Russia’s only manned launchpad damaged badly during yesterday’s launch
During the successful Soyuz-2 rocket launch yesterday carrying three astronauts to ISS, the “mobile service platform” used to transport the rockets to the pad (similar to the strongback used by Falcon 9 rockets), collapsed into the flame trench below it.
According to preliminary estimates, repairs of the service platform, known as 8U216, could take up to two years and it was not immediately clear whether some kind of makeshift arrangement would be possible to support multiple cargo and crew launches to the ISS in the interim. There was some possibility that duplicate hardware could be borrowed from the mothballed Site 1 in Baikonur or from similar facilities at other launch sites. There were four Soyuz pads in Plesetsk at one point, including an unused existing structure at Site 16, also one pad operated in Vostochny.
The Plesetsk pads however are at higher latitude, and any spacecraft launched from there would have difficulty rendezvousing with ISS.
It appears that the failure was the result of inadequate maintenance at Baikonur, or another example of the poor quality control that has plagued Russia’s aerospace industry for the past two decades.
Unofficially, violations of operational procedures, stemming from increasingly scarce maintenance of the facility in the past few years, were blamed for the collapse of the structure. According to another rumor, the mobile platform was not properly secured in its underground shelter before launch, which let the blast wave from the rocket exhaust pull it off its guide rails into the flame trench.
This wasn’t the only failure for Russia in the past day. At its now rarely used Yasny military launch site witnesses reported a rocket exploding after launch yesterday. Though images are available confirming something went wrong shortly after lift-off, no other information has been released by Russia.
Russia planned to launch a Progress freighter to ISS in late December. That launch will now likely be delayed. In fact, the pad damage threatens the entire supply stream to ISS, requiring possibly additional American cargo missions (which almost certainly SpaceX can provide).
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
During the successful Soyuz-2 rocket launch yesterday carrying three astronauts to ISS, the “mobile service platform” used to transport the rockets to the pad (similar to the strongback used by Falcon 9 rockets), collapsed into the flame trench below it.
According to preliminary estimates, repairs of the service platform, known as 8U216, could take up to two years and it was not immediately clear whether some kind of makeshift arrangement would be possible to support multiple cargo and crew launches to the ISS in the interim. There was some possibility that duplicate hardware could be borrowed from the mothballed Site 1 in Baikonur or from similar facilities at other launch sites. There were four Soyuz pads in Plesetsk at one point, including an unused existing structure at Site 16, also one pad operated in Vostochny.
The Plesetsk pads however are at higher latitude, and any spacecraft launched from there would have difficulty rendezvousing with ISS.
It appears that the failure was the result of inadequate maintenance at Baikonur, or another example of the poor quality control that has plagued Russia’s aerospace industry for the past two decades.
Unofficially, violations of operational procedures, stemming from increasingly scarce maintenance of the facility in the past few years, were blamed for the collapse of the structure. According to another rumor, the mobile platform was not properly secured in its underground shelter before launch, which let the blast wave from the rocket exhaust pull it off its guide rails into the flame trench.
This wasn’t the only failure for Russia in the past day. At its now rarely used Yasny military launch site witnesses reported a rocket exploding after launch yesterday. Though images are available confirming something went wrong shortly after lift-off, no other information has been released by Russia.
Russia planned to launch a Progress freighter to ISS in late December. That launch will now likely be delayed. In fact, the pad damage threatens the entire supply stream to ISS, requiring possibly additional American cargo missions (which almost certainly SpaceX can provide).
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
Let’s throw open our Overton windows and connect some dots, even if most people seldom bother to do this. (Does anyone remember James Burke’s popular TV series Connections? I’m guessing that Robert does…)
https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
As this post — and the general trend of many such posts in the past — makes clear, Russia’s space program is in desperate trouble, and “decline” barely scratches the surface of what appears to be happening to their capacity to remain a space faring nation. From aging, unmaintained infrastructure to stifling centralization under an inept, politically constrained bureaucracy*, their moribund space sector seems to have totally lost whatever mojo it once possessed, and there seems to be no coherent plan to fix any of this. (In present day Russia, does its Duma ever have oversight hearings about such things?)
