The Russians on ISS are doing their own spacewalk today, for profit.
They are installing two cameras for a Canadian company that will beam down high resolution commercial images of the Earth’s surface.
Another successful Proton rocket launch took place today in Russia, putting a Russian communications satellite into orbit.
This is the fourth successful Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure, suggesting that the Russians have gotten the rocket’s manufacturing process back on track.
The competition heats up: The Russians have delayed the first launch of a new Soyuz rocket for at least a week.
No reason for the delay was announced. The rocket is an entirely new design, with an upper stage expected to cost less to make.
The competition heats up: Russia’s deputy prime minister is pushing to accelerate the completion of Russia’s new spaceport in Vostochny.
The first scheduled launch is now planned for 2015, but this article suggests they are trying to make it happen by the fall of 2014.
Tbe competition heats up: International Launch Services ((ILS) has successfully launched its Russian Proton rocket to put another commercial communications satellite into orbit.
This launch solidifies the recovery of the Proton rocket since the disastrous July launch. With the Russian government forcing a consolidation of all Russian aerospace companies into one government owned cooperation, however, it is unclear what will happen to ILS and Khrunichev (the Russian company that makes the Proton).
Sacrilege! No alcoholic beverages for the Russian astronauts to drink on ISS on New Year’s Eve.
Some more details about the impending takeover and overhaul of the Russian space industry by the Russian government.
Sadly, Russian culture is strongly top-down and authoritarian. After two decades of wild freedom — when they claimed a large share of the launch market and made a lot of money — they are now returning to their centralized ways. It will not work.
How India’s cryogenic rocket engine program was hampered and delayed, by the United States.
The article is fascinating, and rings very true until the last section. George Bush Sr. was an old CIA guy who distrusted the Soviets enough to want to prevent them from having any dealings with India, and Bill Clinton was very hostile to India during his entire administration. It is very easy to believe both presidents worked to stymie India’s efforts to work with the Russians.
Russia consolidates its space industry into one giant government-owned corporation.
While the U.S. is working to increase the number of space companies and thus the competition to get into space, Russia is returning to its Soviet-era roots. This second story about this consolidation includes this telling quote:
The country is set to radically centralize its space industry in a bid to combat major inefficiencies and cut down on the misuse of funds under plans unveiled by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense and aerospace sectors.
This decision does not really bode well for Russia’s effort to compete on the open market. You never solve inefficiencies or cut costs by eliminating competition. Instead, the lack of competition encourages inefficiency and increased cost.
A Progress freighter was manually docked with ISS today when its automatic docking system suffered a malfunction 200 feet from the station.
This freighter was using a new rendezvous radar system, and had spent two extra days approaching the station to do rendezvous tests. What failed has not yet been released.
Russia has now officially delayed the launch of its next module to ISS by at least a year.
The cause of the delay is because of a number of serious quality control problems by the company that manufactured it.
A Progress freighter, launched yesterday, will not dock with ISS for four days in order to test upgrades to its rendezvou radar system.
Unlike recent Progress vehicles that used the 2AO-VKA and AKR-VKA antennas of Kurs-A system, M-21M is sporting a AO-753A antenna of the Kurs-NA system instead. Once the Progress reaches its preliminary orbit, it will conduct a series of automated engine burns to put it on track to fly within one mile of the station on Wednesday, allowing for the test of the lighter, more-efficient Kurs automated rendezvous system hardware for upgraded Soyuz and Progress vehicles.
After it finishes its flyby, the Progress will loop above and behind the station, returning Friday for a docking.
Dennis Tito noted today that if the U.S. doesn’t partner with him to send a couple to fly past Mars, he’ll partner with Russia or China instead.
That’s nice, but how does he know they’ll partner with him? Based on his proposal, I would expect Russia especially to laugh him out of the room.
Construction of Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport is essentially back on schedule.
“I think we have reduced the lag and are getting back to the initial schedule,” Spetsstroy Director Alexander Volosov said on Thursday, November 21. While in July 2013, the lag was about three months, now it has been reduced to ten days. “Funding is provided on time and in sufficient volumes,” Volosov said. The first stage of the project – construction of roads at the cosmodrome – has been completed. The second stage is proceeding as scheduled and is to be completed in December 2014.
The competition heats up: In a launch today a Russian Dnepr rocket sent 32 satellites into orbit, breaking the record of 29 set less than a week ago by a Minotaur rocket.
This is the future. Satellites are going to get smaller, and thus cheaper to launch.
The new head of the Russian Space Agency has requested that the government impose a ban on the sale in Russia of any foreign made satellites.
