Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort 130
An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"
Thankyou Putin! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's one rich Russian (Score:4, Insightful)
Amount of people in in the building about 3000
And that would be relevant if the response to 9/11 was to protect the world trade center site. But it's not. The response has been to blow trillions of dollars on invading two countries (losing more lives than were lost in 9/11 in the process), engaging in a basically perpetual and unwinnable "war on terror", throwing out civil rights in the name of "security", and starting and organization dedicated to groping people trying to get on an airplane.
If saving lives was really a driving concern those dollars could be spent far more wisely.
Re:the summary is more appropriately (Score:5, Insightful)
By the current manned space exploration of the US, I suppose you mean paying the Russians to get American people to ISS? ;-)
Look, of course, Americans added a lot, especially in terms of communication systems, material science and military applications. But don't believe our own western propaganda too much...
Don't forget, most of the truly important stuff to enable space travel was done by Germans. The original American space programme was essentially a continuation of the Nazi one. Fundamentally not much has changed in terms of getting something in space (a lot has changed in other parts). We use different fuels, and larger rockets, but it's basically more of the same.
Re:chinese have ambitious plans too (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA internal shuttle replacement has slipped from 2014 to 2018 already. If I was a betting man, I'd double the time again.
I wouldn't bet on NASA ever completing a Shuttle replacement. And I am on occasion a betting man. I think by 2018, we're going to see performance deterioration with the Space Launch System (SLS) like was seen with the Ares I rocket design. Politically driven paper rockets suffer greatly when real engineers start looking at the design and someone actually starts to bend metal for them.
For example, they're still chained to ATK's solid rocket motors. I don't think they'll see thrust oscillation issues like the Ares I had (they're using the same trick that the Shuttle used to limit thrust oscillation), but they still have at least two big problems - the mass and risk of solid rocket motors.
That leads to several major infrastructure issues. First, expensive vehicle integration facilities are exposed to considerably more risk. If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites on a launchpad, you probably will be able to recover most of the pad. If not you can always have a back up one ready to keep the launch tempo going.
If a solid rocket motor prematurely ignites in the Vehicle Assembly Building [wikipedia.org], you just lost a key part of your launch infrastructure and can't do anything until you make a new one in a few years. That incidentally should give you a good idea of how screwy NASA can be about risk management.
If that solid rocket motor ruptures shortly after launch, it will create a hotter and more dangerous fireball than a liquid fuel equivalent. Any crew on board would have to have a faster escape system to get further away from the fireball. That means more mass taken away from a payload and more risk to the crew. It also puts deeper constraints on launch trajectories to achieve that "manned certificate".
As I mentioned solid rocket motors are heavy. Because they are mounted in vehicle integration, they have to be carried as part of the vehicle stack all the way to the launch pad. You add at least 1,000 tons to the mass of the resulting vehicle and much more than double the weight you have to move (liquid propellants are pumped in on the pad). But if you had used liquid fueled rockets all the way, you could wheel it up on a heavy duty rail, faster and cheaper.
Similarly, they have lower ISP than liquid fuel rockets (though a bit more thrust). You need a higher mass fraction and hence more propellant mass overall for the same dry and payload mass.
Another traditional area of performance deterioration is cost per launch. Currently, I believe they are claiming half a billion per launch. I think, once you include fixed costs per year and the really low launch frequency of three a year, that the revised estimate per launch will end being well on the other side of a billion dollars - and they'll still be at least years away from launching.
By that time, we should have a working Falcon Heavy rocket which puts 50 metric tons in LEO for far less per kg than the SLS can ever manage. I think the SLS at that point will make so little sense politically, economically, and financially, that they'll deep six it.
Re:The space race sent me to college (Score:4, Insightful)
With Gorbachev, the good guys basically won. Gorbachev wanted nuclear disarmament (Reagan didn't). Gorbachev was more interested in growing chickens than in conquering the world. Gorbachev invited Sakharov back to Moscow from exile. In American terms, Gorbachev was the best leader they could possibly have had.
During the entire history of the Soviet Union, their leaders were afraid to let down their guard, take a risk, and cooperate with the West, for fear the West would stab them in the back. Gorbachev was a leader who was finally willing to take a risk to get peace and cooperation. What did the West do? They stabbed him in the back.