Russian Launch Vehicles and their Spacecraft: Thoughts & News

We are arguing from ignorance.

We have no idea what their future plans are... a super heavy rocket launching after 2033 is too late to help launch their new replacement space station, so we can assume it is needed for something else.

Perhaps they have plans for shuttles and tugs that are going to be very very heavy... I rather doubt they would bother with such a thing for Moon missions and they are talking about moon bases with China before 2033 so it is clearly not intended for that.

I suspect in a mission to Mars they might have a 60 plus ton nuclear tug that might form the core of a rather big space craft to fly to Mars.

When you have nuclear energy and ion thrusters then going really really big means getting there faster by running the engines all the way there and all the way back.

It would not be possible with chemical rockets but with nuclear power and ion thrusters then it should be no problem at all, but a big spaceship will be needed to carry people and all the resources they will require... the nuclear tugs will likely enter Mars orbit when it arrives and a space shuttle could be used for landing if they can find a large enough flat area. I would say using a hovercraft like undercarriage and a huge wing area could make landing rather more efficient that just using a rocket...

The point is that the reactor tug can't be launched in pieces and assembled in space.... you need a super heavy rocket to get it up into low earth orbit and then its propulsion system should be able to accelerate it away to speeds previously unheard of.

They might even be more ambitious... an unmanned mission to one of the large objects in the Oort cloud that have been discovered recently for instance... the speed with ion engines and a nuclear power supply that will be much more reliable than solar power could mean reaching enormous speeds and enormous distances... they could catch up to and recover one of the Pioneer space craft and take photos of it... and spray paint long live Russia on the side of it...

They could also use it to launch a mission to Jupiter and its more interesting moons and drop probes with a tether down into one of the oceans transmitting signals up to an orbiting space craft with a machine sitting on the ice surface and a sub attached to a tether melting and sinking through the ice transmitting data up to the craft in orbit...

All this work on robots and drones could pay off big time.

Note when sending a large space craft to Mars of course you send smaller rockets first to land on the surface and prospect for water and start to 3D print shelters on the planet ready for when people arrive to make things easier and as safe as possible... but there will always be risk.

Everyone forgets radiation. A large spacecraft is essential on any Mars mission to install shielding from solar flare spew of high energy particles and X-rays. The idea that
humans will travel to Mars in 1960s style tin cans is absurd. The alleged Moon astronauts avoided flares but still had to go through the Van Allen belts with relativistic
electron fluxes. No 1/4 inch aluminum shell is going to stop such high energy electrons and the astronauts would have been bathed in the equivalent of beta radiation.
The ISS and Mir orbits are in the belt quiet zones.

https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-021-01508-y

10 MeV electrons can go through several inches of aluminum. The outer Van Allen belt region is the most energetic. Rapid traversal of this zone will limit exposure. But it is
still exposure to radiation. Takes your chances with cancer.

Flying for over six months to Mars, is a whole new ball game in terms of radiation exposure. The chance of being "fried" by solar flares becomes much higher. Even if you get
lucky, that is not a sane exploration approach.

lancelot wrote:There are proposals to make Angara A7 versions with up to 50 tons to LEO. But currently Angara A5 can do like 25 tons to LEO.

Angara A7 is supposed to have six side booster modules versus the four in Angara A5. It uses a wider diameter core.

A-5V with hydrolox u/s will put 38T into LEO. Not sure that A-7 makes much sense if Russia proceeds with SHLV familily based on Soyuz-5 cores.

Actually water is a pretty good radiation insulator. You basically can just carry water to the spaceship and pump it in. You can store it inside the walls.

I remember one scifi writer suggesting that the outer surface of a space craft is where the water for the mission is to be carried in frozen form and liquid form. It can be used for heated to keep propulsion systems cool, and for cooling like freezing food stores etc etc.

When radiation levels get high you can have parts of the spacecraft shielded by these water tanks/ice blocks and the crew can take shelter during the danger periods...

Remember with a nuclear reactor on board you can separate the hydrogen and the oxygen which could be used for rocket fuel... or even filling balloons for exploring the atmosphere of the planet.