Capitalism in space: Arianespace tonight successfully launched a United Arab Emirates (UAE) military reconnaissance satellite from French Guiana, using Russian Soyuz-2 rocket.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
31 China
22 SpaceX
5 ULA
5 Rocket Lab
5 Europe (Arianespace)
The U.S. continues to lead China 35 to 31 in the national rankings.
An evening pause: History must not be forgotten.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Energia, the division in Roscosmos that manages the Russian manned program, including its share of ISS, has proposed that Russia build its own space station after 2025, and the reasons it gives strongly suggest they are worried about the condition of their 20-year-old and leaking Zvezda module.
The International Space Station’s systems are likely to keep breaking down after 2025, Energia company, which manages the Russian module, said and suggested building a national station instead. “Russia has commitments regarding the ISS through 2025. Several elements are already seriously damaged and about to stop functioning. Many of them are impossible to replace. After 2025, we expect many ISS elements to start breaking down en masse,” the deputy director-general of Energia, Vladimir Soloviev, said at a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. [emphasis mine]
They don’t mention Zvezda by name, but the highlighted words point to it. Assuming the persistent leaks in the module are related to stress damage and age, this statement is recognizing publicly that replacing Zvezda is very difficult, or impossible, and that it is on the verge of complete failure.
Whether Russia has the money or resources to get another station built soon after 2025 is questionable, however. If they do decide to go it alone, I doubt they could launch a replacement before 2030, at the earliest, and likely much later than that.
If they do end the partnership with the U.S., it is unclear what happens to ISS. If the Russians choose to undock their portion of the station it will leave ISS somewhat crippled. It has been my impression that without all of the environmental systems in the Russian half, ISS cannot function. This might no longer be true, and will likely not be true with the planned arrival of Axiom’s private modules by the mid-20s. Timing however of all this remains critical.
Due to the discovery of a faulty valve on a Soyuz rocket being prepared for launch in French Guiana, Roscosmos has delayed today’s Soyuz rocket launch from Plesetsk, Russia, until December 3rd to allow engineers to inspect similar valves on that rocket.
This quote from Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, from the first link, describing the problem, is somewhat amusing:
“The ‘faulty valve’ would be launched with the rocket, and it would return to Earth being just a heap of mishap metal, that would be the problem. There are always some flaws, but in our case, they cost too much. Happily, the low-quality detail was timely detected by the quality control system. However, in general, I do note a sharp decline in our suppliers’ responsibility and quality of their work,”
It appears the quality control problems with Russia’s aerospace industry are continuing. No one, including the Russians, should be surprised by this, as that industry has no competition to stimulate quality work and force bad companies out of business. Instead, everything is managed by Roscosmos from on top, with much of that management designed to eliminate competition entirely and protect the companies that presently exist..
According to a Russian news report yesterday, air is still leaking from the Zvezda module of ISS, despite the permanent repair of the crack earlier this week.
Earlier, the crew locked the hatches into the intermediate chamber. The Mission Control asked whether the crew had measured the pressure before the hatch into that chamber was opened. The crew reported that the pressure went down considerably in the smaller part of the compartment while it remained isolated from the rest of the station by an airtight hatch. “The pressure in the intermediate chamber went down from 723 mm of the mercury column to 685 millimeters,” Ryzhikov said.
The report is poorly written, and is unclear on the exact date this air test was done. It is therefore possible the test was done prior to the permanent repair.
If however the air is still leaking, this suggests there might be more than one leak point in that part of Zvezda. According to this same story, the two Russian astronauts during their spacewalk on November 18th took pictures of the exterior area of Zvezda where the leak is located, and noted no exterior damage.
All these facts point to a very serious problem. If there was no exterior damage, it means the leak was probably not caused by a micrometeorite hit (though closer more extensive observations as well as a review of the photos might still conclude otherwise). The fact that the leak is continuing after the permanent repair suggests there is another leak, in the same part of Zvezda. That section is also a docking port, and would have experienced the most stress during the several dozen dockings that have occurred since Zvezda was launched in 2000.
These facts therefore suggest stress damage and aging as the cause, which means the problem will only get worse no matter what method is used to seal any future leaks.
One quick solution that would work, at least for awhile, would be to close the hatch on this intermediate chamber, and do no more dockings to it. This at least would seal the station from atmosphere loss, and reduce the stress on this section of Zvezda. Whether Progress freighters, which use this port, can use another port, or will have a more limited ability to dock, is not clear, however.
Two Russian astronauts yesterday successfully completed an almost seven-hour spacewalk removing and repositioning equipment to prepare ISS for the arrival of Nauka next year, Russia’s next module for ISS.
The Pirs module will be removed and junked next year to make room for the research lab Nauka — Russian for “science.” Several Russian-directed spacewalks will be required to deal with all this. The plan calls for attaching a cargo ship to Pirs in order to guide it to a fiery reentry.
The new 22-ton lab — stretching 43 feet (13 meters) long — is so big that it will be launched from Kazakhstan by a powerful Proton rocket. Once at the orbiting outpost, it will double as an air lock and docking port.
Earlier it had been announced that they would also do an inspection of the area on Zvezda where they had also discovered a small crack, the cause of the longstanding leak on the station. It appears they did not do this. probably because astronauts inside the station had placed a new permanent patch on the leak, and the work they were doing during the spacewalk carried a higher priority.
