Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #2

BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan), July 28. /TASS/. A Russian Soyuz MS-05 manned spacecraft has blasted off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan to deliver a new expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), a TASS correspondent reports from the scene.

More:
http://tass.com/science/958223

Russia, China to sign cooperation deal on Moon exploration

Russia's Glavkosmos space launch operator is also working with Chinese partners on the issue of holding experiments aboard the International Space Station

MOSCOW, August 3. /TASS/. Russia and China will sign a space cooperation program for 2018-2022 in autumn to jointly explore the Moon and conduct the Earth’s remote probing, Glavkosmos space launch operator told TASS on Thursday.

"Work is nearing completion with the direct role of Glavkosmos to draw up a program of Russian-Chinese space cooperation for 2018-2022, which should be signed in the autumn of 2017," the company said.

lavkosmos is the coordinator and the contractor for a portion of the works in this program.

As Glavkosmos explained, cooperation with Chinese partners envisages the following areas: the exploration of the Moon and outer space, space vehicles and ground infrastructure, hardware components and materials, the Earth’s remote sensing data.

Glavkosmos is also working with Chinese commercial partners on the issue of holding experiments aboard the International Space Station and providing the data of the Earth’s remote sensing from Russian satellites, the company said.

Apart from China, Glavkosmos is also considering the possibilities of space cooperation with India, Brazil, South Africa, Nicaragua, Myanmar, Chile, Peru and Armenia and their involvement in Russian projects, the company said in its annual report.

Specifically, Glavkosmos is holding preparations in Brazil for a tender for the delivery of space images to that country.

It was reported earlier that China was interested in buying the world’s most powerful Russian-made RD rocket engines produced by Energomash while Russian Space Systems showed interest in Chinese electronic components.

Russia and China are also working on making their GLONASS and BeiDou navigation satellite systems mutually complement each other and on installing adjusting ground-based stations on the territory of each other.

Besides, Russia and China are working within the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) format to create a unified system of the Earth’s remote sensing.

International cooperation

As Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics Andrei Ionin said, Russia needs to look more actively for international partners to develop space projects.

"Building international partnership is, perhaps, the main strategic task for the entire Russian cosmonautics today. This is because the technological revolution, first of all, in micro-electronics, has made it possible from the viewpoint of investments the creation of space systems consisting of dozens and even hundreds of Earth remote sensing or communications satellites whose commercial success requires work on the markets, and also considering that the next stage of piloted flights is related to movement outside the bounds of the near-Earth space, which will require a sharp increase in expenditures on outer space," he told TASS.

According to the expert, broad and versatile international cooperation in the current situation is seen as a solution for Russian cosmonauts as it will help unite participants’ technological competences and their markets, share risks and expenses.

"Moreover, the international status of a project is practical and insurmountable protection from the Finance Ministry’s regular attempts to sequester space programs," the expert said.

In his opinion, considering the Western sanctions imposed on Russia, new potential partners should include, in the first place, BRICS countries and also, possibly, Indonesia, the UAE, Vietnam, Iran and others.

"In this context, the agreements for the period until 2022 between Russia and China, which has both the competences and the resources and the vast internal market, are a move in the right direction but, considering the scope and the severity of the problems and tasks faced by our space industry, a move that displays little initiative, is too cautious, insufficiently large in scope and extremely slow," the expert said.

Glavkosmos

The space launch operator Glavkosmos was established in 1985 in the USSR Ministry of General Machine-Building. The company engaged in the space rocket industry’s foreign economic activity, organized and held researches and participated in the work to convert defense enterprises to civil output.

Today Glavkosmos participates in the implementation of contracts for the launch of Soyuz rockets from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, organizes foreigners’ flights to the International Space Station and cooperates with India and China in the space sphere.

The Russian government wholly owns Glavkosmos.

It was reported earlier that Glavkosmos got the status of an authorized operator of Soyuz-2 carrier rocket commercial launches from Russian cosmodromes.

