Tag: Russia

Vostochny contractor charged with embezzlement avoids jail

9:08 am

The new colonial movement: The contractor who embezzled almost $6.5 million from the Vostochny spaceport project in Russia has avoided jail time, getting merely a suspended sentence and and a $3,000 fine.

Viktor Grebnev, who headed the TMK contractor until it was declared bankrupt 2015, was accused of knowingly signing loss-making contracts and using company money to buy yachts and a mansion.

A district court in Far East Russia handed Grebnev a five-year suspended sentence and fined him 200,000 rubles ($3,000) for large-scale embezzlement, Interfax cited the court as saying.

It appears from this story that the corruption in Russia remains as strong as ever, which bodes poorly for its future in space. Space engineering is hard. If you allow any dishonesty to linger around it you are guaranteed to have something go wrong.

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Soyuz has problem during return to Earth

7:51 am

In returning three astronauts safely to Earth yesterday from ISS the Soyuz spacecraft experienced a technical problem immediately after its engines had fired, causing it to go to a backup system.

Moments after the completion of the braking maneuver, the emergency signal was heard inside the Descent Module and the communications between the crew and mission control discussed a failure of the first manifold in the integrated propulsion system of the Soyuz spacecraft and the switch to the second manifold. Kononenko first reported K1B (Manifold DPO-B) emergency at 05:02:54 Moscow Time and subsequently confirmed a switch to the second manifold. NASA later confirmed the problem, but did not provide any details.

There is no explanation what the “first manifold” is, though I suspect it is a direct translation from Russian for their term for a primary system. That the system automatically switched to its back-up is a good thing. That there was a failure of the primary system is not.

Once again, this raises more questions about the quality control throughout Russia’s aerospace industry. While so far none of the recent Soyuz problems, which have also included a launch abort and a still-unexplained drilled hole, have caused a loss of life. I fear that soon or later they will.

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Battery screw-up delays Russian X-Ray telescope launch

8:39 am

The Russians this morning postponed today’s launch of the Spectr-RG X-Ray space telescope until July when it was discovered that one of the payload’s batteries had been drained prematurely.

[T]he Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid reported from Baikonur that the problem had been discovered at least a day earlier, but the entire project team at the launch site was kept in the dark until the launch date, not to interfere with Vladimir Putin’s annual press-conference.

According to the paper, the battery was accidentally activated on the launch pad instead of the planned moment after the separation of the spacecraft from the Block DM-03 upper stage. The error was blamed on the erroneous wiring setup by RKK Energia specialists (Block DM-03 prime contractor) between the upper stage and the spacecraft, which caused a complete drainage of the battery designed to be re-charged from solar panels. After the return of the rocket to the vehicle assembly building, the battery would have to be re-charged and the power-supply system re-wired, Moskovsky Komsomolets said. [emphasis mine]

If this report is true, it appears that the Russian government has done nothing to fix the quality control programs in its aerospace industry, and in fact is helping to contribute to them by playing games with launch procedures for the sake of its own public relations.

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Russian cosmonauts refuse to donate sperm for space research

9:21 am

According to one Russian scientist, Russian cosmonauts have been refusing to donate their sperm for a space research project to be launched on that country’s next Bion-M satellite in 2023, making that research impossible.

“We have been unsuccessful in getting the Coordinating Scientific & Technical Council responsible for approving experiments on the Russian segment of the ISS to approve such a routine procedure as the handover of seminograms by cosmonauts,” [Dr. Irina Ogneva, lab chief at the Institute of Cell Biophysics outside Moscow] explained. “We are consistently impeded by objections of a moral, psychological and ethical nature, and can’t find any volunteers among the cosmonauts,” she added.

According to the scientist, the mere mention of the idea of getting the male biomaterial in conditions of space merely “causes everyone to smile” and reject it.

Ogneva also is quoted as proposing that Russia also consider a project for giving birth to the first child in space.

“We are mindful of the fact that we were always first in space and in many areas remain the leaders. Therefore, it would be nice if the first human being born in space were a Russian citizen. But we should place care for the individual, not patriotic populism, at the forefront of our efforts,” Ogneva stressed.

According to the scientist, while it remains too early to formally set the mission of having a child in space, formulating the goal is already possible. Along with technical questions, there are moral and ethical issues which remain to be resolved, since a live birth would essentially constitute an experiment involving a human embryo.

The difficulties, both moral and ethical, for that first space childbirth, are so daunting that I expect it will only happen in one of two ways. Either it will occur in an unplanned manner, with a female astronaut getting pregnant and giving birth while on a mission where a retreat to Earth will be impossible, or it will occur because some totalitarian government, such as China or Russia, will force it on a woman.

It will happen eventually, however, and when it does, we will find out the limits of our ability to populate space. We might find that only in a gravity well can humans reproduce. Or not.

The unknowns are quite striking.

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Two more commercial Proton launches later this year

7:55 am

According to Russian officials, they will have two more commercial launches later this year using their workhorse Proton rocket.

They made this statement at the Paris Air Show yesterday. However, the story did not specific who the customers were, which I find puzzling.

