Russia announces a plan for Mars and Moon missions

[NSEP]

Unmanned missions? Fine! Manned missions? Slow down man!

Everyone wants to do manned missions to the Moon or Mars, but i will only take these proposed Mars or Moon missions seriously when they get out of the paper phase, especially the Mars ones. Currently the Russian PTK-NP is slowly raising its head out of the paper phase (according to RussianSpaceWeb), wich is good, but it still has a long way to go before it can go to the Moon.

PTK-NP is in the Top 3 of the closest thing we have to a near-future Apollo-8 moment that is almost outside the paper-phase. And to be frank, there are only 3 spacecraft outside of the paper phase that might be able to do such things. Orion, Dragon V2 and Federatsiya.

Orion, will probably take a while to get anywhere.

Dragon V2, has already ditched, but it would still be possible to do an Apollo-8 moment if Elon wanted to.

Federatsiya (PTK-NP), is simulair to Orion, expect much further behind.

[DerekL1963]

29 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-A

Is a decades old proposal from the era when Soyuz was still a general purpose earth orbiter and in the process of transitioning to serving as a station taxi.  It doesn't really say anything about the ability of the current generation to perform a lunar mission or what modifications will or won't be required.

[Canopus]

35 minutes ago, NSEP said:

there are only 3 spacecraft outside of the paper phase that might be able to do such things. Orion, Dragon V2 and Federatsiya.

Orion, will probably take a while to get anywhere.

Dragon V2, has already ditched, but it would still be possible to do an Apollo-8 moment if Elon wanted.

More like a Zond moment or Apollo 13.

[sh1pman]

4 hours ago, Streetwind said:

When are the Russians finally bringing Federatsiya online, again? Having a spacecraft that's not named the same as a launch system is decades overdue!

Never. It’s getting pushed back two years every two years. The current date is 2022.

@NSEP it’s not even a paper phase, lol. Fantasy phase more like.

Edited March 17, 2018 by sh1pman

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Soyuz is pretty specialized as a LEO station taxi...  Can it survive the thermal environment of cislunar and lunar space unmodified?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_5

The very first Terrans performed a lunar fly-by and happily returned to the Earth in Soyuz, before Apollo could get to there.

[NSEP]

6 hours ago, sh1pman said:

@NSEP it’s not even a paper phase, lol. Fantasy phase more like.

This article says otherwise

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/ptk-2017.html

[sh1pman]

1 minute ago, NSEP said:

This article says otherwise

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/ptk-2017.html

I was speaking about the rocket, not the spacecraft.

[NSEP]

6 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

I was speaking about the rocket, not the spacecraft.

Oh ok!

[DerekL1963]

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_5

The very first Terrans performed a lunar fly-by and happily returned to the Earth in Soyuz, before Apollo could get to there.

Seriously?  The Soyuz of today is specialized space station taxi designed for LEO operations, it is not a Soyuz lunar spacecraft from forty years ago.  That a different spacecraft did something forty years ago says nothing about what today's Soyuz is capable of or what modifications might be required.

I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp.

 

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Seriously?  The Soyuz of today is specialized space station taxi designed for LEO operations, it is not a Soyuz lunar spacecraft from forty years ago

They can make a thicker bottom. Like did fourty years ago.

Or take it back from museum.
 

Spoiler

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by kerbiloid

[DerekL1963]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

They can make a thicker bottom. Like did fourty years ago.

Seriously?  Did you even read what I wrote?  I never said they couldn't do it today.  I never said anything that even possibly be interpreted as meaning anything like that.

I said: Soyuz is pretty specialized as a LEO station taxi.  Can it survive the thermal environment of cislunar and lunar space unmodified?  It's standard flight duration (2-3 days to a station, 2-3 days back) is awfully close to that of "loop around the moon" mission - what are it's margins?

There's much more to the question than just heatshields.

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Can it survive the thermal environment of cislunar and lunar space unmodified?