*Yes, we’ve also seen this here in the United States under several past administrations. Think, for example, of the long period in which US astronauts had to hitch rides to the ISS with the Russians.
Yet, despite all of this, Russia under Mr. Putin grinds relentlessly forward in its own forever war in Ukraine, and — if you believe the talking heads in Europe — is planning on invading all of the rest of the former Warsaw Pact nations as soon as it becomes convenient. Somehow the notion of a continent-devouring Russian army that lacks both the national infrastructure and the finances to support it** even as it barely manages to fight Ukraine to a draw does not seem realistic, but this is what we are being asked to believe.
**Recall that here in the (bad old) USA, we proceeded with both the Vietnam War *and* the Apollo program, even at the cost of stagflation in the 1970s. Looking back, all this was accomplished at what was arguably the peak of American civilization / the American Century, and one wonders if we could ever accomplish such a thing again. Capitalism in Space, however, might give us a shot…
Similarly, there is the question of why Mr. Putin proceeds with such a costly and unsustainable war when there are so many signs that his country is sliding into irrelevancy in the modern world, short of being a gas station for the Chinese and the Indians. While I do not believe that he is a “nice” person, Russia’s leader has always seemed to be just as much of a nationalist and a promoter of Russian / Slavic culture as Mr. Trump is a fan of American culture here at home.** Indeed, unlike Biden and his friends, he actually seems to LIKE his country and its people and, in his way, want’s what’s best for them. *Why,* then, does he seem to be so indifferent to his country’s precipitous decline and the pursuit of a costly war that he has already essentially won?
**I have always believed that one of the chief reasons that Mr. Putin is so despised by the Council on Foreign Relations / World Economic Forum crowd is precisely because he is a *nationalist* and doesn’t subscribe to the idea that nation states are evil and obsolete. He seemingly loves Russia and its unique national culture, and this CANNOT BE ALLOWED. See, for example, https://somacles.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/alexander-dugin-fourth-political-theory.pdf
In light of all of this, is Putin as senile and misguided as Joe Biden, as narcissistic as Trump, or is there something else going on here.
Why, in light of all of the mounting pressures on his country, does Putin blindly persist in the stalemated, world War I-like slaughter in Ukraine? What does he “get” from this, especially if he truly loves his country / culture / civilization? And can’t he — or anyone else in Russia — look at what’s left of their space program and draw some rational conclusions about what needs to be done?
Milt asked:
“Why, in light of all of the mounting pressures on his country, does Putin blindly persist in the stalemated, world War I-like slaughter in Ukraine?”
Because, Putin lives and dies by the conquerer’s creed. This is like the Romanov Dynasty, that kept pushing Russia’s borders East, West, South, and East again, Putin has his Russian ruler’s credibility from conquest. Ivan IV fought Poland, the Teutonic Order, and others to get access to the Baltic for 20 years, and only then turned East to take Kazan. Peter The Great fought the Swedes for a similar time, to take that Baltic access 150 years later. The Romanovs lost their credibility when they were defeated by an Asian power in 1904, and could not regain it in WW1.
Moscow adopted the label of successor to the Roman Empire of Constantinople under Ivan IV, and has never given it up, even when they changed their religion to socialism. Putin has changed it back to the Orthodox Church from Constantinople. He either conquers, or he dies.
Milt wrote: “””Does anyone remember James Burke’s popular TV series Connections?”””
Yes! The show received some criticism about some of the stated “connections” but was 1) very entertaining, and 2) made me THINK! Similar to how the Scientific American Magazine used to inspire me to read more and more. No, I did not understand every page of the old Scientific American, but it was way interesting. Our SA subscription ended after they ended using real science.
Tom wrote: “””Putin lives and dies by the conquerer’s creed”””
Just remembered one other item.
Putin is practicing the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Leonid Brezhnev stated his philosophy about territory most succinctly:
What’s mine is mine; what’s yours is negotiable.
Infrastructure needs to be maintained.
At least the Soviet system did that.
Putin doesn’t seem to be doing that and instead seems to be riding on the left overs of the Soviet empire.
The old empire is rusting away and he has no desire to replace it or maintain it.
Too bad Leonid Kuchma didn’t send Putin some of his famous soup.
