Russia Tops With 45% of Spacecraft Launches in 2006 119
knight17 writes "This year was a really good year for space exploring nations, but Russians may be the most happiest among them, because they grabbed a huge 45% of the spacecraft launching market this year. The coming year is also very good for Russian space programs, since next year they will finish the GLONASS navigation project. The US is in second place, and China & Japan in third with six launches each. The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen."
Go, CowboyNeal (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Go, CowboyNeal (Score:5, Funny)
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infinite doop (Score:2)
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Hybrid receivers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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When SA was switched off, interest in GLONASS has vanished. Probably Galileo receivers (and certainly the early ones) will be GPS/Galileo.
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What language? (Score:3, Interesting)
This must have been literally translated from Russian. Most other languages are hilarious when literally translated without changing cases or tenses - "Throw me down the stairs my hat".
Re:What language? (Score:5, Funny)
My guess is: "Warden, the vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten."
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The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.
See?
snarkth
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I certainly hope this is the reason, but lets face it, up to now slashdot editors have not really needed translation problems to serve us broken english.
hum (Score:2)
Does. Not. Parse.
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The original article is here: http://rian.ru/analytics/20061215/56977055.html [rian.ru]
news making (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:news making (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they should ask Nasa for some PR advice...
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The Russians have had their share of accidents.
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But they do have a better percentage just because they do fly so many. Even if they loose one a year it's 1 out of 25. When the US looses 1 it's out of 15.
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Oh wait... they use the metric system in Russia, right?
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Good. Teach NASA a lesson. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps they can teach NASA how to run an economical, yet highly effective, space program.
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Personally though, I'd just scrap NASA entirely as it's entirely too encumbered by red-tape to do anything worthwhile and replace it with commercial space programs. Competing interests will result in increased innovation and cost reduction.
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How does one create a commercial space program capable of manned missions to space and interplanetary scientific probes?
Private industry will jump in as soon as they feel it's profitable. NASA's continued existence in no way forbids this. The payoff from NASA's current activities will come decades, maybe centuries in the future when manned
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Let me ask a question: at what point is it profitable to compete when your competition's profit is based on their ability to spend larger and larger amounts of someone else's money?
The more money Nasa spends on spaceflight, the harder it is for comercial flights to happen - who is going to invest in a business competing with the US government?
That said, I think the current Nasa management se
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But let me ask you this, if the US postal service closed tomorrow, would that be good or bad for FedEx?
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Agreed. Number of launches is not necessarily a good indicator of overall health of a nation's space program.
For a variety of reasons (some related to how cheaply and reliably they can launch), Russian satellites tend to be designed for shorter lifetimes than their western counterparts. For example, the article cited Glonass satellites. A Glonass vehicle has a design lifetime of 3 years, while the American GPS system has a satellite lifetime of ~ 10 years. The Russians need
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As long as the rockets don't fail (and I haven't heard much of that happening during 2006), it tend to mean they get more research projects in the air.
Also, the Russians of course know that minimizing the rocket launches necessary is essential for their space program.
They aren't stupid, many actually being rocket scientists!
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Very Simple actually (Score:2)
Create the rockets back in the 60's and keep building them the same way. Oh, pay your ppl about a fraction of what other countries make. And do not worry about fires on a space station, O2 generators that fail, rockets that blow up early in the program (and yes, the USSR lost more than their fair share back in the 60's and 70's). Oh, have a much higher failure rate on other parts of a space program, so focus on the ar
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Yes and No. The legislature put pressure on Nixon to balance the budget since he increased spending in so many other areas (esp in Vietnam). Nixon retaliated by going after the Democrats pet projects; Nasa was simply #1 on the hit parade. Technically, it was Nixon that killed Apollo, but it was under pressure from dems.
To me, the biggest initial problem is cost to orbit, the amount of energy needed to loft a kilogram just into orbit is a major
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As to the autopilot, I was under the impression that it was strictly landing, but I could be wrong. The truth is, that shuttle has the capability to be totally automated, but then what need would there be for pilots? And would you prefer that the person in control of your vehicle be in it with you? I would.
Buran's one and only out of atmosphere misson was flown unmanned. The autopilot worked very well. To be fair, the life systems weren't complete at that point so no human could have gone aloft, but it was still an impressive achievement.
