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Space Science

For Want Of A Soyuz 32

Posted by timothy from the encapsulation dept.
sckienle writes "MSNBC has an article starting "Missions to the international space station may have to be suspended because Russia cannot afford to build new craft to carry crews there...." This is a problem because a Soyuz capsule must be attached to the ISS for emergency evacuation. The problem is further complicated because any one Soyuz capsule can only be docked to the ISS for 6 months maximum. Nor are they and their boosters built for reuse. The CNN version of the information is here. I guess we need to find more billionaires to take the space vacation. How about it Mr. Gates?"
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For Want Of A Soyuz More

For Want Of A Soyuz

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  • How about it Mr. Gates? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about it Mr. Gates?"

    Oh jesus christ, you want it to crash or something?
    • Wouldn't matter. He's bound to have already cloned himself.
      • But has he activated [digitalnowhere.com] the clones? ;-)

        Actually, my .plan is to buy IBM just so I can accelerate the research on transporter technology, launch a receiver station into orbit and then invite Bill Gates for a speech at the first public test. "Yes, Mr. Gates, please step up here..." *Zzzzap*

    • > How about it Mr. Gates?"
      >
      > Oh jesus christ, you want it to crash or something?

      If the goddamn thing were deorbited onto the Shuttle fleet, NASA would suddenly have a motivation to build a real heavy-lift capability.

      And with the budget dollars freed up in the absence of the black-hole of ISS sucking science dollars into a low-earth-orbit white-elephant, we might even get some friggin' science done.

      So yeah, how 'bout it, Mr. Gates? :)

    • "Oh jesus christ, you want it to crash or something?"
      DO you mean you want it to crash because he is there or that you want it to crash because it may run his software. either way...

  • Yeah (Score:3, Funny)

    by RedWolves2 ( 84305 ) on Thursday September 26, 2002 @10:38PM (#4341420) Homepage Journal
    Yeah Mr. Gates it is a space ship ;-) it is not a missle ;-). Trust us.
    • Da, comrade! Soon we have put all capitalist scum in space! EXPLODO_SPACE, that is! (-; --that's a russki smiley because Russia faces are the oppsoite of America faces!!!!!!
  • is a complete replacement for the Soyuz and the shuttle. One that makes travelling to space as cheap and easy as a trip to Pittsburgh. We have the technology, but it seems just not the funding....
    • What we need is a complete replacement for the Soyuz and the shuttle. One that makes travelling to space as cheap and easy as a trip to Pittsburgh. We have the technology

      I'm afraid that paragraphs like this are enough to make most people who are familiar with even exotic launch technologies spray coffee out their noses.

      Let me outline the reasons why all known methods are expensive and will remain so for the medium-term future:

      • Chemical Rockets

        Chemical rocket exhaust velocity is much lower than the delta-V required to reach orbit. This means your craft is mostly fuel. Which means that your craft needs to be strengthened to be able to carry the fuel, which means it's heavier and needs more fuel, and so forth. The end result is a large, very expensive spacecraft. Operating costs are prohibitive (never mind fuel costs - even for a mundane, commodity vehicle like a car, other costs tend to dominate).

      • Ion and plasma drives

        These shouldn't be on the list at all; I'm mentioning them so that nobody tries to bring them up. These all have thrusts far too low to be used for surface-to-orbit work.

      • NERVA-style nuclear drives

        Because your exhaust temperature for a nuclear/thermal drive is limited by the temperature the materials in your reactor core can take, your Isp doesn't end up being much better than a chemical rocket, so your spacecraft is still big and very expensive.

        You're also having half the environmentalists on the planet scream at you (because your exhaust is radioactive and there's a small but significant chance of you smearing your ship and reactor core over a large chunk of landscape).

      • Laser launchers, railguns, and space elevators

        On the surface, many of these exotic solutions look very nice. However, there are two problems.

        Firstly, most of them require extremely high accelerations (laser launchers and railguns). Otherwise the device size becomes impractically large. Railguns or other magnetic or even compressed-gas accelerators may not _ever_ be practical to build, as even an accelerator with a thousand gravities of acceleration would have to be about half a mile long. It would need to be a vertical tower (or shaft) - firing sideways would vapourize your projectile and shed most of the velocity due to atmospheric drag, and making a track that turns up at the end would require a radius of curvature larger than the gun itself (which means you might as well build it upright to begin with).

        If you're dealing with cargo that can take that kind of acceleration, or if you build a multi-station laser launcher that drives cargo mostly tangentially, or if you spend the money for a space elevator, you still have the problem of a facility that costs hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars to build, and tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year for upkeep. In order to justify this kind of expense, and to amortize costs to even be competitive with today's launch prices, you're going to need vast amounts of cargo ready to be lifted into space. There's no convincing evidence that such a market exists (nobody's come up with a really lucractive reason to lift millions of tonnes into space, as opposed to just a few satellites). Even with a high launch volume, the maintenance costs of the facilities will keep the launch costs significant (i.e. far more than just the theoretical energy costs of sending something into space - see my fuel costs comment above).