This is why I don’t believe in ghosts—otherwise Russia’s tiny tyrant would have met with an ending straight out of M.R. James at the ectoplasmic claws of the Chief Designers risen from the grave.
I always preferred “The Blind Dead” in the original Russian.
I suspect that by this time next year Putin will be dead by the classic kalashni cough.
pzatchok: if so, it will be just another victim of a rifle purported to have killed more people than any other weapon. I’ve fired enough assault rifles to know that I would rather have just about any other firearm than an AK. Yeah, okay, if you’ve got nothing else. Most rifles are aimed, the AK is more spray-and-pray.
As commenters above have correctly observed, Putin is nothing new – what’s new is the EuroDems’ fear of him. Trump scared them into seeing reality, even as they curse him for it!
He and Gorby both hurt Russia Space.
One wonders what they could have had if they went the way of China and prospered:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/energia-buran-space-transportation-system.5656/page-15#post-854275
Some of this art has only now been made available.
” In fact, the pad damage threatens the entire supply stream to ISS, requiring possibly additional American cargo missions (which almost certainly SpaceX can provide).”
And this is what American capitalists call an “opportunity.”
If Boeing had not been dragging their feet, they could step up and say Starliner can fill the void, and try to get the jump on SpaceX. Alas, they long for the old days of hand outs from an all controlling agency. The paradigm has shifted.
Sierra Space, too, if Dreamchaser had been ready. But they are not positioned to take advantage either, have yet to test. Too long in R&D. They appear pretty tight lipped about the details of what held them up.
Both are going to miss this boat I think.
Back to my original question, if even many of the dimmer animals in Congress (but then there is Ted, Pass the Pork, Cruz) are grasping the importance of having a vigorous, private sector-based national space effort as the linchpin of a reindustrialized, high tech economy, then why is no one in Russia drawing similar conclusions?
If you love your country and your culture, you want them to be successful, and God knows the Russians are *not stupid*. Sadly, they do seem to be enamored — cf, both their history and, looking forward, Mr. Putin’s seeming embrace of the 4th Political Theory — of top-down authoritarian control, and I have no idea what might be done about this. As Jeff Wright suggests, had they gone the way of China
instead of embracing the crony (gangster) capitalism of the Oligarchs, there is no telling what they might have achieved. Who knows, Americans might be renting space on their Buran fleet.
Yet, for all of this, I remember going out in the dark in October of 1957 to try to get a view of Sputnik 1 — I don’t think that we kids ever succeeded, but the pictures of it were everywhere* — and there was no doubt at that time that their society could mount a serious challenge to ours. As it transpired, they awakened a sleeping giant, but then the country went back to sleep and quickly enough embraced the same kind of centralized, top-down thinking — at the time they called it “convergence,” lol — as our Russian counterparts.
*Here is a wonderful history of Operation Moonwatch, another mostly forgotten chapter in the history of the First Space Age and the STEM program of its time. https://www.amazon.com/-/he/W-Patrick-McCray-ebook/dp/B094YYVD6Z These days — ask any amateur astronomer / imager — it’s impossible NOT to see innumerable satellites while looking at the sky, especially at dusk. How things have changed.
PS — Per the comments by sippin_bourbon, yes, it is a shame that Starliner and Dreamchaser aren’t ready to earn some money and fill in the gaps. One thinks, moreover, of Henry Ford going to Germany and showing them how to build cars there. If the Russians were smart — and had better leadership — they might invite some of our entrepreneurs over for a chat.
Interesting video shot by — I kid you not — Dmitry Rogozin showing how it looks like when the service platform on Soyuz launch pad is being retracted inside the “bunker”, about an hour before launch. This was taken at Vostochny Cosmodrome.*
https://x.com/robert_savitsky/status/1994683000001630536
Scott Manley quips: “Oh hey, Dimitry occasionally did something useful, like shooting this video.”
__
* I wonder if there’s any chance to speed things up by switching Soyuz launches over to Vostochny?
Because this is now an existential conflict for the Kremlin — and pretty much all the likely replacements for Putin are even *more* hardline nationalist than Putin is.
