totm dec 2019 Russian Launch and Mission Thread

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, Alcentar said:

I think everything is much simpler, just modern Russia is not able to create a heavy class rocket. 

Wrong thread?

 

[VoidSquid]

It simply hurts to see things going the wrong way, my heart aches. 

[Alcentar]

48 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Wrong thread?

 

 

No, I got there. Russia rests on the legacy of the USSR, just look at the same unfortunate and dead Angara, at the "Nauka" module, or at "PTK-NP", aka "Federaziya", aka "Orel", which, by the way, remains a layout, in a single copy.  
Oh yes, Angara took off, but taking into account its cost and the time between launches, it seems that it has no prospects. 20 years of development was worth it. :Ъ

Jokes about conquering the moon are funny, but over time, even the funniest joke becomes annoying.

 

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Alcentar said:

"PTK-NP", aka "Federaziya", aka "Orel", which, by the way, remains a layout, in a single copy.  

According to Zak, it's a lot further than that.

2 hours ago, Alcentar said:

Oh yes, Angara took off, but taking into account its cost and the time between launches, it seems that it has no prospects. 20 years of development was worth it. :Ъ

Angara is a victim of a struggle over prime real estate in Fili ) This left the production chain hanging between Khrunichev, and a very dilapidated semi-complete prodicution line for Energiya side boosters in Omsk. Every Angara to date has been produced in an ad hoc manner.

4 hours ago, Alcentar said:

I think everything is much simpler, just modern Russia is not able to create a heavy class rocket. 

Neither could 1960s America. We won't know till we try.

Edited July 26, 2020 by DDE

[DDE]

5 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

I think that the problem is Vostochny cosmodrome. Rails going to Baikonur could handle rockets up to 4.1m, for Vostochny it's 3.9m, IIRC. Both Energia and N1 were problematic, in that they essentially had to be built at Baikonur, and unlike that one, Vostochny has no facilities to that end. I think Angara's upper stages hit the rail transport limits already, so making anything bigger would be a significant logistical challenge. 

Thing is, the superheavy has been finalized around Soyuz-5 4.1 m modules, seven of them. The more risky part is the first-ever VAB for the damned thing.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Angara is a victim of a struggle over prime real estate in Fili

Fili?..

Spoiler

 

[Codraroll]

16 hours ago, DDE said:

 

21 hours ago, Alcentar said:

I think everything is much simpler, just modern Russia is not able to create a heavy class rocket. 

Neither could 1960s America. We won't know till we try.

Well ... they tried, didn't they? Designs have been floating around since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the only rockets that fly on a regular basis are derivatives of a design from the 1960s.

[DDE]

15 minutes ago, Codraroll said:

Well ... they tried, didn't they? Designs have been floating around since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the only rockets that fly on a regular basis are derivatives of a design from the 1960s.

Those were about as realistic as MarsOne. Consider the tale of the Angara again. The original design was set in stone before the turn of the millenium following half a decade of studies and under-the-carpet warfare between design bureaus. It then had a third of that funding allocated. Of that allocated funding, less than 1% would actually be issued throughout yet another decade.

The situation is genuinely different now that up to 10% of the annual defense budget (of which space is a part) actually goes unspent because the industry lacks capacity and because often it ends up working at below breakeven point. Sure, Yenisei is a flawed design: the entire Soyuz-5 boondoggle may be S7 Space trying to run R&D for a renewed Sea Launch at taxpayer's expense, rather than a justified backup to Angara-5. But it's a step forward from SLS-grade calamities with major dedicated hardware (i.e. the countless proposals to bring back Energiya's core, even though all related industrial capacity is lost irreversibly).

Unfortunately, Roscosmos is likely to shamble onwards, paralyzed for a year or two before Shoigu gets tired of having to build his own space industry in the shadows, and has the whole damn thing annexed back into the Aerospace Forces. Safronov's arrest for treason should probably be viewed as part of that long-time feud rather than retaliation for journalistic work - remember, Rogozin was a Serdyukov-era appointee in charge of the defense industry until he got pushed out into his current marginal position. Similarly, note the Krylo-SV project: Roscosmos has little to no involvement, and it's slated for use from Kapystin Yar, where there's no Roscosmos infrastructure but plenty of military assets. There are even hawks within the cosmonaut corps who want a leaner, less international and more applications-focused space program.

