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Why does America still use Soyuz rockets to put its astronauts in space?
- jpatokal 8y agoThis article is from October. A recent unmanned launch of Soyuz went well and the next manned launch with ISS crew is scheduled for December 3rd.
- inamberclad 8y agoRoscosmos must be pushing hard in order to pull this off. If they can't make their launch, the current crew will still need to depart on time. Should this happen, it'll be the first time in 18 (I think) years that the ISS has been unmanned. The Soyuz's hydrogen peroxide supply slowly denatures, so the spacecraft literally has an expiration date.
- walkingolof 8y agoRoscosmos where very quick figuring out what went wrong and everything is business as usual now. https://www.space.com/42319-soyuz-launch-abort-russia-identifies-cause.html https://www.space.com/42319-soyuz-launch-abort-russia-identi...
- habnds 8y agokind of a disappointing article from the economist. Click-baity title with the obvious answer in the first line of the article. They fail to directly compare the cost per flight for shuttle v soyuz. No follow up sentence on the possibility of actual sabotage on the soyuz return lander.
- ryanobjc 8y agoThe economist is opinion, filled with motivated reasoning, that pretends to be news. It also confuses breadth for depth and proudly touts it’s meh international coverage. When I want to cancel, I did it via my credit card company. They’re surprisingly anti free market when it comes to taking your money, they add as much friction to exiting the subscription. You have to have at least two magazines labels so you can compare them looking for the subscriber id, then call them. Signing up is a trivial webform though.
- mikejb 8y ago> They fail to directly compare the cost per flight for shuttle v soyuz. That would be a difficult but interesting comparison: You'd have to compare a single SpaceShuttle launch with the cost for launches of 1) Soyuz crew launches and 2) cargo launches that could be covered with the SpaceShuttle's 16t payload capacity.
- wallace_f 8y agoAnd not to mention the article does mention cost problems with the shuttle without going into such detail--which the editors may have cut out.
- jessriedel 8y ago> Click-baity title with the obvious answer in the first line of the article Is this just a complaint about the title rather than the article? Conditional on click-bait title, having the answer on the first line is the best outcome. Teasing an answer would make it a bad article.
- HenryBemis 8y agoAll very good comments from fellow HN-ers (the ones regarding the Economist's accuracy). My first thought on the title of the article was "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". As it goes for 'commuting' people back and forth to ISS (and previously to Mir - Mir means both 'World' and 'Peace' in Russian language) Soyuz was the favorite means of transportation. I am not against upgrading, but if it does the job, leave it alone :)
- starbeast 8y agoAs an aside to your comment about the naming of MIR, I have been saying for a while that, completely ignoring any science or technology benefits, the ISS and other combined space programs have paid for themselves many times over by giving the USA and Russia something really tricky and high level to coordinate over that is nothing to do with where the nukes are pointing today. Is the best back-channel going.
- walkingolof 8y agoSoyuz does the job alright, but its a complex system that could be simplified with what we know today, for example the Soyuz launcher have 20 main engines in a complex arrangement that was the cause of the last accident.
- proaralyst 8y agoI thought it had five main engines, four with six chambers and the fifth with eight?
- walkingolof 8y agoTrue, Sloppy nomenclature of me, it have 5 "engine" assemblies, with in total of 20 main chambers and 12 vernier chambers, a complex setup, Falcon 9 have, well, 9, all the same. Ref RD-107: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-107#/media/File:RD-107_Vostok.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-107#/media/File:RD-107_Vost...
- xoa 8y ago
- wallace_f 8y agoKorolev and von Braun are the most important pioneers of space flight. Korolev was brutalized and nearly beaten to death (he could not even turn his head to look to the side) in his stint in the gulags resulting from false accusations; and meanwhile the American efforts, like the Vanguard program and others, injected so much politics, beauracracy and corruption that we were actually losing the space race until Kennedy put a literal nazi--who had been rotting away with nothing to do in Texas--in charge of the Apollo program. There's often an extreme ugliness to human history that we dont want to look at, and An Economist word salad can read relatively like a nursery rhyme. The reality is just that simply the main obstacle to what humanity can accomplish, and the answer to the article's question, is just people screwing things up.