      In summary, even if you assume that alternate launch mechanisms can be built *now*, there are strong economic reasons for space travel staying expensive.
  • to use a craft that has to be destroyed every 6 months as a lifeboat anyways?

    • Re:So, whose idea was it... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gerry Gleason ( 609985 ) <gerry@@@geraldgleason...com> on Friday September 27, 2002 @02:00AM (#4342201)
      Well, you know it's an international project and there has to be something for each nation to do. If one government can make a toilet seat cost $600, what do you think it would cost when there is a commitee of governments?

      But seriously, Russia should have the resources long term to make their economy work so they are actually able to pay for their space program and live up to the commitments they make to international programs. Probably, it would be worth it for them to invest more of the currently scarce resources into the space program. They now have access to a lot more technology than they did when Soyuz was designed. Design something new, with current technology, for maximal reuse and flexibility. I bet that would do as much for their economy as the Moon program did for ours in the 60s. Good investment.

      Something similar could be said about the shuttle. Come to think of it, wouldn't it be nice if a long lived program like a shuttle was designed with the idea that you would upgrade and improve systems continuously over the live of the program. With the shuttles, I know the later ones had improvments, and probably some of those improvements got added to older birds (when it is possible), but if it was designed to be upgraded through its life as needed it would be easy. Doesn't it cost more to maintain the old systems?

      • Come to think of it, wouldn't it be nice if a long lived program like a shuttle was designed with the idea that you would upgrade and improve systems continuously over the live of the program. With the shuttles, I know the later ones had improvments, and probably some of those improvements got added to older birds (when it is possible), but if it was designed to be upgraded through its life as needed it would be easy. Doesn't it cost more to maintain the old systems?

        That depends, as any modified man-rated space system has to go through an ungodly amount of engineering, testing, revision, and more testing before being certified - especially if it's a reusable system instead of a one-shot. You also have to modify and re-certify any of the support facilities that are affected by the change (and many will be - remember, they effectively take the shuttles apart and put them back together again between flights, and that takes equipment).

        Upgrading the design every decade I could see. Every couple of years would probably cost much more than it's worth.

        Re. economic benefits, bear in mind that Apollo cost a _huge_ amount of money. Yes, there were spinoffs, but was the program cost-effective compared to, say, offering a similar volume of tax incentives for research? This is basically the whole "military spending boosts the economy" debate. Except in very special cases, it's still open to debate whether the benefits are really there.

        Of course, a continuously-upgraded space fleet would be cool. I'm just not sure you can make a good case for it being an economic benefit.
        • I agree with all of your points. However, my point is that if you design for a long program, you should expect upgrades and improvements to be made as you find out what works and new tech becomes available. Once you've qualified it for building new hardware, retrofit would be easier. Of course there are systems interactions to watch for, and some additional systems level testing to tease that out, but you have done most of the work anyway.

          The more mechanical systems probably wouldn't change as fast, but planning on a decade or maybe even 5-7 year upgrade cycle for control, data and navagation systems would probably even be cost effective.

  • too bad what we're going to spend to keep the soyuz coming is probably going to be more than the emergency escape pod, that could stay indefinatly, we were making untill 'budget cuts'
    • I rather doubt it. A complete Soyuz- the list price is about $50 million IRC. But it actually costs about $5 million to build one. That's why Tito was able to get a launch for about $15 million- he paid for the entire thing. NASA should cut a deal.

  • Then we won't need no stinkin' Soyuz.

    ISS is a hella big waste of time, it hasn't done jack shit except waste money.

    Tim

  • Russian efficiency... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SofaMan ( 454881 )
    I always used to like the old story about how the NASA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get a ballpoint pen to work in space, and the Russians got around the problem by just using pencils.

    The Russians have always been pretty good at doing more with less, but I guess there comes a point when you can only do less with less.

    See what happens when you commit yourself to a proprietary solution to a problem, and then run out of money? What we need is some Open Source spacecraft... ;)

  • Gates in space (Score:2, Funny)

    by PDX ( 412820 )
    I don't know if getting him excited about space travel is such a hot idea. Isn't this sort of how the Borg got started?
  • Now suddenly it will be their fault that ISS will no longer be operational (it was operational now?)...

    And what would happen if shuttle would be there docked for 6 months as a rescue vehicle? What's the big issue?

    I guess shuttle is not that good anyway...

    How to fix this mess? Design some capsule that could be used for reentry for emergencies. something like Apollo module or whatever would be good enough, just attach one booster and couple of thrusters so that you can back away from the station and use the booster to make a re-entry burn and then land somewhere in the ocean... Shouldn't be too difficult...

    And maybe even use a shuttle to bring it to ISS...

    Dunno...

  • Upon entering the ISS, Gates slips into the venting system. Captain of mission: "Commander, is it hot in here? Check the ventilation system." Commander of mission: "Aye Sir." Little does the Dear Commander know he is GOING TO DIE!@!#W
  • You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!

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