Also Buran could accept detachable jet-packs that allowed full in-atmosphere flight. This means that the whole business of ferrying became much easier
Cheap Labor (Score:2)
People keep forgetting about this. It is a trend that is eating into many science and tech related fields. It is hard to see how technology can be our comparative advantage, except maybe the cutting-edge stuff that no other country wants because of the boom-bust cycles it dumps on the careers of angry voters.
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Arianespace (Score:4, Informative)
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Clearly a rather extreme example of the Law of Fives [wikipedia.org].
So Russia won the spaCe raCe? (Score:1)
Seemingly the Russians with their outdated technology are winning the space race. The USA with all its money, trying for reusable spacecraft, lost!
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I'm not sure what you mean by that, since we didn't just try for reusable spacecraft we actually built them. They're called "Space Shuttles". We've put lots of stuff into Earth orbit using the Shuttle fleet. Granted, the launch cost was far greater than originally projected, but show me a single government on this planet that doesn't incur major cost overruns
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About the GPS system, who knows that is another strategy of the US ? Indians refused to use the GPS system of the US military and they are planning a new system.It may be true that the Russians do not have the kind of money
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Nobody in the West who has
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USA and Russia are nowadays fairly often collaborating in space and both have played major roles in getting much of the tech at ISS up and running.
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What about europe ? (Score:1)
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Not enough to ever have a chance of entering the European Union though, and as ESA is largely a collaboration of EU contries, I also think there should be a distinction here.
The ESA doesn't have Russia as one of its members, and it's the primary European space agency (actually; that's what it's short for -- European Space Agency) in common speech.
Kazakhstan (Score:2)
No, I'm not just saying that because the scoop sounds like something Borat might have said.
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true but...whats the point? (Score:1, Informative)
There are many launch bases in the world. Launch locations include Kaoru, French Gianna, Japan, China (at one time), and Hawaii. The bases are used to launch many types of commercial satellites. Private companies transport spacecraft all over the world to be launched. While the number of launches from Kaoru might be higher than the U.S. or elsewhere, the spacecraft being launched are mostly from other coun
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There is the chicken and egg effect that higher launch frequency drives down launch costs since the high fixed costs can be divided between more launches. Launch costs do form a significant part of the overall cost of satellites and probes and they indirectly drive up the cost of the total system. If your probe is expensive to launch, then you want it to be more reliable to cover that cost. End result is that high launch costs result in expensive, high redundancy cargos.
BTW, it takes more fuel to orbit fr
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Do you happen to know the source of the data for that picture? I know the U.S. operates some very large phased-array radars that track hundreds of thousands of objects.
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Try here [nationalgeographic.com]
Borat (Score:3, Informative)
And, by the way, Kazakhstan is in first place! Little known secret is that rockets are actually launched from Baikonur, which is in Kazakhstan, greatest nation in the world! All other nations have inferior rockets!
-- Borat
I work as a NASA engineer on the launch programs (Score:2, Informative)
NASA makes satellites such as STEREO and then buys a ticket on a Delta II or an Atlas V. IT then oversees the launch process. Contr
Re:I work as a NASA engineer on the launch program (Score:2, Interesting)
What US failure? (Score:2)
What failure? The US designed the ISS. We are using the Space Shuttle to build it. The Russians have launched 2 small station modules. The US has launched 12. We were the first and only nation to make it to the moon, and we will be the first back with no competition in sight. Is any other country even attempting to build moon-capable launchers?
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And you're too optimistic about the US going back to the Moon. Recall that this fad has occured before. Whether or not this happens in the next couple of decades depends a lot on the next administration. It's not obvious to me that the Constellation progra
Homebrew launchers (Score:2, Insightful)
The Ares I and Ares V designs draw from the launch technologies developed over the past 25 years. The SRB Ares I first stage is fantastically reliable and cost efficient. The parallel staged Ares V combines the best of lightweight shuttle tankage and newly developed LH2 RS-68 engines. It is a smaller simpler design than t
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I find it interesting that you think that the Ares I will be cost efficient. I was under the impression that it would be quite a bit more expensive for a small launcher compared to Deltas or even spaceX falcon.
