Russian launch pad incident raises concerns about future of space station
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Hatred for its leaders is complete justified, but try to have some empathy for all the innocent people who are suffering as their country is destroyed under the misrule of an amoral sociopath.
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Yeah, won’t someone think of the Amer .. oops I mean Russians!
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When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.
On topic... well, no surprises there, really. I do regret that the pad wasn't disintegrated.
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It would involve Russia being willing to humiliate itself (in the broken minds of Russian ultranationalists) by launching their flagship cargo vehicle on a Western vehicle. They're more likely to just let the ISS fall out of service and focus their energy on the new Chinese space station (inferior orbital access for Russia be damned).
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So...you're saying Russia's best bet for negating any potential opponent's strategic counterstrike ability would be to open an employment agency?
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It's just a bit poetic that a couple of decades ago, Musk went to Russia to try and get help to buy a rocket, and now Russia may need to go to Musk to have him help cover for their lack of rocket launch capability.
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Well, nobody said that yet, but certainly that thing in flame trench looks like a trampoline.
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I'm all for replacing the ISS, but "measuring" the science isn't useful.
The ISS research is completely different from the JWST. It's not even apples and oranges, more like apples and bacon.
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And one engineer even spat on him!
Imagine if the Russians had just cut him a deal, and SpaceX was never started? That's an alternative history that would leave this entire forum in an uproar, for some reason as well as its totally opposite reason.
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You jest, but in Russian if the e is stressed it is pronounced as o or yo.
For beginner text they put an umlaut on it, ё, but at a more advanced level you just have to know.
So форгёт would indeed be pronounced forgot.
(It grinds my gears when people refer to Battleship Potemkin, it's "Puhtyomkin" even though I know it's totally irrational.)
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I agree its difficult to measure the benefits of different research against each other. Obviously the JWST is telling us far more about the universe and its beginnings than the ISS ever could. But I'm an advocate of human exploration of the inner solar system, and the ISS gave us invaluable information to help us with that.
The real question is ISS worth the cost, ie could we not have gained this information in a much less costly manner? I think so, and I think we should strive to do so in the future. Its time to retire the ISS and replace it with a new station or stations that are not only better, but far more cost efficient.
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Once they clear away the remains of the platform from the flame trench, is there really such a big problem for launching another mission? The platform isn't needed for the actual launch, only for servicing the engines once the rocket is raised into position. While it isn't ideal, I could imagine them setting up a temporary system under there somehow IF any such actions are needed.
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THAT the damage happened in the first place screams a desire to end their participation in ISS. They said they were going to end it by 2028 or so, and got global condemnation. So they walked that back and fired Rogozov (MHO for being too loose-lipped about the Russian's plans for the future of their participation in his nationalist tirades trying to kiss his superior's asses), and had to come up with some less obvious way to stop the launches because that's a huge financial commitment in a cash-strapped country.
Yes, accidents happen, but this kind of accident shouldn't. It's not like they're new to the space race.
What better way than to deliberately "forget" to move a platform that shouldn't have been where it was into launch position to avoid damaging it? Make it seem like an "oops, sorry, but now we can't do shit for the ISS. TTYL!" thing.
I did entertain the notion that this might have been done by a rogue nationalist, but we saw what happened to Rogozov when he went off the script (he got sent to the war front in Ukraine) so I'm inclined to think this was a deliberate decision by the higher ups. I don't discount the possibility of incompetence, either, but you know "move the platform out of the fucking way before launch" was a bullet point on the pre-launch checklist that no one should have missed.
So on the list of the usual suspects, I put "deliberate" at the top, with the blessings of the higher ups, and can keep "We can't find competent people anymore because they all fled a dictatorial regime" somewhere below that.
No matter the cause or how one parses it, this is going to play badly for the propaganda machine. I do wonder how they'll spin it to make it sound like they have any fucks to give about space science (as opposed to space militarization) at this point.
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Well, this explains it, they were just doing what they were told!
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Blast from the past. We were screamed at almost daily in junior high computer lab to ‘park your hard drives or else’. The dude was seriously scary.