But I do agree, that when you look at things like what happened in Baikonur, that it’s a bit hard to buy the idea that the Russian Military could take Riga, let alone Warsaw, as things stand now. They’re just good enough to grind the Ukrainian army to paste (at high cost). There is a lot of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith famously said — the problem for Ukraine is that they had less ruin to run through than the Russians do.
Milt asked:
“Why, in light of all of the mounting pressures on his country, does Putin blindly persist in the stalemated, world War I-like slaughter in Ukraine? Why, in light of all of the mounting pressures on his country, does Putin blindly persist in the stalemated, world War I-like slaughter in Ukraine? What does he “get” from this, especially if he truly loves his country / culture / civilization? And can’t he — or anyone else in Russia — look at what’s left of their space program and draw some rational conclusions about what needs to be done?”
I don’t think it’s about conquest for its own sake. It’s nationalism, not in the Westphalian sense but more primal: Putin is a paternalist with a herding dog’s instinct to drive the Rus flock together. For him, it is inconceivable that Slavic peoples would willingly embrace the West’s exploitation and divorce themselves from their own ethnic and religious cohort; it can only be due to Western subterfuge and treachery. (Note that this is the mirror image of how many elites in the West have viewed anyone sympathetic toward Russia, long after the Cold War ended and long before the Ukraine wars started.)
As for space, Russia did have dreams of commercialization but stolidly groped along, like a Platonic form of the most indifferent cost-plus contractor possible, heedless of the imperative to adapt in order to satisfy customers’ needs. Probably a case of Pournelle’s Law of organizations — Russians would recognize the principle immediately if they saw a translation.
Richard M,
The Ukrainian armed forces are a long way from being “ground into paste.” The grinding has mostly been – and continues to be – of the Russians by the Ukrainians. And the ratio of exchange has been tilting more and more in Ukraine’s favor as the war has progressed even if one counts civilians killed in Russian terror strikes as well as Ukrainian military KIAs on the Ukraine side of that ratio.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but Ukraine has been punching well above its weight in inflicting ruin upon Russia. Given another year or so, that process would run to effective completion.
Anent the Soyuz pad damage at Baikonur, I don’t think it much matters for the limited future of the ISS whether or not this miscue knocks Russia out of the manned spaceflight business or not. Even if Russia can repair the Baikonur pad or refit the Soyuz pad at Vostochny to handle manned Soyuz and Progress missions, neither outcome is likely to occur particularly soon. The US should pretty much figure on having no further Russian involvement on ISS until further notice once the recently-arrived Soyuz crew departs in eight months. NASA needs to start making alternative arrangements now.
More Dragon and Cygnus cargo missions to replace the absent Progresses pose no major problem, but maintaining a crew complement of seven would require adding three new seats to each Crew Dragon as only one of those can be resident at ISS except for the few days needed for crew exchanges.
Periodic boosting of ISS’s orbital altitude is something both Dragon and Cygnus have already demonstrated they can do.
The main remaining Russian capability that would need replacement is station thrusters that allow periodic desaturation of the US’s control gyros. NASA needs to quickly arrange a Space Act Agreement with, say, Impulse, to come up with both a set of strap-on replacement thruster units and a means to both install them without crew EVAs and to refuel them, periodically, after that – perhaps with some sort of propellant bowser that can be brought up in a Dragon trunk and which can then do its own station proximity ops with its own on-board thrusters. I suspect Impulse could have something ready based on its Ethane-NO2 thruster tech by the time the just-arrived Soyuz crew is ready to depart. And Impulse isn’t even the only US NewSpace firm with potentially applicable tech.
Once those last two Russians are gone, just close the hatch to the Russian side of ISS and leave it closed.
Russia’s motivations for its serial attacks on Ukraine, and its earlier land-grabs in Georgia and Moldova, are several. There is certainly a Russian assumption of cultural superiority and of a right-to-rule. But, as geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan points out, there is a long-standing strategic imperative behind Russia’s millennial history of ceaseless aggression too – the Russian heartland is part of a vast plain that makes border defense essentially impossible. Russia has, therefore, continually conquered its neighbors so as to acquire more and more buffer space in which to swallow invading armies.
