Soviet Space Battle Station Images Published

An anonymous reader writes "Images of the Soviet Union's laser space battle station Skif and its prototype Polyus have been published on the web. Polyus-Skif was the Soviet response to the American 'Star Wars' program of the 1980s. The Polyus was launched in May 1987 but a faulty sensor caused it to de-orbit into the South Pacific. More information can be found at Encyclopedia Astronautica."

Re:Old Soviet Overlords

[AeternitasXIII]

Soviet propaganda did a really good job of pumping up their apparent strength, but their economy was in dire straits since the mid-1970s. By the time Carter and Reagan had maneuvered the US into backing Iraq vs. the nominally Soviet supported Iran, the Soviets were already well on their way to bankruptcy. The Star Wars program and the resultant Soviet reaction to it probably only hastened the demise of the country by a year at most, according to many economists.

History Channel Last Night

[DnemoniX]

Funny that the History Channel ran a show last night on disasters in the Soviet space program. What was very interesting was some seriously devistating disasters that the world at large never knew about until years after the wall came down. One was really impressive, the rocket exploded on the pad killing over 150 people and burning for hours. In another the rocket began to launch, but flipped sideways and dropped. The damage to the launch facility was so bad it took two years to get in back into usable shape. All the while Khrushchev was mocking the US efforts as backwards and offering assistance to a "backwards" nation. Meanwhile covering up their mega-disasters. So it makes you wonder what "really" happened to this thing.

Re:"One thing i can tell you - Energia Corp now

[dr_d_19]

And perhaps a good ground for the interview would be Energia Corps' own Martian Mission web [energia.ru]

Yep, number increment

[Anonymous Coward]

Wel, yes please, just increment the number ;).

http://www.army.lv/photos/3987.jpg [www.army.lv]

Jeez,

Re:Sad

[21mhz]

Skif just seems like a particularly wimpy name for a "laser space battle station".

Skif means "Scythian" in the native tongue.

Re:Yep, number increment

[antime]

Yikes!
Nuclear space mines, self-defense cannon! [www.army.lv]

Re:any ideas why this on the Latvian army site?

[iezhy]

http://www.army.lv/ [www.army.lv] isn't a Latvian army site. It's just an amateur site about Russian military forces, and has nothing to do with official Latvian army or inteligence.

Re:Yep, number increment

[WIAKywbfatw]

That's because what it looks like you're seeing in those pictures is the orbiter on its launch vehicle. The orbiter alone (the black thing, if I'm reading things correctly) is probably what those measurements you have are referring to, so that expains the disparity between the pictures and the numbers.

Re:Old Soviet Overlords

[Meredeth]

Yes. A previous poster mentioned a large rocket prototype exploding on the launchpad and killing 150 people. That rocket was supposed to do the same job as the saturn rocket, but failed due to vibration problems ( I think it had 11 engines ). Energia is the rocket that they wanted to build in the 1960's. Its a fantastic design. It can loft Buran into space, or just a giant container, so it can lift quite a bit more than the shuttle could. If the russians can ever fund a major mars mission, Energia can launch just about anything they can think of.

Re:Stratoshperic Archeology

[magarity]

the latest peice of crap we found floating around in low orbit (that noone had a record of being up there

I'd say that was fairly unlikely. See, there are these satellites called 'launch detectors' the US military has that picks up rocket heat signature blooms within seconds anywhere in the world. So they know at least something is taking off and where it is going. And then there are these other things called 'telescopes' that let people on the ground look at things in space. Combine the two and while there might be some military satellite whose exact use is secret, there really isn't anything in orbit that isn't well known.

Re:violated USSR - USA treaty?

[virg_mattes]

Not this time. The treaty forbade launching armed craft, but although this thing was slated as a weapons platform, the first unit was sent up without armaments, and no others went up because the project was scrapped with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Virg

Re:Stratoshperic Archeology

[Oddly_Drac]

"There's lots of junk up there."

And the majority is being tracked by NORAD down to the size of around a basketball; which is the major reason why they actually justify the Cheyenne mountain budget. No. No points for Stargate jokes. Note that this addresses your point about tracking being limited; the military stares outwards.