Apart from this, Glavkosmos has received the exclusive rights to distribute images received from Russia’s Kanopus-V and Resurs-P Earth’s remote sensing satellites on foreign markets.

In 2017-2018, Glavkosmos plans to act as the operator of the launches of over 100 commercial micro-satellites as an additional load while orbiting three satellites under Russia’s federal program. Of this number, 72 satellites were launched from the Baikonur spaceport on July 14. Another 40 satellites are planned to be launched from the Vostochny space center in the Russian Far East at the end of the year.

Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos announced in May that Glavkosmos and Kosmotras had set up a joint operator for the launch of spacecraft by Soyuz-2 and Dnepr carrier rockets from the Russian spaceports. The new operator was named Glavkosmos Launch Services (GK Launch Services). Glavkosmos holds 75% and Kosmotras 25% in the new operator.


More:
http://tass.com/science/958923

haahah ,so nothing about putting man on he moon in 2020s, moon exploration ,ambitious plans , russia has taken a 3rd place and it will fall even more behind as global rocket development accelerates... probably they will NEVER put man on the moon all that talk just empty rhetoric .
plan for sunkar/ soyuz-5 is too ambitious it wont be complete for much longer,  and manning that rocket so fast  would be suicidal omg they are really risking it like in 60s.
and angara is left in the dust after sooo much time and money wasted- 0 launches in 2017 like i predicted -0 satelites so far after 20 years, for all that money nothing to show, what a fiasco.
http://russianspaceweb.com/soyuz5-lv-ptk.html

Rmf wrote:haahah ,so nothing about putting man on he moon in 2020s, moon exploration ,ambitious plans , russia has taken a 3rd place and it will fall even more behind as global rocket development accelerates... probably they will NEVER put man on the moon all that talk just empty rhetoric .
plan for sunkar/ soyuz-5 is too ambitious it wont be complete for much longer,  and manning that rocket so fast  would be suicidal omg they are really risking it like in 60s.
and angara is left in the dust after sooo much time and money wasted- 0 launches in 2017 like i predicted -0 satelites so far after 20 years, for all that money nothing to show, what a fiasco.
http://russianspaceweb.com/soyuz5-lv-ptk.html

Trolling again? Why the fuck do you bother posting here? Is it your sole intention to piss people off with your infantile banter? if so, mission accomplished, GWB style....

C'mon RDF, ban this Rmf troll and put us all out of his misery...

Expects to be taken seriously...

Posts link to Zak's website...

0 satellites? Wtf? There was a recent launch from Soyuz 2

I clicked on Zak's link to see if he has fanart of Soyuz-5 (he does, only selling point he has) and I looked over text.

He does not say anything about any failures of space program. He is actually concise and on point here.

And yet Rmf managed to get some disaster scenario out of it somehow.

When even Zak cannot talk out of his ass then you know things are on schedule.

miketheterrible wrote:0 satellites? Wtf? There was a recent launch from Soyuz 2

The clown means zero satellites from Angara... he still flogs his pet whinge that there have been no Angara launches since the hand-assembled prototypes were tested back in 2014, even though we all know the hold-up is due to delays in serial manufacture in Omsk and QA issues affecting the certification of the brand new facility, personnel and procedures. The attention-seeker waves what he perceives to a bloody shirt over his head while chanting "I was right".... "i was right"... FFS this guy gets up my nose with his idiot BS...

Big_Gazza wrote:
The clown means zero satellites from Angara...  he still flogs his pet whinge that there have been no Angara launches since the hand-assembled prototypes were tested back in 2014, even though we all know the hold-up is due to delays in serial manufacture in Omsk and QA issues affecting the certification of the brand new facility, personnel and procedures.  The attention-seeker waves what he perceives to a bloody shirt over his head while chanting "I was right"....  "i was right"...  FFS this guy gets up my nose with his idiot BS...

