Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #2

Big_Gazza wrote:Good news, its reported that comms has been restored with Angosat-1  

http://tass.ru/kosmos/4850396

Specialists managed to establish a connection with the Angolan satellite "Angosat", which was launched on December 26 from the Baikonur cosmodrome, telemetry was received from the apparatus. This was reported on Thursday by a TASS source in the rocket and space industry.

"Specialists managed to restore communication with the satellite" Angosat ", telemetry was received from the apparatus," the source said.

TASS has no official confirmation of the information.

Fingers crossed...  

ZoA wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:

Reading about these fuckups is becoming physically exhausting, like watching your favorite SF TV show becoming a soap-opera as a result of incompetent writers...

Is that STD reference?

Big_Gazza wrote:communications could had initially been disrupted due to draining of the spacecraft's batteries, but, fortunately, Angosat-1 had already deployed its solar panels, which allowed to restore the power supply. Obviously, such a scenario provides no explanation how the spacecraft ended up with drained batteries and why such an obvious problem could not be avoided.

...."Prepared in order to impose a reprimand: the Executive Director of the Russian space Agency for launch vehicles and operation of ground space infrastructure Andrew Mazurina, Director of the Department to ensure the quality and reliability of the Russian space Agency Viktor Capolino, Director General of FSUE "TsNIIMash" Oleg Gorshkov", - said the state Corporation.
Reprimands will be given to the Director General of the RCC "Progress" (developer of the rocket "Soyuz-2") Alexander Kirilin, the head of NPO imeni S. A. Lavochkina (the developer of the upper stage "Fregat") Sergey Lemeshevsky, CEO of SPC Automation and instrument making of a name of N. A. Pilyugina (developer of the control system) Efim Mezhirich and the head of the Corporation "VNIIEM" (the manufacturer of the satellite "meteor"), Leonid Makridenko..........

....Russian space agency Roscosmos was baffled as to why they lost contact with the satellite after it was launched from the agency’s new Vostochny cosmodrome. Gizmodo reports that the answer ended up being the ultimate embarrassment when it was finally broadcast by Russian deputy prime minister Dimitry Rogozin from the Rossiya 24 state TV channel: Someone screwed up the coordinates.

What this means is that even though the rocket was ready to blast into space from its shiny new launchpad in the Far East, it was actually programmed with the coordinates to take off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where Russia’s rockets had previously been launching from. When you plug in coordinates for a hulking piece of metal loaded with explosive fuel to launch from a different location than the one it’s actually in, you’re going to have issues. You’re also going to have heavy financial casualties.....

Big_Gazza wrote:Are you bipolar?.... I mean WTF gives? You write sensible posts then puke out this schadenfreude on steroids?...

Big_Gazza wrote:....commercial launches are still worth pursuing, and providing a non-Western launch provider to nations that have long suffered the antagonism of the collective West (eg Angola, Venezuela, Iran) is valuable for making friends and influencing people.

Every commercial launch that Roskosmos can land is one less contract for the likes of Musk, ULA and Arianespace, and from that point of view every goal is to be celebrated.

Cyberspec wrote:
I think he means well just gets a bit excited...

Well at risk of upsetting Papa again.... they're aimimg for 99% efficiency rate by 2025...

Back in April, the supervisory board of state corporation adopted a comprehensive program to improve the quality of the company as a whole. The main goal of the program is to bring the share of trouble-free launch vehicles in 2025 to 99%, the extension of working spacecraft and increase their warranty terms by 25-30%.

https://finobzor.ru/53222-roskosmos-opravdanno-dorogaya-neobhodimost.html?utm_source=topwar.ru&utm_campaign=auction&utm_medium=main_page

Big_Gazza wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:

Big_Gazza wrote:....commercial launches are still worth pursuing, and providing a non-Western launch provider to nations that have long suffered the antagonism of the collective West (eg Angola, Venezuela, Iran) is valuable for making friends and influencing people.

Every commercial launch that Roskosmos can land is one less contract for the likes of Musk, ULA and Arianespace, and from that point of view every goal is to be celebrated.

Private Russian launch companies with access to Roskosmos equipment could provide all those countries with much better service, generate more profits and tech development and would free up Roskosmos to pursue scientific and manned projects.

They would also trim away even more contracts from Musk & Co if that turns out to be one of the goals.

