Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #4

The first mission of the Russian nuclear tug "Zeus" will take 50 months

source

MOSCOW, May 22. / TASS /. The first mission of the Zeus transport and energy module (TEM) will take 50 months. This is stated in the presentation of the executive director of Roscosmos for promising programs and science Alexander Bloshenko, presented in the framework of the educational marathon "New Knowledge".

"50 months is the total duration of the mission," the presentation says.

Bloshenko said that the first flight is scheduled for 2030. "We have designed it now. Together with the Russian Academy of Sciences, we are calculating the ballistics of this flight, payloads," the executive director explained.

According to Bloshenko, the mission will begin on Earth, then it is planned to fly to the Moon, where the spacecraft will separate, then there will be a gravitational maneuver near Venus, where the spacecraft will also separate, then it will fly towards Jupiter and its satellites.

In December last year, it became known that Roskosmos and KB Arsenal signed a contract for the development of a preliminary design of the nuclear tug Nuclon, which will be used for flights into deep space. The contract value is over 4.17 billion rubles. It was concluded on December 10. July 28, 2024 is indicated as the expiration date for the execution of the contract.

Roscosmos will submit a modified lunar program to the government in June

https://tass.ru/kosmos/11446435

The state corporation noted that a version of the program with a super-heavy launch vehicle is under consideration, an alternative option will involve a four-launch flight scheme using the Angara rocket

MOSCOW, May 22. / TASS /. Roscosmos plans to submit a revised lunar program to the government in June. This was announced by the executive director of Roskosmos for promising programs and science, Alexander Bloshenko, to journalists within the framework of the New Knowledge forum.

"We will submit a modified program for a four-start scheme to the government in June," Bloshenko said.

According to the executive director, a version of the lunar program with a super-heavy launch vehicle is currently under consideration; an alternative option will involve a four-launch flight to the moon using the Angara rocket.

At the end of 2020, Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin noted that the presence of two launch complexes for Angara (in Vostochny and Plesetsk) from 2023 will make it possible to combine launches by assembling manned flight complexes in orbit. This will become the main tool for starting lunar exploration.

The first Russian manned expedition to the lunar surface is planned to be sent by 2030.

Nothing really new here, just confirmation of going round in circles we go as they try to make lunar aspirations fit a budget and schedule... back to A5-V for initial lunar expeditions, with a SHLV (Yenisei or Amur on steroids, as yet undecided) to follow?

Didn't they already submit a lunar program to government?

And another one before that?

Not sure if someone has already linked the presentation by Alexander Bloshenko (Roscosmos Executive Director for Long-Term Programs and Science) so here it is:



Damn, but I wish I could speak Russian....

Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with OneWeb satellites launched from Vostochny spaceport

VOSTOPCHNY SPACEPORT /Amur region/, May 28. /TASS/. A Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with a Fregat booster and 36 British OneWeb communications satellites has been launched from the Vostochny spaceport in Russia’s Far Eastern Amur region, a TASS correspondent reported on Friday.

The Fregat booster carrying the communications satellites will separate from the rocket’s third stage nine minutes after the launch. The satellites will separate in several stages, with the entire process taking 3 hours and 51 minutes.

This was the seventh launch of OneWeb satellites and the fourth purely commercial launch from Vostochny. With these satellites in orbit, the OneWeb constellation will reach 218.

The launch was initially scheduled for May 27 but was postponed for a later date due to minor problems detected by automatic sensors. Later, Arianespace, the launch operator, said the carrier rocket’s electrical equipment needed to be replaced before the launch.

The first six OneWeb satellites were orbited by a Soyuz-ST carrier rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana on February 28, 2019. Another 34 satellites were delivered into outer space on February 7, 2020 and the same amount on March 21 from the Baikonur spaceport.

On April 26, Director General of Russia's Roscosmos state space agency Dmitry Rogozin reported that 36 British OneWeb communication satellites, launched from the Vostochny spaceport on a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket, have been put into orbit.

OneWeb satellites were launched from the Vostochny spaceport for the first time in December 2020. A total of 36 space vehicles were put into orbit. Overall, the UK company intends to deliver around 600 satellites into a near-Earth orbit.

OneWeb’s renewed agreement with the French Arianespace that acts as the launch operator stipulates the lift-off of 16 Russian Soyuz carrier rockets from the Kourou, Vostochny and Baikonur spaceports in 2020-2022. Each launch can put between 34-36 OneWeb satellites into orbit.

By my reckoning that is 52 flights without a launch failure, or 59 if you count Soyuz from Kourou.

Last failure was the abort of Soyuz-MS10 back in 11 Oct 2018 that was fully attributable to human error during stack assembly.

There are ~18 launches planned for the rest of 2021 (including 2x Angara tests) so if all goes well the run might stretch out to 70/79 by years end

May this run of success continue to last, and hopefully the past reliablity issues can be finally put to bed and written off as the lagging-indicator of the space programs gutting by Yeltsin and his comprador band.  The program may not be exactly flushed with cash at the moment, but its a far cry from the old bad days when investment was zero and people didn't get paid for months while the Oligarchs stole every last kopek and stashed it in western banks...

I think people sometimes exaggerate things a lot.
The Soyuz 2 was a vast improvement over Soviet models.
There were investments in the Russian space sector even back then.
A lot of money was spent both on the Soyuz 2 upgrade program, the Proton-M upgrade program, and the new Soyuz capsules.
Angara took forever to develop, but it is there.
Of course you cannot compare the rate of development with Soviet times but that kind of effort was not sustainable.