They will use the Proton to launch Russia’s first space telescope in decades later this week. If successful, and if the two other launches occur, that would be the most Proton launches in a year since 2017.

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Europe inaugurates ExoMars control center

8:15 am

The Europe Space Agency yesterday inaugurated the control center where it will control and download data from the ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin, scheduled to launch to Mars in the summer of 2020.

The control center also includes a dirt filled enclosure where they can simulate Martian conditions with a rover model.

The article outlined the project’s upcoming schedule:

Over the summer the rover will move to Toulouse, France, where it will be tested in Mars-like conditions. At the end of the year Rosalind Franklin will travel to Cannes to meet the landing and carrier modules for final assembly.

As I noted yesterday in my most recent rover update, this assembly, only six months before launch, gives them very little margin. If there are any problems during assembly, they will likely miss the 2020 launch window.

I also wonder if this will allow them any time to do acoustical and environmental testing, as was just completed on NASA’s 2020 rover, to make sure ExoMars can survive launch, landing, and the journey to Mars. If they forego those tests, they might discover after launch that they were launching a paperweight, not an expensive planetary probe.

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Astronauts recover towel left on outside of ISS ten years ago

8:01 am

During a spacewalk this week Russian astronauts recovered a towel that had been left on the outside of ISS during an earlier spacewalk ten years ago.

The towel was originally meant to clean astronauts’ spacesuits during their work in outer space. It was left by a Russian cosmonaut about a decade ago. Mr Kononenko and Mr Ovchinin removed the towel from the station’s surface and placed it in a special container. It will be sent back to Earth and delivered to a group of experts for further examination.

Though unplanned, this towel will provide some good data on the ability of microorganism to survive in space. It almost certainly had such things within it when it was taken outside a decade ago, and the question now will be whether they survived or not, and their condition in either case.

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Russians say ISS threatened by debris from India’s anti-satellite test

8:58 am

According to one Russian official, data from the U.S. Air Force suggests that ISS now faces an increased risk from the debris produced from India’s anti-satellite test in March.

The probability that debris from an Indian satellite shot down earlier may puncture the International Space Station (ISS) has risen by 5%, Executive Director of Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos for Manned Space Programs Sergei Krikalyov said on Wednesday.

“The Americans have carried out calculations on the probability of the station getting punctured because of more debris surfacing and being dispersed. There are numerical estimates raising the probability of a puncture by about 5%,” Krikalyov said at a session of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Council.

It is unclear what this means, since Krikalyov did not say what the estimated overall risk is now thought to be. Increasing a 1% risk by 5% is far less significant that increasing a 10% risk by 5%. In fact, without knowing what the overall risk is, this story is practically meaningless, and instead suggests there are political reasons for making this statement.

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Launch failures in the past decade cost Russia almost a billion dollars

8:43 am

According to a Russian news report today, a Russian government financial study has found that the eleven Russian launch failures that occurred from 2010 to 2018 cost the government almost a billion dollars.

“During this period (2010-2018), 11 emergency launches took place. The losses of Russian to more than 35 bln rubles (which is almost 13 times higher than insurance costs),” the document said.

At the same time, due to the insurance tool, Russia returned almost 20 bln rubles ($309.62 mln), which is more than seven times the insurance costs.

“It should also be noted that during this period there were a number of emergency that were not insured. The result of these accidents was the losses of Roscosmos State Corporation in the amount of over 10.5 bln rubles ($162.55 mln), the sources of compensation are not established,” according to the explanatory note to the draft resolution of the Russian government.

The report also noted that insurance for launches from 2019 to 2021 will cost the Russians about 15% per launch. I don’t know the normal per launch insurance rate, so it is unclear if this is a heavy burden or not.

What is clear is that the failures in the past decade not only cost Russia dearly in money, it also lost them their international commercial market share. Right now almost all their launches are for the government, which brings them no outside profit, something they need desperately to help finance their future space effort.

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Russian company announces plan to enter suborbital tourism industry

8:08 am

Capitalism in space? A new Russian company, CosmoCourse, claims it will be flying a reusable suborbital capsule for tourism and science by 2023, with manned flights to follow in 2025.

CosmoCourse is developing a reusable spacecraft for sub-orbital tourist flights. A crew of six persons and an instructor is expected to make a 15-minute flight to an altitude of about 200 km. The preparations for the flight will take one day. The first manned flight is planned for 2025.

The CosmoCourse chief executive earlier told TASS that the company had signed a contract with the Nizhny Novgorod Region in the Volga area on cooperation in the project of creating the first private spaceport in Russia. The corresponding documents were submitted to Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos for approval. [emphasis mine]

I strongly suspect that this story will fall into the pile of hundreds of other stories that have come from Russian in the past two decades, promising much but in the end delivering nothing. The company appears to be just a piece of paper selling itself in the hope of raising investment capital. In Russia however such capital does not exist, as everything related to space is controlled by Roscosmos, as indicated by the highlighted text. To get built, this company must convince Roscosmos to fund it. And since its proposals will be a direct threat to the already established “companies” under Roscosmos’s control, I doubt the Russian space agency will be inclined to approve this competitive effort. The players in power will determine who gets the money, and it won’t be any new startups.

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