The idea is that Russian industries should build these satellites instead, and that this ban will encourage the rebirth of the Russian satellite business.
I doubt it. If the Russian satellite business could do it better, they would get the business anyway, especially since their labor costs are generally much lower.
Two Russian workers were killed and several injured last week while cleaning out a rocket tank at a Russian spaceport.
The article says that the accident occurred because of a failure to follow safety regulations, which suggests that the quality control issues in Russia’s space industry still exist.
The competition heats up: A Proton rocket successfully launched a Russian military satellite today.
This is Proton’s the third successful launch in a row since July’s spectacular launch crash. It seems they have straightened out their quality control problems, for the moment.
A Soyuz capsule safely returned three astronauts to Earth Sunday.
The returning crew from ISS has undocked from the station.
During a five hour EVA yesterday that had lots of minor technical difficulties, two Russian cosmonauts took the Olympic torch on a spacewalk.
Most of the press is focusing on the PR stunt with the Olympic torch, but I think these issues are more interesting:
Working around the Service Module, Kotov and Ryazanski worked on cables at the RK21 site before attempting to fold up the panels on the hardware into its original configuration. The EVA tasks were mainly related to the preparations on the Urthecast pointing platform for installation of the HD camera in December. However, only the removal of the launch restraint from VRM EVA workstation and the disconnection of the RK-21 experiment were completed. The duo struggled with the relocation of the Yakor foot restraint – which they opted to take back to the airlock instead – while also failing to fold and lock RK-21 experiment antenna panels. While the spacewalkers managed to take a large quantity of photos for engineers on the ground to examine, the spacewalk was concluded after the failure to fold up the RK-21 panels, resulting in outstanding tasks for the next EVA.
The competition heats up? According to People magazine, Lady Gaga will take a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight in 2015 and thus beat Sarah Brightman into space.
A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully launched a new crew to ISS today.
As a Russian publicity stunt, they are carrying the Olympic torch up to ISS, which will be brought back by the returning crew on Sunday.
The accumulated evidence from the Chelyabinsk meteorite now suggests the risk of large asteroid impacts might be ten times greater than previously estimated.
The Chelyabinsk asteroid had approached Earth from a region of the sky that is inaccessible to ground-based telescopes. In the 6 weeks before the impact, it would have been visible above the horizon only during the daytime, when the sky is too bright to see objects of its size, says Borovička.
“The residual impact risk — from asteroids with yet-unknown orbits — is shifting to small-sized objects,” says Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and an author on the Nature papers.
Of the millions of estimated near-Earth asteroids 10–20 metres in diameter, only about 500 have been catalogued. Models suggest that an object the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid hits Earth once every 150 years on average, Brown says. But the number of observed impacts exceeding 1 kiloton of TNT over the past 20 years alone hints at an actual impact risk that may be an order of magnitude larger than previously assumed,
The data also now suggests that the Chelyabinsk asteroid was twice as big as previously thought, and that it had an almost identical orbit to a much larger already known asteroid.
New quality control problems that have popped up in Russia might delay its next module to ISS by more than a year.
The company building the new module is the same one that builds the Proton rocket that has had serious problems in the last few years.
The competition heats up: Russian owned International Launch Services (ILS) today successfully used its Proton rocket to launch a commercial satellite.
This is the second successfully Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure. The company seems to be recovering, which of course means that the competition for launch services will get hotter in 2014.
Which is excellent news. The competition will keep these companies on their toes, and force them to innovate in order to stay in business. In the long run this will lower the cost to orbit and make space more accessible to everyone.
Divers working at a Russian lake have recovered a half-ton piece of the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk on February 15.
Boom! A remotely operated Russian telescope, located in New Mexico, on Wednesday discovered a kilometer wide Near Earth asteroid.
The asteroid, believed to be the 704th largest with an orbit that comes relatively near Earth, does not pose a danger of crashing into our planet, said the head of the observatory that made the discovery. “It’s a big asteroid, but it poses no danger for us,” Leonid Elenin, who lives in the Moscow Region, told RIA Novosti on Friday.
Finding a new asteroid like this illustrates that there might be other such large objects out there undiscovered. Also cool is how the Russians discovered it, using equipment in the United States!
Posted from Midland, Texas, the center of the world for the American oil industry.
The Russian government today replaced the head of its space agency.
This is part of the continuing shake-up of the Russian space industry following a series of launch failures over the past three years.
The shake-up in the Russian space bureaucracy continues.
The government is consolidating the different aerospace companies created after the fall of the Soviet Union as well as replacing the head of Roskomos, the Russian space agency.
