The Russians have successfully recovered their first sample from Lake Vostok, buried almost 2.5 miles below the Antarctic icecap.
Russia has announced a commitment to spend $70 billion over the next seven years on their aerospace industry.
Russia will spend 2.1 trillion rubles (about $70 billion) under a state program for the development of the national space industry in 2013-2020, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday. “The total volume of funding is quite significant: 2.1 trillion rubles, including extrabudgetary sources,” he said. The program is designed to ensure the country retains its position as a leading global space power, while also supporting its defense capability, and boosting economic and social development, Medvedev said.
Though this commitment of significant funds will certainly help revitalize their aerospace industry, I wonder whether it will instead encourage that industry to be less efficient. If done right government subsidies can jumpstart an industry, as seen with NASA’s new commercial space program. If done wrong, however, subsidies can result in an expensive operation that can’t make a profit, as in the case of ESA, Arianespace, and its Ariane 5 rocket.
The investigation into the failure of the Proton rocket’s Briz-M upper stage on December 8 has pinpointed the failure to a turbopump.
While it is a good thing that they have found the cause of the failure, this is not the same component that failed previously. Moreover, after the previous failure the Russians had said they would dismantle and inspect all Briz-M stages under production. It is obvious that they did not find this turbopump problem then.
All told, these issues do not recommend the Briz-M upper stage or the Proton rocket that depends on it. What else might be wrong with this upper stage that they might be missing? Until they can reassure potential customers that this question has been answered, the Russians are going to have a serious problem competing in the increasingly competitive launch market.
The Soyuz capsule with ISS’s new crew of three astronauts has successfully docked with the station.
Russia today successfully launched a new three man crew toward ISS.
More bad news for Russia: Kazakhstan is considering cancelling the lease that allows Russia to use the launch facilities in Baikonur.
Bad news for Russia: During a launch yesterday the upper stage of a Proton rocket failed to put the satellite into its proper orbit.
With this, the third failure in the past 16 months for the Briz-M upper stage, I expect that the Proton’s customers will continue to flee, as has Echostar.
The Russians today announced a reorganization of their space industry.
An obvious attempt to deal with their increasing production and quality control problems, this proposal has both good and bad parts to it.
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The competition heats up: Echostar signs a multi-satellite deal using the Ariane 5 rocket.
Several points:
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Real progress: Russia and the U.S. have named the two astronauts who will spend a year in space beginning in 2015.
This mission will also make room for a Russian tourist flight during that same time period.
A Russian Proton rocket, scheduled for launch in late December, is being replaced because of damage sustained during transport from its factory.
This is not the first time this has happened. In 2010 a Soyuz capsule had to be replaced for the same reason. Modern television journalism (if one can call it that) would immediately ask “Is this a trend?” I instead wonder what the details are in both cases, which unfortunately are not available.
Sources in Russia indicated today that the contract for Sarah Brightman’s space tourist flight has not yet been signed.
Brightman will have turned 55 by that time, which means she will become one of the 20 oldest cosmonauts of the world, among which there is now only one woman (Barbara Morgan, which made a shuttle flight in 2007). “It is not known how the next three years, which the singer will spend in permanent travel around the world, will affect her health,” the source said. It is most likely that only Russian cosmonauts will take part in the 2015 ISS mission, who will take all three spaces in the Soyuz, he said.
The story focuses on the publicity gained for Brightman by making her announcement, but the actual scoop, assuming the source is correct, is that she doesn’t have a contract.
The head of the company building Russia’s version of GPS has been fired.
It appears there are allegations of fraud and embezzlement. (He should have worked for MF Global, raising funds for Obama. Then he would have gotten off scott free!)
Three astronauts safely returned to Earth today after a 125-day stay on ISS.
More on why that communications cable was cut at Russian mission control.
It appears that because of routine maintenance of other equipment, the company that controlled the cable was supposed to mark it so that the repair crew would leave it alone. That repair company is now claiming that the marking never happened.
The Russians have repaired the severed cable that had cut off their communications with ISS and space.
The article notes that this failure was never a critical problem for ISS, pointing out that there was a back up communications route in the U.S., and that the astronauts on board are trained to work independent of the ground. Though both these points are true, what the article doesn’t mention is that much of the American half of ISS has been built to be run from the American mission control. It is not like Mir, which was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible. The result is that though a communications break in Russia is not really critical, a communications break in the U.S. might be.
The accidental cutting of a communications cable has cut off Russia’s mission control from ISS and many of its satellites.