The photo above shows the reentry capsule of Soyuz successfully survived the thermal environment of cislunar space.

Nothing magic in heat protection. They did it fourty years ago, they can put a thicker layer of ablator now. Not a rocket science.

P.S.
Btw why fourty? Fifty. 1968.

P.P.S.
Proven by the Soviet lunar tortoises, first live beings from the Earth visited another celestial body near space and returned back alive.

Edited March 17, 2018 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Guys, I'm happy to inform you you're looking at quite a bit of fake news. To quote my mail to r/space moderators,

Quote

https://ria.ru/science/20180315/1516414153.html

Direct quotes:

We will in the near future conduct unmanned, and later manned launches for research into deep space. A lunar program, followed by research into Mars. The former will take place very soon, in 2019. Afterwards we'll launch a mission to Mars.

Our specialists will attempt polar landings, as there's reason to expect water there. Therefore, there's work to be done - as a staging area for flights to other planets and to deep space.

FYI, the article reiterates [2019 for Luna 25 polar lander,] 2021 for Luna 26 orbiter and 2022 for Luna 27 driller.

There's also the 1h53m actual movie: https://vk.com/video-98331381_456239217 (link will likely be blocked)

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by DDE

[sh1pman]

36 minutes ago, DDE said:

Guys, I'm happy to inform you you're looking at quite a bit of fake news. To quote my mail to r/space moderators,

 

Yea, I mentioned that too, on the previous page. Was it a translation bug or a misinterpretation bug?

[DDE]

2 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Yea, I mentioned that too, on the previous page. Was it a translation bug or a misinterpretation bug?

Both, TBH. The original quote requires some background knowledge to understand even in Russian.

[tater]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They can make a thicker bottom. Like did fourty years ago.

Skimming the older posts I saw this, read "bottom" as "bacon" and immediately got hungry (and wondered about the history of slicing thicker bacon).

[sevenperforce]

On the topic of moon landings -- is there any acceptable lunar ascent engine on the market today?

[Scotius]

But there is no market for them today. So who would produce them? Only vacuum engines created today are meant for second stages, deep space probes and as maneuvering\stationkeeping propulsion for satellites.

[sevenperforce]

We couldn't even think about designing a moon lander without suitable engines.

What about something like the Rutherford, but using nitric acid in place of LOX, using resistance heaters to vaporize propellants for autogenous pressurization and temperature management, and using spark-vapor ignition? Solar power with batteries and fuel cell backup. Should get much better reusability than another pressure-fed hypergol solution, with equivalent reliability.

Edited March 18, 2018 by sevenperforce

[DDE]

19 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

We couldn't even think about designing a moon lander without suitable engines.

What about something like the Rutherford, but using nitric acid in place of LOX, using resistance heaters to vaporize propellants for autogenous pressurization and temperature management, and using spark-vapor ignition? Solar power with batteries and fuel cell backup. Should get much better reusability than another pressure-fed hypergol solution, with equivalent reliability.

You’re really rushing it. UDMH-NTO/IRFNA is just fine for now. Extra performance can be coaxed out using aluminium or beryllium slurries, pentaborane, peroxide, or chlroine pentafluoride (and yes, Energomash has experience with all of the above). Besides, what do you have against pressure feeds? Moon ascent motors are marginally in turbopump territory; it’s less about the Rutgerford and more about turbines being inefficient at such mass flows.

In the long term, aluminium-oxygen ISRU is my favourite.

[sevenperforce]

6 minutes ago, DDE said:

You’re really rushing it. UDMH-NTO/IRFNA is just fine for now. Extra performance can be coaxed out using aluminium or beryllium slurries, pentaborane, peroxide, or chlroine pentafluoride (and yes, Energomash has experience with all of the above). Besides, what do you have against pressure feeds? Moon ascent motors are marginally in turbopump territory; it’s less about the Rutgerford and more about turbines being inefficient at such mass flows.