Just out of curiosity, is NASA even looking at Direct Launcher
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A Delta IV heavy is not a good design. The high impulse (and cost) hydrogen booster stages are wasted by drag losses in the lower atmosphere. Without booster to core propellant crossfeed and a new upper stage I don't think it is even an option. An Atlas V with solid motors might work, barely. Atlas V Heavy and Falcon are more vaporous at this point than Ares I.
I have no problem with the Direct Launcher proposal. It resembles shuttle derived concepts from the 1990's. But 2 SRBs a core vehicle and an upper
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Still the Delta IV sounds promising. They could always add solid boosters to get the rocket out of the atmosphere before turning up or even starting the first stage.
An Atlas V with solid motors might work, barely. Atlas V Heavy and Falcon are more vaporous at this point than Ares I.
IMHO that is an unfair comparison for Atlas V Heavy here. Ares I is in between the Atlas V Heavy and Falcon in terms of vaporware right now. Atlas V Heavy is based on expanding an existing launch platform and they already
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As I mention in my other post [slashdot.org], I heavily favor using existing commercial launchers over developing new launch infrastructure. The Ares V is still useful because nothing comes close, but the same can't really be said for the Ares I.
Looking at the consolidation of the two rocket lines (the Delta IV and Atlas V variants) that can come close to the Ares I, I see that they've been consolidated into a single monopoly, the United Launch Alliance [wikipedia.org] or ULA. That's not a sign of health. My take is that it's much more
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Show me the money (Score:1)
One wonders why China and Russia, now flush with profits though adopting the U.S. style capitalism they fought for 50 years, do not aggressively build a greater capability. In America we say, "show me the money!" They aren't.
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The Tibet railroad is an instrument of repression, nothing more. It is my hope with US backing India will seize it back and restore the Dali Lama. As for the 3 gorges dam. Yawn. China is a joke.
The coming spectacle (Score:2)
We would have used Chinese to man the call centers but you speak like you have marbles in your mouth. You would still be counting on your fingers if America hadn't shown you what software is. Manufacture cheap shit and be content.
We are arming India and the Taiw
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As true as it is, don't forget that when the ISS was just two modules the Russians landed MIR, because it was 11 years in space.
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The ISS is spectacularily behind schedule. Because you are using Space Shuttles to build it. You also seem to forget that the ISS is a international project. Mainly because the US wanted to draw on Russian experience. They designed the Mir. Remember that one? ( Try searching for "Zvezda" or "Zarya" )
This is because the modules are designed for hit
We saw Mir (Score:1)
You seem to forget the we (the US) have seen inside Mir. It was a carnival of danger and reckless management. This recklessness persists to this day with Russia's sleazy instance to fly moviestars in space for profit. Look up some of the interviews of US astronauts who spent time there. I for one am unimpressed.
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IIRC, there was a smaller Saturn, the IB, which was used for Earth orbital missions - Apollo 7 and 9, the ASTP, and visits to Skylab. Not sure what the economics looked like on that as compared to Ares, though. As for the heavy lifter, you're probably right there; there's not much commercial use for such a colossal rocket, and s
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Re:I work as a NASA engineer on the launch program (Score:2)
Payload neutrality, commercial sourcing, base-
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Oh, we can just fire them - they're only contractors. The problem is that the executives live large off of those operations, and those executives have friends in congress. Those friends in congress also know that deleting a program means losing jobs in their district, most likely, because the programs are carefully p
Number of launches isn't important (Score:3, Insightful)
On the Russian side, it sounds like much of that activity is from commercial satellite launches. Useful, but not all that interesting. On the American side, a big chunk is pointless, outdated shuttle launches. Some of those will be useful, such as fixing the Hubble, but most will just be the make work project that is the IIS.
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</black humour>
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not surprising in the least (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes, it almost seems like beating the Russians to the moon killed the US space program more than anything else. It meant that we no longer had anything to proove, and could just sit back and watch space-planes evolve on their own. Well, that ain't happening.
What would happen if Russia became the first nation to have a semi-permanent lunar settlement? That I could see happening.
24 billion rubles is 2.3 million dollars? (Score:2, Informative)
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Launch histories (Score:2)
Russia Needs More Satellites Because of Location (Score:2)
Russian Space Station. (Score:1)
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28997 [theonion.com]
by the way (Score:1)
Spacecraft sellers or spacecraft hardware? (Score:2)
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