He is in competition with Vann7 xD

the whining and typical insults are hillarious ,  many russophiles are on intensive care it seems , but that only speaks about people throwing them, wonder noone has been warned at least for this shitty behavior  ,i posted many times here  --angara has stolen precious money from other perspective projects and wasted time -resource you can never recover.
angara has no 3 and, 7 version ,and now not even man rated version. its a fiasco.!
simple addition of hydrogen second stage to proton- would boost its payload to 30 tons. much easier and less expensive.

now same thing repeats with sunkar it will be delayed many people here will be dead before it flies. it will be expensive. and puting man on top of that thing to replace soyuz lLOL
they didnt put man on zenit  , but they will on its derivative -and with again modified engine with even more thrust and thus less technical margin . !!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zenit_launches

T-47 wrote:

Big_Gazza wrote:
The clown means zero satellites from Angara...  he still flogs his pet whinge that there have been no Angara launches since the hand-assembled prototypes were tested back in 2014, even though we all know the hold-up is due to delays in serial manufacture in Omsk and QA issues affecting the certification of the brand new facility, personnel and procedures.  The attention-seeker waves what he perceives to a bloody shirt over his head while chanting "I was right"....  "i was right"...  FFS this guy gets up my nose with his idiot BS...

He is in competition with Vann7 xD

They need to get a room and get it out of their systems...

Rmf wrote:the whining and typical insults are hillarious ,  many russophiles are on intensive care it seems , but that only speaks about people throwing them, wonder noone has been warned at least for this shitty behavior  ,i posted many times here  --angara has stolen precious money from other perspective projects and wasted time -resource you can never recover.
angara has no 3 and, 7 version ,and now not even man rated version. its a fiasco.!
simple addition of hydrogen second stage to proton- would boost its payload to 30 tons. much easier and less expensive.

now same thing repeats with sunkar it will be delayed many people here will be dead before it flies. it will be expensive. and puting man on top of that thing to replace soyuz lLOL
they didnt put man on zenit  , but they will on its derivative -and with again modified engine with even more thrust and thus less technical margin . !!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zenit_launches

So much childish idiocy, so little desire to respond...

"wasted time -resource you can never recover." rmf posts are a salient reminder of this fact...

Big_Gazza wrote:

T-47 wrote:........
He is in competition with Vann7 xD

They need to get a room and get it out of their systems...

Rmf is a moron who thinks that Soyuz and  Soyuz-5 are same thing because they contain same word like he just said yet again.

He can't comprehend that completely different rocket is given familiar name due to brand recognition.

If you ask him he will probably tell you that Ford Ka can pull the same type of trailer as Ford F-350 just because it contains word Ford in it's name.

And he says that RD-170 engine, same one that was used on Energia/Buran project, can't be used for simple capsule. 



Ordinarily I would be more polite but I asked him once since he whines 24/7 what would he do differently if he were in charge of space program? What would he change? 

You know what his answer was? He had none. Nothing. He just talks out of his ass.

Earlier he would quote Zak's whining verbatim so he sounded logical on first reading but now since Zak has choked on his own dick and had to stop whining because he has no grounds for it anymore poor Rmf is forced to use his own intellect when coming up with bullshit to whine about.

As you can see results​ are predictably anticlimactic.

PapaDragon wrote:Zak has choked on his own dick...

Thanks man, that brought me an evil chuckle at the end of a long workday....

kvs wrote:Russia is damned if does and damned if it doesn't.    The accusers, however, are the real losers.

The Angara framework looked like the only one on the horizon several years ago.   But now we have the Sunkar replacement
for Zenit that will serve as a new modular framework.   Recall that Zenit was a major satellite launch workhorse (e.g. Sea Launch).  
It look to me like there is a lull because plans and priorities are being reassigned.   This why the Proton has not been retired yet
as well.

