Roscosmos Blames SpaceX For Being Successful (Update)
Russia’s passive-aggressive reaction to SpaceX may mask a deeper truth, Ars Technica
“I would like to point out something else interesting–from one point of view this is a good thing, because we were carrying astronauts, we were getting basically for free $400 million a year at about $90 million per seat for each foreign astronaut. That is more than the entire cost of the rocket and the ship and launch operations taken together. This means as long as we had at least one foreign astronaut on board, we were launching for free. For us this wasn’t just a freebie–it was a narcotic. It allowed us to do absolutely nothing and still earn money. And now, this narcotic is going to be cut off, and we will be forced to do something. Either we will pass into history along with all of our space achievements, like Portugal, with its discovery of America and the voyages of Magellan and so forth, or we will have to seriously do something.”
Russian Rocket Program Sputters in New Race to Space, Bloomberg
“Russia’s market share for rocket technology worldwide fell slightly in 2017, which Roscosmos blamed on sanctions, the weak ruble and increased competition, according to its annual report published on Friday. It singled out SpaceX for allegedly undercutting the market thanks to U.S. government assistance. … The windfall funding from the U.S. hasn’t always been spent wisely. Alexei Kudrin, the head of the country’s Audit Chamber, told Russia’s lower house of parliament in June that he found 760 billion rubles ($11.4 billion) of financial violations in Roscosmos’s books. “Several billion have been spent, basically stolen, that we are currently investigating,” Kudrin said in an interview aired Nov. 25 on state-run Rossiya 24 TV. “Roscosmos is the champion in terms of the scale of such violations.”
– Man Driving Diamond-encrusted Mercedes Caught Embezzling Cosmodrome Funds, earlier post
“I just love all the pictures of the car this article contains. This guy was embezzling money from Putin and yet he thought it was fine to be driving around in a “diamond-encrusted Mercedes”. It would seem like he was either asking to be caught – or …. that cosmodrome construction workers commonly drive around in diamond-encrusted Mercedes.”
Huh, that must explain the various bad smells the Russians are detecting from the Crew Dragon.
I noticed that the crew put on gas masks before they went in! Does anyone know the source of that particular silliness? Does Elon’s super-sensitivity to odors have a role?
Maybe someone didn’t want the obvious photo op?
(Speaking of silliness, that whole hide-the-cosmonaut-in-Soyuz routine was over the top).
The article I saw in Ars Technica implied that the masks weren’t unusual. Spacecraft are full of nasty things you wouldn’t want to breathe. Probably not hydrazine, since it’s so obvious people are very, very careful about it. But things like coolants might be volatile and leak during launch. Remember, the passengers on a Dragon 2 will be in pressure suits.
What is unusual, however, seems to be tweeting pictures of the astronauts in gas masks. And ordering their cosmonaut into the Russian section with the hatch closed. I don’t remember them doing that when the Shuttle docked, or when the Soyuz docks. That sounds like some poorly concealed, negative spin.
Exactly my sense, and it is unworthy of a great nation.
It’s unfair! The Capitalists are undercutting Russia on price. The US needs to punish SpaceX for being too aggressive…
The irony is that Dragon owes so much to Soyuz in concept: A common command/crew return module for a variety of applications including crew ferry, exploration, cargo and space science (crewed or uncrewed). Sergei Korolev would have recognised the design immediately. If anything Roscosmos ought to be proud that their old design concept has basically won the argument!
There was an early Apollo concept similar to Soyuz in the US.
PART 2 (C), Design – Decision – Contract, April 1961 through June 1961
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/off…
From above:
I am sure it is just a coincidence, like the Tu-4, Tu-144, Tu-160…
Dreamchaser…
And X-38.
Form follows function?
It doesn’t look much like a Soyuz to me. The Soyuz has separate service and orbital workspace modules, in addition to the descent module. Dragon 2 is all one unit. The Soyuz arrangement for abort rockets is also quite different. A Shenzhou has the same basic layout as a Soyuz, but even then, the hardware is pretty different.
Hmm shall I take the vehicle with one parachute, or four?
It’s not quite that obvious. Vladimir Komarov was killed on the Soyuz 1 mission because the parachute lines fouled. (Ok, that’s a gross oversimplification. After a whole bunch of things went wrong, including the main parachute not opening, the backup chute fouled on the drogue chute.) Redundancy isn’t inherently safer. But I suspect the Dragon (and the Starliner) will end up being safer than the Soyuz. Newer designs based on past experience and more recent technology aren’t automatically safer. But they can be if they are done right.
Indeed. Dragon Crew will need a lot of launches before it can claim the same reliability as Soyuz.
Everyone’s favorite space reporter (Eric Berger, Ars) has a nice piece exploring NASA’s reluctance on the parachute issue WRT Dragon; Ars explains that the last time chutes were used was Apollo 17, and that current managers have no experience.
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
(Of course as someone herein recently pointed out, neither do they have much experience building rockets).
Which probably explains why the Genesis Sample Return mission crashed when it’s parachute failed to deploy…
Hopefully the Dragon2 will teach NASA that they need to learn to trust the experts in matters like these. After all look at how many Dragon cargo capsules have been safely recovered because the experts at SpaceX knew what they are doing.
Actually, Genesis was Lockheed Martin, not NASA. The problem was an accelerometer wired in backwards, so it never showed 3g of _de_celeration and therefore never triggered the drogue parachute release. That’s not quite the same as fouling the lines on the parachute.
Disturbingly, the same mistake almost cause a failure of the Galileo atmospheric probe in 1995. There was a backup, absolute time signal, so everything was fine (except for a small amount of lost science data.) That was made by Hughes, and the Genesis people probably never heard about it. It’s rare for people to mention mistakes to the public or competing companies when they can avoid it. This one ended up being a couple of vague sentences in an initial results science paper, not a valuable lesson learned for future missions.
Thanks for pointing that out. And I wonder if that failure can trace either roots, or direct experience, or staff, back to Apollo? Maybe someone here knows?
As usual, Ars goes into the story more deeply. Of particular interest are the extended quotes from Vadim Lukashevich, who points out that while Shenzhou is bigger than Soyuz,
Many here in this group have talked about the great exploration nations of the 15th and 16th centuries. Like many Russians, Lukashevich sees world history as a perpetual struggle by Russia to somehow ‘best’ the west while remaining Russian:
As to the future, without the “narcotic” of American money:
Or, as the Americans would say “Are we worthy of Apollo?” I’d be very surprised if the Russians do not find a way, and I hope they do. Recent events in weaponry, sad as they are, demonstrate a very high level of ability.