Russia announces revised schedule for its lunar unmanned projects
NPO Lavochkin, the Roscosmos division that builds Russia’s lunar landers, has now announced a revised schedule for all of that country’s proposed lunar unmanned projects, following the failure of its Luna-25 lander in August.
The program calls for at least six missions, including orbiters, landers, and a rover, launching from 2027 through the 2030s. However, this quote from the article is the reality:
As often before, the latest strategy relied on the development time frames that had never been demonstrated by NPO Lavochkin in comparable projects in the past three decades.
What is worse is the 100% failure record of Lavochkin’s planetary probes once launched. It takes forever to build anything, and then what it builds and launches doesn’t work.
Not that this absimal record will cost Lavochkin anything. The Russian government and the bureaucracy that controls it does not allow any competition. Instead, like prohibition-era mobsters, divisions like Lavochkin carve up territories that they control, and allow no one else in. For example, Lavochkin owns planetary research while Energia, another division in Roscosmos, controls manned space flight as well as its launch industry. No one else is allowed it enter these markets, which means Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
NPO Lavochkin, the Roscosmos division that builds Russia’s lunar landers, has now announced a revised schedule for all of that country’s proposed lunar unmanned projects, following the failure of its Luna-25 lander in August.
The program calls for at least six missions, including orbiters, landers, and a rover, launching from 2027 through the 2030s. However, this quote from the article is the reality:
As often before, the latest strategy relied on the development time frames that had never been demonstrated by NPO Lavochkin in comparable projects in the past three decades.
What is worse is the 100% failure record of Lavochkin’s planetary probes once launched. It takes forever to build anything, and then what it builds and launches doesn’t work.
Not that this absimal record will cost Lavochkin anything. The Russian government and the bureaucracy that controls it does not allow any competition. Instead, like prohibition-era mobsters, divisions like Lavochkin carve up territories that they control, and allow no one else in. For example, Lavochkin owns planetary research while Energia, another division in Roscosmos, controls manned space flight as well as its launch industry. No one else is allowed it enter these markets, which means Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing!
Patrick Underwood: Yes, it is bad. When bad people anywhere stymie human achievement, we all will suffer bad consequences in the end. Wouldn’t be better if Russia was a healthy prosperous nation competing for business on the open market, rather than a nation run by mobsters who think it okay to start wars for political gain? Those same mobsters squelch all competition inside Russia, and thus squelch the ability of ordinary Russians to follow ambitious but laudable dreams.
Once the Chief Designers died, it was a downhill slide. Like Musk, they were Cosmists for whom space exploration was there all.
Pants usually have two pockets at least:
One we will call “public” and the other we will call “private.”
If you want a ride to space, it really doesn’t matter which pocket it comes from.
Blue Origin is just as private as SpaceX
Russia is just as public as China.
Like Blue, Russia just has ‘holes in its pockets.
And India just made a capsule out of pocket lint.
You can always train “know-how.”
It is “want-to” that is lacking.