Ostapenko called it stupid dead end rocket long ago, he was dismissed as head of roscosmos,clans, interests, rivalries, still rock hard in Russian rocket industry.... yet we should listen to this simple maggots noobs here that dont have a clue ,  ha ha ha this ban function is great!
i told you long ago they needed heavier 4 engined urm and here it is very fast-modified zenit.
kbxa had methane engine in works for longer then musk ,but it didnt have funds , so they develop and tested smaller version.
even if nk-33 cant be restarted (some say otherwise) , sure they could built new methane engine single chamber of 1.500-1700 kN thrust, and a light single engine and heavy 4 engine URM around it. that way you can have trully massive production of engines , yet again they still make mistakes with this rd-171 avcdef modification of modification....instead of 1 type of engine for all. with heavy /light urm split and modular approach you can replace all rockets , something angara could never have done on its own.
angara destroyed enormous potential ...

Amerikans went modular in 90s with titan ,atlas, delta , and they got expencive launchers , why russia followed is beyond me.

Now Musk will take all that sweet money from international market ,and go even faster with his projects, while Russian play catch-up with years behind sucking hard and will fail miserably.

Rmf wrote:
Ostapenko called it stupid dead end rocket long ago.....

....instead of 1 type of engine for all. with heavy /light urm split and modular approach you can replace all rockets , something angara could never have done on its own.
angara destroyed enormous potential ...

Amerikans went modular in 90s with titan ,atlas, delta , and they got expencive launchers , why russia followed is beyond me.

Now Musk will take all that sweet money from international market ,and go even faster with his projects, while Russian play catch-up with years behind sucking hard and will fail miserably.

1) You are talking about same Ostapenko on whose watch Roskosmos  degenerated into shittier and infinitely less competent version of FedEx? Same guy who needed a decade to get construction of spaceport going before being sacked? Same guy who thought that it makes sense to keep pushing for Proton-M and sucking Kazakh dick?

You sure that his issues with Angara had nothing to do with interest in keeping certain primitive Asian "country" in space business? 

2) You do realize that "1 engine type" is approach used both by Angara and Soyuz-5?

3) And finally (and this one will hurt you on a personal level) you do know that Musk is using same modular approach with Falcon series that you just took a dump on right now? Must be hard to find out that you failed your waify? 

Also, thanks for not only putting me on ignore list but also for advertising it in your signature. Being on your ignore list is a badge of honor on this forum. Always love to get extra cred for free....

PapaDragon wrote:
Also, thanks for not only putting me on ignore list but also for advertising it in your signature. Being on your ignore list is a badge of honor on this forum. Always love to get extra cred for free....

Agreed. Its a badge of honour, a bit like being a Russian politician and being targeted by Uh'murikkkan or Euro-peon sanctions over Crimea....

MOSCOW, August 14. /TASS/. The launch of the Russian-German observatory-class mission Spektr-RG (Spectrum-XG, SXG) has been shifted from September to October 2018.

More:
http://tass.com/science/960258

Main Builder for 2nd Phase of Vostochny Cosmodrome to Be Named by September 16

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201708161056498197-vostochny-cosmodrome-builder/



Soyuz-2 Rocket to Arrive at Vostochny on September 20 for November Launch

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201708161056498746-soyuz-2-rocket-launch/



3rd Launch From Vostochny Cosmodrome Set for December

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201708161056497853-vostochny-cosmodrome-launch-december/



Equipment for Angara Heavy-Class Rocket Arrived to Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201708161056498268-russia-vostochny-cosmodrome-angara/

Probably referring to Angara equipment that is to be installed in assembly building

Proton successfully launches Blagovest military communications satellite.

A high-power Russian satellite designed to deliver broadband Internet connections and relay television and videoconferencing signals fired into orbit Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Destined to serve the Russian military and civilian customers, the first Blagovest communications satellite rode a Proton rocket into space at 2207 GMT (6:07 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, according to a statement released by ISS Reshetnev, the spacecraft’s manufacturer.

Liftoff occurred at 4:07 a.m. local time Thursday at Baikonur, a sprawling spaceport leased by the Russian government from Kazakhstan.