Expect that inspection to eventually occur, but for now the cause of that crack remains unknown.
Ukraine has becomed the ninth nation to sign the Artemis Accords, designed to encourage private enterprise in space.
The article at the link provides little information, other than claiming that ” Ukraine has all the scientific and technical capabilities and experience that allow it to become one of NASA’s important partners in the implementation of the Artemis program.”
Russia and the Ukraine are on opposite sides of a war, with Russia attempting to steal territory, with some success. Russia has also boycotted all Ukrainian space technology, ending a half century of business dealings.
It seems that the Ukrainian government looked at this political landscape, and decided to align itself with the United States. By signing the accords, it now has the opportunity to sell its space technology to NASA, as well as participate in any American effort to get to the Moon and elsewhere. That it chose to pick an ally halfway around the world instead of its big and powerful neighbor, tells us a great deal about the Ukrainian’s opinion of Russia.
I expect there will be a NASA press release in the next day or so that will provide us additional information.
The Russian spacewalk to inspect the outside location of the air leak in the Zvezda module on ISS has now been scheduled for November 18, 2020, and NASA will be providing a live stream.
Live coverage of the Russian spacewalk will begin at 8:30 a.m. EST on NASA Television and the agency’s website. The spacewalk is expected to begin about 9:30 a.m.
Ryzhikov, designated extravehicular crew member 1 (EV1), will wear a Russian Orlan spacesuit with red stripes, and Kud-Sverchkov will wear a spacesuit with blue stripes as extravehicular crew member 2 (EV2). This will be the 47th Russian spacewalk for assembly and maintenance of the station.
During the spacewalk, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov will first conduct leak inspections outside the hatch, as this will be the first spacewalk using the Poisk module for its purpose as an airlock. Next, they will relocate an antenna from another module, the Pirs docking compartment, to Poisk, the first in a series of tasks over the course of several spacewalks that will prepare Pirs for decommissioning, undocking, and disposal. The Earth-facing Pirs will be replaced by the new Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module, named “Nauka,” Russian for “science,” which is being prepared for launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
What they find could have a significant impact on the future of the space station.
The Russians announced yesterday that they plan the full and permanent repair of the small inch-long crack leaking air on ISS to occur in December, after required material is shipped to the station.
According to the official, the crack was the width of a hair and located in a hard-to-reach spot of Zvezda’s shell.
Solovyov did not specify the spacecraft that will deliver the sealing materials to the ISS, but the only one scheduled to fly in December is Cargo Dragon, a reusable freight spaceship of US private company SpaceX. The soonest flight of a Russian cargo spacecraft — Progress MS-16 — has been postponed until December 2021.
They also plan a spacewalk in the next two weeks to inspect the exterior of the Zvezda module where the crack is located.
I have yet to see an image of the crack itself. Why none has been made easily available is somewhat puzzling.
Russian astronaut, Sergei Ryzhikov, today noted that to him the 1-inch crack causing the leak on ISS appeared to have been caused by an “external impact.”
Speaking with Flight Director of the Russian segment of the ISS Vladimir Solovyov, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Ryzhikov said: “If you take a closer look at the picture, there are changes of color in the middle of the crack.”
“We suspect an external impact,” Ryzhikov said adding that the place of the suspected impact should be examined during the crew’s next spacewalk, which is scheduled for November 18.
This conclusion is different than that expressed yesterday by another Russian astronaut, who suggested the crack was from age and wear and tear of the twenty-year-old Zvezda module.
Either way, an inspection of the exterior point of the crack is essential in order to permanently seal it, and that inspection will tell us one way or the other the cause of the crack.
A Russian astronaut just returned from ISS admitted during a press conference that the recently located crack on the 20-year-old Zvezda module that was the source of the long-term slow leak could be the result of the module’s age.
“Twenty years are actually an absolute record for all space stations now. And we see now that something is changing and something requires greater [attention]. Again, if we go back to the leak, the hull is already beginning to give cracks and scratches somewhere, that is, we see the limits [of the ISS structure’s service life],” [cosmonaut Ivan Vagner] said.
The crack has been sealed temporarily, with a more permanent seal put in place after the nearby docking port is cleared and the hatches closed and out of the way.
If Russian astronauts are noticing wear and tear in Zvezda that is bad enough to cause “cracks”, this raises some very serious issues for ISS’s future, as replacing that module on ISS will be complicated and expensive, and at this point no one has even begun planning such an replacement.
Russia this past weekend arrested another Vostochny official on charges of fraud and bribery.
The arrest was of a different individual than the one Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin fired this weekend.
Roman Bobkov, the head of the state entity operating the cosmodrome, has been placed in pre-trial detention for two months by a local court, on Saturday, and faces several charges, including fraud, abuse of office, and incitement to abuse of office and forgery. He assumed the role of director at Vostochny in March 2019.
Bobkov is accused of using bribery to entice a senior Defense Ministry inspector, Dmitry Fomintsev, to file fake reports on the commissioning of several of the spaceport’s major water-supply facilities. The fraudulent documents were allegedly drawn up to conceal Bobkov’s own misconduct during their construction, which had left them unfinished.
They estimate the cost of Bobkov’s actions to be around $6.5 million, which in rubles is about a half billion.
The level of corruption and theft that has permeated the construction of Vostochny raises great doubts about the quality of work there, building the spaceport. Expect many “glitches” when they start attempting regular launches.