I know I sound like a broken record, but we're in for a wild ride once Russia's civilian space program is finally put out of its misery.

[Codraroll]

Yeah, I don't think Russian engineers and manufacturers lack the ability to design and build a heavy rocket. It's organizing the effort from a political level that's difficult.

[GearsNSuch]

Russia is still very much present and capable after the USSR's fall. There's just no motivation or reason for the state funded Roscosmos to continue to innovate. The rockets they have are reliable and cheap enough– why bother?

NASA has a similar problem with SLS (not to bash on it). Between the Soyuz and now the Crew Dragon, there's just not a good enough reason to speed development on. Why bother when there are other options present?

During the Space Race, the USSR and the U.S. both had such massive, innovative, and successful space programs because there was a clear goal (winning) with clear benefits (political and strategic power). Ultimately, it was a win for both countries, and something previously unimaginable on both a technical and political level, the Apollo-Soyuz project, became possible.

The reason why something like SpaceX can be successful and revolutionary is because there's profit for them in innovating. That's always been the reason, but where that profit comes from has shifted from political sources to commercial, at least in the here and now.

So, if some enterprising individual in Russia wanted to found a private launch company and had the brains, finances, and connections to do so...

[Codraroll]

2 hours ago, GearsNSuch said:

So, if some enterprising individual in Russia wanted to found a private launch company and had the brains, finances, and connections to do so...

...politics would happen and he'd be jailed and lose that fortune to one of Putin's friends somehow.

Edited July 27, 2020 by Codraroll

[sh1pman]

2 hours ago, GearsNSuch said:

So, if some enterprising individual in Russia wanted to found a private launch company and had the brains, finances, and connections to do so...

...that individual would emigrate to US.

Roscosmos views such startups as dangerous competition and will use all of its power to shut them down. I agree with @DDE, Russian civilian space program should be restarted from scratch. Its ideology needs to be completely reinvented, with focus on commercialisation of space activities. Otherwise it will be perpetually stuck in abandoned projects, unrealised proposals and use of ancient archeotechnology.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, Codraroll said:

...politics would happen and he'd be jailed and lose that fortune to one of Putin's friends somehow.

Implying he wasn't Putin's friend in the first place - the list is long and the bar for entry rather low.

Not that it would make him immune, of course.

6 hours ago, GearsNSuch said:

So, if some enterprising individual in Russia wanted to found a private launch company

Ha-ha, very funny. Russia has gone from a wild and corrupt privatization to re-nationalisation and dirigisme to mature state capitalism. You're not supposed to enterprise and innovate without state participation - although, sadly, the taxpayer money rarely comes with proper oversight. Whether it's the perks or the job security, the best jobs, the ones most in demand on the market, are in the vast bureaucracies of the state corporations. Why would anyone want to be an entrepreneur if not from desperation and lack of credentials?

We're headed full-tilt for the Chinese model where the public sector is nebulous but all-penetrating; our high and mighty think the US runs under the same model despite pretending otherwise, hence all the complaints about Musk being subsidized by the Pentagon.

Problem is, the state-led model of innovation is highly competitive if the state actually gives a damn (which, in cases of Russia's many, many past superprojects, it didn't). Corporations merely replicate the same top-down approach of setting a direction, mobilizing resources, and shutting out uninvited competing ideas as distractions.

6 hours ago, GearsNSuch said:

because there was a clear goal (winning) with clear benefits (political and strategic power)

A retroactive fiction. The Sputnik Race had a goal. By the first manned launch, the goals began to diverge, and Khrushchev's "retirement" almost completely eliminated interest in civilian spaceflight. Which was a very major factor in why the Soviet Union joined the Moon Race half a decade too late.

[kerbiloid]

52 minutes ago, DDE said:

The Sputnik Race had a goal.