The three-stage Proton booster deployed a Breeze M upper stage shortly after liftoff to conduct multiple engine firings aimed at guiding the Blagovest No. 11L spacecraft into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit. After separation from the Breeze M stage several hours into the mission, the satellite’s own engine will circularize its orbit over the equator at an altitude of nearly 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers).

“Nine minutes into the flight the fairing enclosing the Breeze M upper stage and the Blagovest satellite successfully separated from the launch vehicle,” ISS Reshetnev said in a statement. “Now the satellite with the help of the upper stage is continuing its journey to the intended orbit.”

At that altitude, the Blagovest satellite will remain fixed over the equator at 45 degrees east longitude, staying in view of the same part of Earth and orbiting the planet at the same rate it rotates.

Designed for a 15-year mission, the Blagovest No. 11L satellite was built for the Russian military by ISS Reshetnev, a Russian aerospace contractor based in Zheleznogorsk, Russia. It is based on ISS Reshetnev’s Express 2000 satellite bus.

“Blagovest is the first satellite that has a payload fully designed and manufactured by ISS Reshetnev,” the company said in a statement. “It is intended to provide high speed Internet access, communications services, television and radio broadcasting, telephony and videoconferencing.”

The relay spacecraft will serve Russian military and civilian users with a suite of C-band and Ka-band transponders.

While ISS Reshetnev claimed the Blagovest communications payload was fully manufactured internally, information released by Thales Alenia Space indicates the French company supplied filters, power dividers and multiplexers for Blagovest’s telecom instrumentation.

Three more Blagovest communications satellites are planned for launch in the next couple of years.

Russia’s Proton rocket program, managed by the Russian company Khrunichev, has two more launches on the books next month. The quicker launch pace comes after a year-long standdown from June 2016 through June 2017 to resolve engine quality concerns.

While the mission with the Blagovest No. 11L satellite was part of Russia’s federal space program, the two Proton flights next month will be commercially managed by International Launch Services, a Virginia-based company responsible for selling Proton launches on the global market.

The Amazonas 5 communications satellite, owned by Madrid-based Hispasat, is already at the Baikonur Cosmodrome being readied for liftoff as soon as Sept. 9 on a Proton/Breeze M.

The AsiaSat 9 telecom craft is scheduled to blast Sept. 28 on a Proton/Breeze M.



https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/08/17/proton-launcher-takes-off-with-dual-use-russian-communications-satellite/

Russian Military Likely to Give Up Using Baikonur Spaceport Soon

https://sputniknews.com/politics/201708171056552693-russia-military-baikonur/


Sputnik clowns still don't know that Angara is medium class rocket...

PapaDragon wrote: Sputnik clowns still don't know that Angara is medium class rocket...

To be fair, there are no launchers currently operational with payloads much over 25T... so from that POV, Angara is a heavy class....

(Delta IV Heavy tops the listings at 28.8T to LEO)

Big_Gazza wrote:

At 01:07 MSK on August 17, 2017 (22:06 on August 16, 2017 UTC) the Space and Air Defense Forces conducted a successful launch of a Proton-M launcher from Baykonur. The satellite was successfully delivered into orbit by the Briz-M booster stage. After that it received the official designation Cosmos-2520.

Cosmos-2520 is apparently the "heavy communication satellite" also known as Blagovest. It is the first in a series of at least four satellites of this type that are produced at the Reshetnev ISS enterprise in Zheleznogorsk.

http://russianforces.org/blog/2017/08/successful_launch_of_cosmos-25_1.shtml

Blagovest is a series of four planned communications satellites for russian domestic services.
While the spacecraft itself is built by russian ISS Reshetnev based on the Ekspress-2000 bus, the communication payloads will built by Thales Alenia Space.
The first satellite, Kosmos 2520, was launched on a Proton-M Briz-M (Ph.4) rocket from Baikonur in August 2017.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/blagovest-1.htm