Manned flights from Vostochny delayed
In order to save construction costs at its new spaceport at Vostochny, Russia has decided to delay its first manned flight there until 2023.
They originally were going prepare a launchpad for Soyuz rockets so that they could do a manned launch at Vostochny as early as 2019, but had already admitted this was inefficient and had abandoned the plan. Now they have admitted that it will take until 2023 for them to get Vostochny and Angara ready for manned flights.
That it will still take almost 8 years to prepare a launchpad and get Angara ready to launch manned capsules, however, seems an ungodly long period of time. It should not take that long.
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In order to save construction costs at its new spaceport at Vostochny, Russia has decided to delay its first manned flight there until 2023.
They originally were going prepare a launchpad for Soyuz rockets so that they could do a manned launch at Vostochny as early as 2019, but had already admitted this was inefficient and had abandoned the plan. Now they have admitted that it will take until 2023 for them to get Vostochny and Angara ready for manned flights.
That it will still take almost 8 years to prepare a launchpad and get Angara ready to launch manned capsules, however, seems an ungodly long period of time. It should not take that long.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Sadly, 8 years seems quite normal when discussing future launches.
Falcon 9 was developed from scratch in considerably less time than 8 years. So was Dragon. So will their spaceport in Brownsville, for a lot less than the $3 billion the Russians are spending for Vostochny.
This might not be easy and it might require a lot of legwork, but 8 years is too long. We were flying astronauts by 1961, only four years after Sputnik. It can be done fast.
I’m sure NASA is jealous, and will try somehow to up the ante.
But getting to space is hard. As some say.
This must be the first time the Russian government has had to work with unions and their organized crime handlers.
There is so much cash being thrown at this project that its a sure bet someone. if not several someones, are getting a little ‘incentive’ under the table.
Pretty soon we are going to hear about a ‘house cleaning’ in the space industry that will reach from top to bottom. A lot of people are going to get implicated in this and a lot are going to go away permanently.
You don’t keep embarrassing the head crime boss Vladimir Putin on the world stage without some kind of real hard fall out happening.
The few arrests we have heard about are just the start. Those people will implicate a lot more. And unless Vlad gets enough cash out of this heads will roll.
> But getting to space is hard. As some say.
The Japanese and the Brazilians might say so, too. They have had quite a difficult time of it, in the past couple of decades.
However, this seems to be less of a problem of the construction being difficult to accomplish and more of a problem with project management. Building a launch pad and support hardware is not so difficult and what is needed and how to build them are reasonably well understood. At a launch pad, there are no high power, high temperature, high vibration engines attached, scant feet away, from the lightweight, fragile fuel tanks, so they don’t have to worry so much about the pad exploding, just the rocket exploding on or just above the pad.
It could also be a problem of Russia wanting a full-up site at first operation — taking on too much all at once. SpaceX is likely taking the typical capitalist industrial strategy of starting inexpensively, with the basics, then adding more over time, as need arises and funding allows. This strategy is how we got Mercury running so quickly, and it does not expend resources, now, on items that can be delayed until later, or will ultimately never be necessary.
As for Don, below, thinking that NASA might get jealous: about the same time as Mir, NASA *did* propose an even larger space station, as though they were thinking “me too!” But NASA still has the more impressive Kennedy Space Center, so I suspect that the Russians are the jealous ones, this time.