We should remember, that the goal was the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Geophysical_Year

Quote

Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. launched artificial satellites for this event; the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957, was the first successful artificial satellite.^[3] Other significant achievements of the IGY included the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by Explorer 1 and the defining of mid-ocean submarine ridges, an important confirmation of plate-tectonic theory.^[4] Also detected was the rare occurrence of hard solar corpuscular radiation that could be highly dangerous for manned space flight.^[5][6]

So, and who of us actually remembers that goal without wiki?

***

And also the implementation of the goal looks rather inspiring.

The Soviets were having problems with the warhead reentry, so they just spent a headless rocket to launch a sat, as anyway why just keep sitting and doing nothing.

The Americans were failing with the vonBraunless projects, so after that they hurried up and launched a sat just to show they are big, too.

Oh, yes, and there was the Geophysical Year with its declared goal, which would be happily forgotten by everybody if the tech was not wrong.

Edited July 27, 2020 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

So, and who of us actually remembers that goal without wiki?

Actually the goal was to use a peaceful excuse to establish a precedent that national airspace boundaries do not apply to space.

Because otherwise, aside from greatly inconveniencing spy sats, all of the rest of orbital flight would be well and truly [redacted].

Edited July 27, 2020 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

52 minutes ago, DDE said:

Actually the goal was to use a peaceful excuse to establish a precedent that national airspace boundaries do not apply to space.

At that time they were hardly applied even to air. RB-36 and U-2 were bothered by the daily routine of flying above till early 1960s.

Edited July 27, 2020 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

16 hours ago, DDE said:

Actually the goal was to use a peaceful excuse to establish a precedent that national airspace boundaries do not apply to space.

Because otherwise, aside from greatly inconveniencing spy sats, all of the rest of orbital flight would be well and truly [redacted].

The US was the one thinking about spy satellites and was worried about overflight rules for satellites.
And yes the US was already doing overflight of Soviet union who tried to shoot them down, however this was secret missions while the satellites would be public and overfly every country. 
This was the reason for the US pretty convoluted plan with an small entirely civilian launcher and satellite. 
As it turned out nobody than the US had thought much about this and it was kind of pointless after the first satellites. 

[kerbiloid]

A manned (at that time - in both senses manned) spysat was among the first planned objectives of R-7 between warheads and unmanned spysat from the very beginning.

But R-7 was able to put in orbit several tons, while the American first rockets were... lighter. Nobody seriously needed them due to the huge bomber fleet, so it was looking more like a hot potato

[tater]

 

[DDE]

1 hour ago, tater said:

 

Photo looks familiar.

Could be any one of a thousand prior launches.

[tater]

40 minutes ago, DDE said:

Photo looks familiar.

Could be any one of a thousand prior launches.

Yeah, I wondered about that.

 

 

[magnemoe]

On 7/29/2020 at 6:26 PM, tater said:

Yeah, I wondered about that.

 

 

Top image shows clearly it will be no boster separation as I was waiting for first time
Is Proton and Saturn 1b the only multi body rockets? Not including stuff like the little john used to test Apollo escape system as it was an one off ballistic test but space rockets? 

[DDE]

6 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Top image shows clearly it will be no boster separation as I was waiting for first time
Is Proton and Saturn 1b the only multi body rockets? Not including stuff like the little john used to test Apollo escape system as it was an one off ballistic test but space rockets? 

I think there were many bunches of proposals, especially from Yangel. The Zenit was originally built in the "flatfish" variant with two cylinders under a fairing. All of them ended up becoming more conventional ("logs").

[magnemoe]

1 minute ago, DDE said:

I think there were many bunches of proposals, especially from Yangel. The Zenit was originally built in the "flatfish" variant with two cylinders under a fairing. All of them ended up becoming more conventional ("logs").

Thought of the UR class up to http://www.astronautix.com/u/ur-900.html 
Unlike proton and like 1b it has one engine under each stacks. the UR-500 was also set up to stage 3 bundles of two cores while 3 cores was core stage, much of the same for upper stage   
it was so Kerbal it had cross feed. Make Vladimir Chelome an honorable Kerbal. 
 

[tater]