and various other supplies are being emptied. The deficiencies of materiel in long-term storage

6 000 T-62 (equivalent of M60) from storages start joining the party.
While most part of modern ones wasn't even involved.

The opposing force is also not armed with Merkavas and Abramses. And Leos (even I) are still at their homes.
Mostly this is the greatest world-wide utilization of Soviet obsolete hardware to the date, anmd Russia definitely has more of it.
(Actually, it was returned almost from the oven doors, so costs like a metal scrap).

The mentioned large ships were an old Soviet cruiser and a big rolker used as cargo ship.
Anyway, this may affect the event sequence, but not the final result, which is absolutely clear and predictable., whoever wins on the battlefield 

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Stores of ammunition, spare parts, and various other supplies are being emptied.

Didn't check. But probably no old armor will stay in the stores.

On the other hand, we can see a lot of towed howitzers (like the lightened specops 777, shooting from the farthest distance they can, 4 powder charges instead of the usual 1..2 charges from American videos much more intensively than they were designed for) and Soviet epoch tech, but droplets of more or less modern ones. So, looks like whole world will update its military hardware in several years after emptying the junk storages.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The deficiencies of materiel in long-term storage (that it's dang near impossible to produce a single working tank from parts salvaged from a hundred rusting husks in a storage yard, never mind that it gets blown up five minutes into battle)

It's lasting for three months to the date, which is much longer than five minutes. Don't confuse it with a rush to La Manche in two weeks.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

And it is revealed that the air force is incapable of flying complex missions in even lightly contested airspace, effectively implying the bulk of its planes can only be used as expensive airfield decorations.

The air force is avoiding carpet bombing of residential areas, otherwise the military plants and railway objects would be destroyed in the first week. 
The aim is not to make a wasteland. So, efficiency is sacrificed for the civil casualties decrease.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The problem is quite simple: Just Not Enough Money. A space program is expensive

So, it will be limited. No space hotels.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

but it's hard to imagine a path where Russia manages to restore a level of prosperity where it can fund everything a country needs plus a manned space program of its very own.

1950s were even worse...

Idk when Russia will achieve the American level of prosperity, but still there are three countries having launched their crewed ships, while some don't have even such industry.
It's non-linear. You don't need to replace both your cars every five years to have a space industry.

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Its behaviour in Ukraine might cause it not to be invited to participate on the ISS' successor.

Is the participation needed? Is the project on the table? A year ago NASA was choosing a new design after a decade of our discussions of this forum.

Edited June 7, 2022 by kerbiloid

[SunlitZelkova]

@Vanamonde @Gargamel Clean up on Isle Russian Launch and Mission thread

The discussion of ROSS has veered into blatantly off-topic stuff. We might benefit from another explanation of just how far "space policy" discussion can go, and maybe even about what constitutes respectfully sharing opinions and what doesn't.