Rogozin Gets Scolded By Putin's No. 2
Russian space chief told to drop grandiose talk, get more done, Ars Technica
“On Wednesday, the prime minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, expressed his displeasure with the situation. During a meeting in Moscow with senior Roscosmos officials, Medvedev made sharply critical remarks that were reported by several Russian news organizations, including Gazeta.RU and RIA Novosti. “This is a blunt and direct assertion: We need to quit projecting future plans, stop talking about where our missions will land in 2030, get to work, talk less, and do more,” Medvedev said. “We need to be more active in commercializing our space industry and increase Russia’s international market share of commercial launches. … Now Medvedev, in a public setting, has called Rogozin out for this tactic. He also expressed concern about Russia’s success in attracting commercial satellite launches amid the rise of SpaceX and other international competitors.”
The good news is that the test firing today of the Falcon 9 with the Dragon2 on board went perfect. So shortly we won’t be dependent on the Soyuz anymore for sending astronauts to the ISS. We will have our own “trampoline” again ?
And, Musk tweeted video of a Starship heat shield test. At the rate they’re developing techs…..
I guess I thought that heat shield technology was well-understood and fully characterized through experience from tiny Mercury capsules, to Apollo, to STS.
What are the remaining issues (if anyone knows)? Is it the mass of Starship? As I understand Starship, much of her energy will be dissipated through retro rockets, and by exposing a relatively large proportion of her [His? It’s?] elevation to the atmosphere.
Unless there’s a major change Starship won’t use retropropulsion for anything but deorbit burns and landings. Being much larger than shuttle but also much lighter it’s rather “fluffy, ” so a passive entry at a very high angle of attack works. Once almost fully decelerated near the landing site it does what SpaceX calls a “skydiver” vertical descent, using two rear fins and the canards as drag brakes, like a skydiver uses his limbs. At a few klicks it rotates to vertical and does the landing burn.
Fanart, but a good representation of Starship’s Mars EDL
https://youtu.be/00CpItR97zY
Except for the Shuttle, those were all ablative and non-reusable. The Shuttle’s tiles were not an approach anyone would want to repeat, at least not if operational costs are a concern. The X-37B also uses tiles, but I think that’s about all we know. The details, operational costs and ease of reuse aren’t in the open literature.
At around the same time Mr. Musk announced the switch to a steel structure, he also mentioned some other details. It wasn’t as widely reported, but the Starship will use active cooling (circulating water or liquid methane through/behind the surface) and transpiration (bleeding a liquid through the surface for evaporative cooling and, I think, thickening the boundary layer.) Those aren’t new ideas. They’ve been talked about since before Sputnik. But they’ve never been used in flight. I don’t think they have ever been tested, except possibly some limited lab work.
It is always good to see the expansion of the frontiers of technology and forgotten paths getting a new look. Here’s hoping it is successful.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Unfortunately, Russia is trying to execute on plans that would require an order of magnitude increase in their space program’s budget. This is coming at a time when they’re losing revenue from Soyuz (i.e. US commercial crew is coming online in 2019) and are losing revenue from “commercial” launches on their launch vehicles (primarily due to the poor reliability of those launch vehicles over the last 5 to 10 years).
The Russian space program (and military program) is currently circling the drain. They’re trying hard to punch well above their weight class and are failing (no surprise there).