- codeulike 8y agoKennedy put a literal nazi--who had been rotting away with nothing to do in Texas--in charge of the Apollo program. Who? edit: Ah, this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- mmjaa 8y agoThe USA put a lot of Nazi's to use after the war. 1,600 of them went off to be part of the CIA. We can see how successful that integration went .. EDIT: Yes, I know, it makes you feel uncomfortable, Americans. But it is an uncomfortable truth that has to be confronted sooner or later - Nazi's helped build the CIA. https://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/31/the_nazis_next_door_eric_lichtblau https://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/31/the_nazis_next_door_...
- sitharus 8y agoI wish the article analysed the differences between the space programs in more depth. The US space program has had several new rocket and spacecraft designs where the Russians (and Soviets before) have concentrated on progressive refinement. The Soyuz rocket is a refinement of the R7 ballistic missile - the world’s first - and the spacecraft has been continually refined since 1967. The first stage engines still use hydrogen peroxide to spin the turbopumps as they’re iterations on the V2’s engine. I guess there might be something there with high tech analysis vs traditional iterative engineering.
- walkingolof 8y agoNot quite accurate, the Russian space agenecy (and before that the Soviet) have tried several times to replace the Soyuz, without succeeding for various reason, but the main reason is lack of resources. Right now it looks like maybe the Soyuz 5 rocket and the Federation capsule may make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
- baybal2 8y agoSoyuz 5 is effectively a man rated Zenith. Zenith is made in Ukraine, and that's the end of story.
- walkingolof 8y agoIts not, its a new design around a methane engine, its meant in certain configurations to replace Zenith and Proton, just like Angara, it greatly overlaps with Angara which makes many question that project. http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz5.html http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz5.html
- baybal2 8y agoNomenclature matters, the Soyuz 5 was a fatter Zenith integrated in Russia. The Soyuz 5.* line built around methane was originally a completely different project that was haphazardly renamed in order to conceal that the original Soyuz 5 programme went nowhere.
- Delmania 8y agoI had the opportunity to speak with a woman who works in mission control, monitoring the electrical systems and solar panels for the ISS. She said in her opinion, canceling the shuttle program was the right thing to do because using a space shuttle to fly to the ISS was the equivalent of using a mercedes to drive to the end of your driveway to get mail.
- sbradford26 8y agoSo the space shuttle couldn't even replace the Soyuz for taking people to the space station and back. The Soyuz capsule stays at the space station for the duration people are there so it can be used to get everyone back if needed. The space shuttle has a maximum mission length of 16 days so it could not fill that same role, while the Soyuz capsule can go about 6 months. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/extend_duration.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/extend_dur...
- rsynnott 8y agoThe shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem; the design never really made a lot of sense in the first place. The US would almost certainly have been better pursue a scaled-down Apollo-derivative (ie a Soyuz clone).
- tw04 8y ago>The shuttle was kind of a solution in search of a problem; I don't think that's entirely fair. At the time, when it appeared space may become weaponized, it made a lot of sense. A craft that could potentially fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home? Worth the cost and then some many times over.
- rsynnott 8y ago> fly up to space, take someone else's satellite and bring it home (NB. Provided that it was in an accessible low earth orbit and that very simple countermeasures weren't used) I mean, realistically, putting a small bomb in each sensitive satellite would be enough to dissuade anyone from trying this, and most sensitive satellites wouldn't be in orbits that the shuttle could make anyway. The military applications always seemed like the most fantastical part of the concept.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoDoes anyone have a workaround for the paywall?
- avmich 8y agoInteresting that USA launched people on LOX-ethanol (Mercury Redstone), LOX-kerosene (Mercury Atlas), N2O4-Aerozine (Gemini), LOX-kerosene-LH2 (Apollo), solids-LOX-LH2 (Shuttle) - and Russia (previously USSR) always actually used R-7 LOX-kerosene with almost the same launch pad... > Russia’s willingness to ferry passengers—including space tourists—gave NASA and other agencies a useful fallback option Remember how much NASA opposed the Dennis Tito flight. Doesn't look like a useful fallback. > the date by which the three astronauts presently on the ISS must use a Soyuz descent vehicle before its corrosive fuel renders the craft unusable I believe it's the fuel itself which deteriorates, not the craft. Peroxide is slowly self-decomposing.
- vectorEQ 8y ago"because trillions of dollars still doesn't beat russian technology"