During the high water mark of territorial control in post-WW2 Soviet times, Russia finally had sway over lands with natural barriers to invasion broken only by a few fairly narrow potential invasion routes that could actually be secured with less-than-infinite manpower. One of Putin’s main goals is to restore Russian reach to its Soviet-era maximum.
That means Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine are just the warm-up. Russia wants the entire former Warsaw Pact back under its thumb and still imagines it can accomplish that. A borderline lunatic belief to be sure, given current circumstances, but it explains Russian maritime mischief in the Baltic and recent forays by manned aircraft and drones into the airspaces of several NATO nations. Putin thinks he can cozen President Trump into handing him Ukraine on a silver platter and that Trump will also stand aside while Russia also tries to re-swallow all of the former Warsaw Pact.
As someone who would dearly love to live long enough to at least metaphorically piss on Russia’s grave, I’ll confess to wishing, just a bit, for Russia to try something rude with, say, Poland. Compared to what the Poles would do to Russia in response, what the Ukes are doing to it now would look almost polite by comparison.
The last a heard coming out of the Ukraine front line news is that Russia is now down using “mule” troops to send in supplies.
No body armor used mismatched uniforms no helmets and no weapons., just a backpack of supplies with orders to run through the battle zone and get the stuff to the solders on the front. Then stay there and find equipment off of the dead to replace the dead.
Basically meat mules to supply and replace the meat waves.
England has now sent all of its AS90 155mm howitzers to Ukraine and Ukraine is now producing 155mm shells.
Just ran across this from Katya P on X, posted earlier this weekend: New photos of the damaged launch pad at Site 31 of Baikonur Kosmodrome were published in Telegram channels and on the Novosti Kosmonavtiki forum.
https://x.com/katlinegrey/status/1994420759138107881?t=kyjtf6kt8mmRgBtqFrJzqw&s=19
“It’ll buff out.”
I like the idea of an access “tray” sliding out of the way.
Here in the US, LeMay and Rickover got the blanket checks with space advocates neutered after ABMA’s death.
The early Soviet space success was due to the polar opposite.
After the Chief Designers died, a lot of folks in other parts of the military had it in for Russia-space.
Nikita saw rockets as a way to NOT have to match America bomber for bomber….blue-water navy for blue-water navy. Once Korolev died and Nikita was out, the turn against space began in earnest—with only Glushko in the way.
After his death, the writing was upon the wall even before Putin.
In the early Space Race days, rocket men ate well and were supported even if others had to starve..
Where space advocates started to prevail here with USSF, inertia overseas went in another direction.
What I like most about Russia Space is that they were far from timid, and took risks.
Here is something new from the US edition of the Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15336905/trump-plan-end-ukraine-russia-war-billions-dollars.html
Most intriguing is this statement: “There were also reportedly talks of pursuing a joint mission between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Russia to reach Mars, a far cry from the ‘space race’ of the 20th century.”
How such a partnership would work — and what, exactly, Russia would contribute to such a mission — remains unclear, but it does remind me of the original deal that was struck with respect to creating the ISS. At any rate, it sounds like history might be repeating itself, as you can read in Jim Oberg’s Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance. https://www.amazon.com/Star-Crossed-Orbits-Inside-U-S-Russian-Alliance/dp/0071374256
If there is any reality to this at all, it would completely reshape everything that we are talking about, including, perhaps, the Russians also becoming partners with the US in its “race” back to the moon. But how, one wonders, does Elon Musk feel about this? And how do you integrate a Soviet-style command and control mindset into the creative dynamism of SpaceX? Talk about a shotgun wedding…
PS: Thoughtful commentary, thanks, especially from Dick Eagelson. Enjoying / learning from this discussion. If only the “experts” who write in Foreign Affairs were as grounded in history and technology.
PS — A note to Robert. As I keep thinking, you can’t, now, talk about politics without taking into account the background of the emerging Second Space Age and its fundamental importance for everyone’s future. Again, the Daily Mail story might be fantasy, but it does illustrate just how interconnected with everything else the new, private sector pursuit of the High Frontier has become. As an analogy, think about the effect of ship building and navigation on the fortunes of the European powers in the 16th century. And who were the Elon Musks of *that* era?
Capitalism in Space has been prophetic, and its working out in practice has indeed changed everything. Methinks that it is time for a follow-up book / paper.