My preference would be to split away those personnel in Roskosmos responsible for commercial launches into a public business unit.  Run them as an independent business with a genuine operating culture, and use the profit they generate to subsidize government/public space operations.  Allowing private operators to fill the role will simply result in earnings being lost to private pockets and produce little to no benefit for the Russian space program.
..........................

Russia has conceded that a high-profile space failure in November last year occurred because scientists programmed a rocket carrying a US$45 million weather satellite with the wrong coordinates.

In comments to Russian state TV last week, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin admitted the Meteor-M weather satellite was effectively under the impression it had launched from a site in Kazakhstan, when it had in fact taken off from Russia's far east.

"The rocket was really programmed as if it was taking off from Baikonur," Rogozin said. "They didn't get the coordinates right."

The Baikonur Cosmodrome – located in southern Kazakhstan – is a colossal spaceport that figures heavily in the history of Soviet space exploration, going back to its founding in the 1950s.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has leased the facility from Kazakhstan for rocket launches – but Baikonur isn't the only cosmodrome in town.

A much newer US$7.5 billion spaceport called the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast in south-east Russia has been under construction since 2011 – and was the actual location of the Meteor-M 2–1's launch atop a Soyuz–2 booster rocket on November 28 (being only the second launch for the Vostochny site).

The launch initially proceeded without a hitch – also carrying 18 smaller research and commercial satellites into orbit for the US, Japan, Canada, and Germany, among others – but when the Meteor-M weather satellite was deployed from the rocket, scientists became aware something was terribly wrong.

"The first scheduled communication session has failed to establish contact with the satellite due to its absence from the designated orbit," a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos said at the time.

"Analysis of the current situation is underway."

While Russian media initially suspected the problem was somehow due to a failure of the booster's final stage – the Fregat – Roscosmos launched its own investigation.

What they found was something altogether more glaring and avoidable: human error.

In somewhat different language to how Rogozin explains the failure, an official Roscosmos statement on the catastrophe attributes the satellite loss to the "imperfection of the software algorithms of the control system" on the Fregat. [HORSESHIT EXCUSE BY ROSKOSMOS!!! ]

In other words, the scientists who were meant to oversee the rocket's launch instructions weren't thorough enough, Roscosmos says.

"All this in aggregate contributed to the fact that the factors, the combination of which led to an abnormal completion of the mission, remained undetected in preparation for launch," the emergency commission concludes.

"For improper performance by the leaders of the duties assigned to them, the commission recommended that disciplinary sanctions be imposed on them in the form of reprimands."

It's not a very promising start to Russia's pricey, new Vostochny spaceport, and comes after Roscosmos had its budget slashed by more than a third following an internal audit that condemned the space agency for wasting nearly US$2 billion, "with such a level of moral decay, one should not be surprised at the high accident rate".

It also means scientists are going to miss out on what the Meteor-M 1–2 was intended to deliver: a five-year mission gathering satellite imagery and environmental data for the Russian weather agency, Roshydromet.

Hopefully Russia's space program can bounce back from this embarrassing calamity, and quickly – after all, we have some pretty high expectations for what they're going to achieve.

Big_Gazza wrote:

PapaDragon wrote:And Roskosmos is officially forced to swallow it's own shit, part in brackets is by me:

$45M Russian Satellite Lost After Scientists Admit They Gave It The Wrong Coordinates

http://www.sciencealert.com/45m-russian-satellite-lost-after-scientists-admit-they-gave-it-the-wrong-coordinates-roscosmos-meteor

OOI, whose responsibility was it to ensure the Fregat U/S was properly configured?  Lavochkin as manufacturer, or Roskosmos?  My understanding is that Roskosmos acts as the contracting authority and doesn't perform the technical verification function.  That suggests it is the responsibility of manufacturers to ensure that their equipment operates correctly?

I'm really getting sick of human error fucking up Russian space missions. I'm generally not in favour of Stalin-style management techniques, but its times like this when I like to entertain myself with ideas of Gulag version 2.0.  maybe a year of breaking rocks in -20C will help to... sharpen... peoples thought processes...  

I would not be surprised if some of these managers run off to the USA and we will get Papa Dragon's favourite wank fest fantasy fiction tales of gross incompetence in Russia's commercial satellite launch industry. 

kvs wrote:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-zuma-satellite-possible-failure/

Americans are competent, Russians are incompetent.

LOL.