In the long term, aluminium-oxygen ISRU is my favourite.

Just thinking ahead.

A fully-reusable solution would be a vehicle capable of doing lunar descent and lunar ascent in a single stage, expending only bipropellant, and accepting propellant transfer from an Earth tanker. Using pressure-fed engines is suboptimal for this, for multiple reasons. One, you're going to need large tanks to pack almost 4 km/s onto a single stage, and dry mass of a pressure-fed solution scales really poorly when your tanks get large. Two, pressure-fed engines require that a tanker replenish not only the bipropellant tanks, but also the pressurant tanks, which means the prop transfer gets overcomplicated.

Hypergolics are desired for ignition assurance (and because it means fewer consumables), but if you can get 100% reliable ignition without additional consumables, then you can expand beyond hypergolics. That's why I was thinking you could use a resistance heater to vaporize kerosene so it could be reliably spark-ignited. A resistance heater which produces kerosene vapors could also be used for autogenous fuel tank pressurization, and the warm vapor would act to prevent propellant freezing.

The oxidizer is the problem; it is much easier to combat freezing than it is combat the boil-off you'd get with LOX. Hence nitric acid, because you could do the same thing as you did with your kerosene.

[wumpus]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Just thinking ahead.

A fully-reusable solution would be a vehicle capable of doing lunar descent and lunar ascent in a single stage, expending only bipropellant, and accepting propellant transfer from an Earth tanker. Using pressure-fed engines is suboptimal for this, for multiple reasons. One, you're going to need large tanks to pack almost 4 km/s onto a single stage, and dry mass of a pressure-fed solution scales really poorly when your tanks get large. Two, pressure-fed engines require that a tanker replenish not only the bipropellant tanks, but also the pressurant tanks, which means the prop transfer gets overcomplicated.

Hypergolics are desired for ignition assurance (and because it means fewer consumables), but if you can get 100% reliable ignition without additional consumables, then you can expand beyond hypergolics. That's why I was thinking you could use a resistance heater to vaporize kerosene so it could be reliably spark-ignited. A resistance heater which produces kerosene vapors could also be used for autogenous fuel tank pressurization, and the warm vapor would act to prevent propellant freezing.

The oxidizer is the problem; it is much easier to combat freezing than it is combat the boil-off you'd get with LOX. Hence nitric acid, because you could do the same thing as you did with your kerosene.

Considering the cost of each lunar flight, the cost of the lander is in the noise.  There is no reason to make it reusable and little reason to bring it back (do you really want a heat shield on it?  You pretty much at least need to aerobrake, even if you are going to dock it on the ISS between flights).  Also how reusable will that engine be after using nitric acid (probably less bad than LOX, unless you are talking about the stuff similar to "red fuming nitric acid" from Ignition!, then all bets are off).

The rutherford engine is still extremely complex and untested, building reliable pressure-fed hypergolics aren't.  I'd  even expect it to be trivial to build one with Kerbal-style drop tanks, at least assuming that you dropped the tanks between burns (close one valve, eject, open another).  This should go a long way to fixing the efficiencies of pressure fed engines (or just use two like Apollo did.  Everything I heard implied that the ascent engine was the most likely component to fail in Apollo.  The forces acting on it from launch (and pogo) to landing weren't completely known, and it had to be so extremely light...  Lots of nightmares at NASA about astronauts banging away on the ascent motor while air ran out).

[Canopus]

8 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Considering the cost of each lunar flight, the cost of the lander is in the noise.  There is no reason to make it reusable and little reason to bring it back (do you really want a heat shield on it?  You pretty much at least need to aerobrake, even if you are going to dock it on the ISS between flights).  Also how reusable will that engine be after using nitric acid (probably less bad than LOX, unless you are talking about the stuff similar to "red fuming nitric acid" from Ignition!, then all bets are off).