They have rerouted communications to ISS through mission control in Houston, so the station has not been seriously effected by this accident.
The orbital debris from the exploded upper stage of the failed Proton launch in August now totals over 100 pieces.
For the second time, a Progress freighter has launched and, after only four orbits, docked with ISS.
This was the fourth Progress launched this year, the second to follow an abbreviated four-orbit rendezvous with the space station. Russian flight controllers normally implement two-day rendezvous profiles, but they are perfecting procedures for single-day flights for possible use with manned Soyuz missions to shorten the time crews are forced to spend in the cramped ferry craft.
The Russians have used the leisurely two-day rendezvous path now for almost a half century. So, why are they suddenly trying to shorten the travel time to ISS to six hours? Though there are many good engineering reasons, I also suspect it is because they are now feeling the pressure of competition. The shorter travel time probably lowers their costs at mission control. It also makes using the Soyuz for manned flights more appealing. Dragon for example is presently using the two-day rendezvous path. And Dragon will soon become a direct competitor to Soyuz, when it begins flying humans in the next three to five years.
A Russian ship carrying 700 tons of gold is missing off Russia’s eastern coast.
The dry-cargo freighter Amurskaya, operated by a company based in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, went missing in the Okhotsk sea on Sunday. It had a nine-member crew on board, local prosecutors who are checking the case said in a statement.
The ore came from Polymetal’s Avlayakan mine and was supposed to be delivered to its Hakanja processing plant, the company said in an emailed comment. It declined to give further details. At current gold prices , the 700 tonnes of gold ore may cost around $230,000, analyst Sergey Donskoy at Societe Generale said. Each tonne of ore out of the Avlayakan mine contains about 6 grammes of gold.
If this was a movie, the ship is right now hidden in an underground lair somewhere, being offloaded as engineers work to disguise it.
The failure last August of the second stage of a Russian Proton rocket is causing more problems: the stage exploded in mid-October and the debris is now a threat to ISS and other satellites.
With a successful Soyuz docking today, ISS is back to a full six person crew.
Early today a Soyuz rocket successfully lifted ISS’s next crew into orbit.
The first analysis of the water from Lake Vostok, buried deep under the Antarctic icecap, has shown no evidence of life.
Bulat and his colleagues counted the microbes present in the ice sample and checked their genetic makeup to figure out the phylotypes. They counted fewer than 10 microbes/ml — about the same magnitude they would expect to find in the background in their clean room. And three of the four phylotypes they identified matched contaminants from the drilling oil, with the fourth unknown but also most likely from the lubricant.
The scientists note that this is a preliminary result. Further drilling for new deeper samples will take place in 2013.
The competition heats up: Just two months after the failure of its second stage during launch, Russia’s Proton rocket successfully put a communications satellite into orbit yesterday.
This quote, from this Space News article, also implies that there is increasing competitive pressure in the launch industry, which I attribute to the success of SpaceX’s Falcon 9:
Perhaps the most striking element of the launch is that Washington- and Luxembourg-based Intelsat agreed to proceed with it so soon after the August failure of the Proton Breeze-M upper stage. It has been common practice following previous Proton failures that a Russian government mission would be the customer on the return to flight. In this case, Intelsat and its insurance underwriters were sufficiently persuaded that Reston, Va.-based ILS and Proton prime contractor Khrunichev Space Center of Moscow had come to grips with the issue to agree to be the customer for the first flight after the failure.
It’s official: Singer Sarah Brightman has purchased a ticket to fly to ISS in a Soyuz capsule.
Irony of ironies: In order to buy her seat on a Soyuz capsule Sarah Brightman outbid NASA, bumping its astronaut out.
This was a win-win for the Russians. They get paid more by Brightman than by NASA (over $51 million), and they finally get that year long mission they’ve been campaigning for for years. Because Brightman has taken one of NASA’s seats, the U.S. agency was forced to agree to the extended mission in order to maintain a presence on the station throughout that time period. Otherwise, their astronaut would come home and be replaced by Brightman, but for only ten days.
The head of Russia’s manned program said today that the first yearlong mission on ISS will begin in March 2015.
This appears to be another case of the Russians trying to use the media to pressure NASA into agreeing to the mission. I hope it works.
Isn’t competition wonderful? The head of Russia’s space agency said today that they need to reorganize their industry in order to compete.
Key quote: “Unless we act now – we will cease to be competitive,” he warned.
I wonder why? Could it be there is a company out there selling launch capability at half the cost?
The competition heats up: Singer Sarah Brightman appears slated to be the next tourist to fly to ISS.