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Assuming that this leads to the end of the ISS, would any replacement station orbit at the same altitude? As long as they stay under the inner Van Allen belt, what's the tradeoff between orbital height and atmospheric drag? The delta V shouldn't be that different.
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Yeah, well, I was asking about the technical side of things. Obviously, the politics of it would be whole 'nother kettle of fish. Of course, I was under the impression that the thrusters played a major role in attitude control. from what I am reading here in the comments, it's the gyros that do the actual attitude control and the thrusters just desaturate them, and that can be done by Dragon and Cygnus, so we don't have an insurmountable problem. Going forward, will the Russian ultranationalists accept the "humiliation" of American spacecraft being their only way of getting their cosmonauts to the ISS? We put up with it for nine damned years.
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No, that's wrong. The letters 'е' and 'ё' are actually distinct: it's not just a 'e' with an umlaut or a stress accent; these two letters both appear, separately and independently, in the Russian alphabet. And 'ё' is always, always pronounced like the 'yo' in 'coyote': it is never pronounced like an 'o'; there's the actual letter 'o' to serve that purpose.
When Russian text uses 'e' where there should be 'ё', this is either a typo or laziness on the part of the typesetter. That kind of thing is not normal, even in non-beginner texts.
And форгёт would indeed be read by any Russian as sounding more like 'forgyot'.
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Even ignoring the difficulty of 'just keep the Russian doors locked' due to the station being designed for the Russian and US portions to rely on each for critical functions, as illustrated in this very article, there are myriad other problems with just shoving it higher and trying to continue operating it, which doing so does nothing to address, and you're just introducing additional new problems on top.
First it's just frankly getting old and tired, there are both integrated systems that cannot be replaced without essentially taking a chopsaw to them, and the hull itself that are aging towards failure. The roll of lifetime extentions have all been conditional on projections that things will last a few years more, but when your space station already has nominally habitable compartments that are kept sealed for safeties sake at all times other than when access is explicitly required, it's probably time to think about a new one.
Then there are the problems you introduce by flying so much higher, for starters the ISS was never designed to operate in that radiation environment and for the most part is very lightly shielded, at least compared to what you would want for long term habitation in that high an orbit, plus none of the launch vehicles currently servicing the ISS were designed for trips that far either. Does anything currently operational even have the dV to go that far, rendevous, dock, depart and return in a reasonable timeframe?
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Leaders don't remain in power without at least some significant level of popular support. Even in autocracies.
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Cargo Dragon, the one that did the reboost, doesn't has SuperDracos (the engines that they planned to use propulsive landing with)
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two for friday apparently.
https://united24media.com/latest-ne...ny-after-suspected-rs-28-launch-failure-13868
https://united24media.com/latest-ne...ny-after-suspected-rs-28-launch-failure-13868
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Will it be Kazakhstan or Russia that handles the repair? I imagine Kazakhstan owning the pad will want to prioritize its repair so they don't look bad to the regional despot running things over there, but they've also pulled the plug recently on Russian outfits due to lack of payment on electricity bills, so...
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Low seems to be the play. ISS is 256.6-262.2 miles up while Tiangong is 240.1-243.5 miles. For something as heavy as a station, it probably matters a fair bit how high up you put it until LEO lift gets a bit cheaper still.
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Bill Swallow
Ars Centurion
sigh This isn't like moving DS9 from Bajor to the mouth of the wormhole - the ISS has no Deflector Shields. Doubt it would survive the trip, even if such a move was a good idea.
Which it most definitely is NOT!
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Well if it can survive a reboost (and the trampoline flips the other year) it can survive being boosted all the way out to an L-point, slowly.
Not that notionally being able to survive the journey makes the journey a remotely good idea of course.
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I might have done that 50 years ago. I doubt I've done it in the last 49.
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Bill Swallow
Ars Centurion
You're right, but I'm not sure I'd want to bet lives on it still being able to survive things now that it could have a year or two ago. I can think of situations like that that I've survived in the past that I'd hesitate to try now.
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