Civilian tracking is generally a matter of watchin g for new stuff. "we still don't know where the radioactive material on the spacecraft landed."

It's the largely technical problem of finding an object the size of a basketball in an oval area 150 miles wide in the minor axis by 7000 miles in the long axis, the majority of that being water. 270 grams isn't much, and it's probably fairly safe for the moment.

"Maybe not so much with something this big, but you could always claim that it's an expended booster or maybe a failed research satellite if you didn't want anyone paying attention to it."

This was what they said about some Bigbird satellites, except someone did point out that failed satellites don't change orbit. I think that the veil of secrecy surrounding KH lasted for all of five years.

Re:De-Orbit?

[DunbarTheInept]

Thing adjective verb thing. Verb Thing. Thing verb?

There, was that a useful line to write? No? Do you understand why it was not useful? Yes, that's right, because sometimes more precise terms are neeeded. "Crashed" is imprecise. "De-orbit" describes a little bit more about the reason it crashed. De-orbit means it decellerates itself so it is no longer going fast enough to orbit and thus falls. (As opposed to, say, accellerating itself off at some angle such that it was still going fast enough to orbit, but was going in the wrong direction to miss the earth, or say, "crashing" by hitting some other object in space, or "crashing" by failing to get out to orbit in the first place.)

Re:any ideas why this on the Latvian army site?

[Pecisk]

Wrong, percentage of Russian speaking people here, in Latvia, is rather high, but still no more than 30% of whole population. The rest 60% are native Latvians. It was never bigger than 35-40% even in those times, when soviet regime tried to bring down Latvians as the nation (1940-1960 years).

You can check it out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Latvi a/ [wikipedia.org]

Re:Wow

[HeghmoH]

Russian launch practices are fascinating. They basically cart the rocket out on a huge truck, turn it upright, and fire it off. They routinely launch in horrible weather. By comparison, the US space program uses an incredibly slow and expensive system to take the things to the launch pad while they're upright. They launched one time when it was a tad cold and the entire thing blew up. On the other hand, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during the launch, and went on to land on the Moon.

Re:any ideas why this on the Latvian army site?

[dunkelfalke]

the owner of the site is a 20 year old russian living in latvia. and a quite nationalist one. i used to talk with him for a while (i own a small military site about russian special forces myself).

99% of his materials are shamelessly copied from other sites.

Re:Old Soviet Overlords

[RedWizzard]

A previous poster mentioned a large rocket prototype exploding on the launchpad and killing 150 people. That rocket was supposed to do the same job as the saturn rocket, but failed due to vibration problems ( I think it had 11 engines ).

You're confused. You're thinking of the N1 launcher (the Soviet moon rocket). It had 30(!) engines in the first stage. The failure of the N1 5L mission in 1969 did destroy one of the launch complexes at Baikonur, but it didn't kill 150 people. It's detailed here [astronautix.com]. The vibration problem happened in the N1 3L, and was due to small metal particles in one of the gas turbines. The rocket failed some 68 seconds into the mission, and crashed 45 km down range. The 150 people died in an accident in 1960, also at Baikonur, but this was a ballistic missile prototype (R16). From astronautix.com:

This On 24 October 1960 the first R-16 prototype was fuelled and on the pad, awaiting launch. An electrical problem developed, leading to a hold. Marshal Nedelin, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, ordered the engineers and technicians to fix the problem without the long delay of defuelling and refurbishing the missile. He personally had a deck chair brought out to the pad so he could watch the work first-hand. At 18:45 local time a spurious radio signal ordered the second stage of the rocket to fire while workers swarmed around the missile in its gantry. The missile exploded, killing a good part of the Soviet Union's rocket engineering and management talent. Among the dead were Nedelin, Konopalev (designer of the missile's guidance system), Grishin (deputy chairman of GKOT), Nosov (chief of launch command at Baikonur), and OKB-586 engineers Kontsevsky and Lev Berlin. 74 people were killed immediately, and 48 died in the ensuing weeks from burns or contact with the toxic and corrosive propellants. The total included 38 civilian engineers and 84 officers and enlisted rocket technicians.