Real proposals for fully or partial reusable lunar lander park them in orbits near the moon (L1, L2 or NRHO) not return them to earth or the ISS.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

You’re really rushing it. UDMH-NTO/IRFNA is just fine for now. Extra performance can be coaxed out using aluminium or beryllium slurries, pentaborane, peroxide, or chlroine pentafluoride (and yes, Energomash has experience with all of the above). Besides, what do you have against pressure feeds? Moon ascent motors are marginally in turbopump territory; it’s less about the Rutgerford and more about turbines being inefficient at such mass flows.

In the long term, aluminium-oxygen ISRU is my favourite.

For landings LH2/LOX is still plausible with a gateway of some sort, dark side landings and LH2 would be completely stable. Though I think for convenience methane would be a better choice. It is the moon, its not like is on the other side of the universe or Mars or something.

Somewhere in the prehistoric I think Moon landings were done before so basically anything you do will practically be more efficient than that.

I agree, the cart here as about 3 light years ahead of the horse. Where are the resources for this moon mission going to come from, an agreement of an oil/gas oligarch?

[PB666]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Just thinking ahead.

A fully-reusable solution would be a vehicle capable of doing lunar descent and lunar ascent in a single stage, expending only bipropellant, and accepting propellant transfer from an Earth tanker. Using pressure-fed engines is suboptimal for this, for multiple reasons. One, you're going to need large tanks to pack almost 4 km/s onto a single stage, and dry mass of a pressure-fed solution scales really poorly when your tanks get large. Two, pressure-fed engines require that a tanker replenish not only the bipropellant tanks, but also the pressurant tanks, which means the prop transfer gets overcomplicated.

Hypergolics are desired for ignition assurance (and because it means fewer consumables), but if you can get 100% reliable ignition without additional consumables, then you can expand beyond hypergolics. That's why I was thinking you could use a resistance heater to vaporize kerosene so it could be reliably spark-ignited. A resistance heater which produces kerosene vapors could also be used for autogenous fuel tank pressurization, and the warm vapor would act to prevent propellant freezing.

The oxidizer is the problem; it is much easier to combat freezing than it is combat the boil-off you'd get with LOX. Hence nitric acid, because you could do the same thing as you did with your kerosene.

I agree, without a lunar atmosphere all you have is insolance and heat scatter which can effectively be stopped. But lets face the hard fact, the Russians are not going to have a gateway. Not trying to be pessimistic, but doesn't seem to me that the funds that might flow to the project would have a propensity to flow that direction. In fact they infrequently use LH2 based systems despite having a tremendous amount of Natural gas for which to make LH2. I think with proper design on can use L02 direct dispatch from Earth, and a oxidizer substitute like N204 or the like will not make an incredible amount of difference if you also use a fuel like Liquid Ethane or propane.

Lets just X from the get go any form of gateway. You might consider a circulator instead that moves from a lunar station to LEO and back.
But then that begs the question where is the SpaceX like refueling vehicle that is itself recyclable?
Then add the cost of shielding liquid volatile tanks in space (Solar panels or detachable shield or a shield attached to transfer vehical) and on the lander (A very light inflatable balloon could do the trick).
----------------------
Does not appear to be a thing that the RSA would do.

This does bring an issue however, we need a new SpaceX like designer to come up with a cheap way of keeping liquid lbp-volatiles in space.

There are folks that talk and folks that do, we need to separate the talk from the do. Certain folks have credibility when in comes to control within their borders, but not very progressive, and the economy is kind of regressive. That sort of dynamic is not going to innovate space except maybe on a military front. There are other folks that talk and manage to innovate, but they lack the public resources (if they get some of those public resources then they might do more). There are folks that don't talk much, but are increasingly doing stuff that we cannot see, so they have the momentum to accomplish but lack the experience and have a tremendous amount of growing public resources. When they do, they will let you know what they have done . . . .And then there is NASA, which once upon a time did really great moon missions, but has be $hackled and then ESA, which might get to the moon someday delayed 5 fold.