To be fair if the US wanted to speed up the manned capsule effort they could have done it.
The original cargo Dragon capsule had most of what you needed for a basic manned capsule.

The Dragon V2 capsule has way more stringent specs. It has less black zones where you can't abort a launch than even the Soyuz.
I do think the Soyuz is more advanced in that it can actually land on terra firma.
Dragon V2 was also supposed to do this but NASA did not allow it because it feared the heat shield design would not be reliable enough.
The heat shield was supposed to be reused, while IIRC the Soyuz ejects the heat shield before firing the landing engines.

lancelot wrote:To be fair if the US wanted to speed up the manned capsule effort they could have done it.
The original cargo Dragon capsule had most of what you needed for a basic manned capsule.

The Dragon V2 capsule has way more stringent specs. It has less black zones where you can't abort a launch than even the Soyuz.
I do think the Soyuz is more advanced in that it can actually land on terra firma.
Dragon V2 was also supposed to do this but NASA did not allow it because it feared the heat shield design would not be reliable enough.
The heat shield was supposed to be reused, while IIRC the Soyuz ejects the heat shield before firing the landing engines.

IMHO the crewed Dragon is a death trap due to the absurd decision to integrate escape rockets within the crewed capsule rather than on a jettisonable tower.  I can't for the life of me understand how they could possibly risk assess the hazard of maintaining hypergolic propellents within 4 enclosures built into the walls of the capsule.  Heck, we've already seen one test capsule get blown to smithereens during a post-recovery Draco test, and that nicely illustrated the nature of the hazard.  On the other hand, these are the same fucking geniuses that decided to perform fuelling of the stack after the crew board the vehicle...  hardly keeping risks ALARP (as low as reasonably practical).

The only question in my mind is how missions will be flown until a crewed Dragon fails catastrophically and kills its crew. Its a case of when, not if.

Big_Gazza wrote:IMHO the crewed Dragon is a death trap due to the absurd decision to integrate escape rockets within the crewed capsule rather than on a jettisonable tower.  I can't for the life of me understand how they could possibly risk assess the hazard of maintaining hypergolic propellents within 4 enclosures built into the walls of the capsule.  Heck, we've already seen one test capsule get blown to smithereens during a post-recovery Draco test, and that nicely illustrated the nature of the hazard.  On the other hand, these are the same fucking geniuses that decided to perform fuelling of the stack after the crew board the vehicle...  hardly keeping risks ALARP (as low as reasonably practical).

The only question in my mind is how missions will be flown until a crewed Dragon fails catastrophically and kills its crew. Its a case of when, not if.

The idea is to cut cost and save weight. The decision to use those engines also reduces the black zones where you can't abort.

The escape tower needs to be ejected some time after takeoff. After that there is a time period where aborting is pretty much impossible.

SpaceX has no experience with solid rockets or the facilities to produce them.
Outsourcing the solid rockets in the escape tower would be cost prohibitive. Try reading about the cost of the escape tower on the Orion capsule for example.
Using liquid engines in this configuration means you can reuse them together with the capsule.

It was supposed to save weight because you could basically use the same engines and fuel you would use in the escape tower for the propulsive landing.

For what it's worth the Soviet Union had plans to make a Zarya capsule that was to be launched on the Zenit rocket as a replacement for Soyuz which used a similar system.
http://www.astronautix.com/z/zarya.html

The main difference Dragon V2 has is it has a parachute large enough to brake the capsule even without propulsive landing.

I agree that having a hygroscopic propellant like hydrazine in a vehicle which does water landings is a disaster waiting to happen though.

For what it's worth the Shuttle also used hypergolics in the OMS/RCS system and AFAIK it never caused a major problem.
Although it made upkeep of the Shuttle hideously expensive because of the complex ground handling required to handle the fuel.

3000 second burn time, so basically what was for LEO now all becomes GEO payloads? what is the current Soyuz payloads being used for LEO? Can they just burn the fuel rate more by 10 times the amount for more weight for LEO? I am still impressed.

If the engine lasts longer it means they can reuse it.

As for Angara launches this year I'll be waiting sitting down for those four launches.
Even the Russian military doesn't trust the rocket enough to put a precious satellite on it. Pathetic.
This makes it at least three launches with mass simulators.

They are test launches... why would they carry real payloads on a test rocket launch.

Why are they not putting a full attack force on the Ford when they take it out and test it... surely the US military lack confidence in the US MICs ability to make CVNs if they are not prepared to invade a country on every test sailing of new vessels...

Maybe the LCS ships are a failure too as their transmissions don't work and can't be fixed so they can only run at 12 knots... the Zumwalt fuckup is the same as the Sheridan tank fuckup a few decades before... design a missile and then build a gun to fire it to replace missiles with a cheap gun system... the plan is to make a gun system as accurate and long ranged as a missile system but as cheap to use as a gun, but all they ended up doing both times was make a gun cost more than a missile launcher for missiles they already had in service.

Musk is the same... the claim is that making it all reusable will make it cheap and affordable and they are no where near achieving that, but subsidies to the program mean they can undercut Russian launch prices by a margin.

But they have already said the subsidies are gone and prices have gone up so watch the companies switch back to cheaper alternatives... that is how businesses work... there is no loyalty.

Other companies in the USA also had access to a lot more subsidies than that and free tech from NASA and went nowhere.

More accurately...


Other companies in the USA also had access to a lot more subsidies than that and free tech from NASA and went nowhere too.

Musk is a house of cards like the country he is currently working for.... it is only a matter of time before the whole thing collapses...