Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #3

thegopnik wrote:Its like another Tesla and Edison story the scientist that focuses more on scientific progress over business will always have the better designs. The future after liquid or solid fuel rockets might soon rest on nuclear propulsion and I have my doubts that he has any expertise on a completely different field of science, nor have I heard any news of him safely launching astronauts or humans into orbit.

miketheterrible wrote:

Big_Gazza wrote:Musks fake projects like HyperLoop and StarShip are beyond a joke.  These are nothing but vanity projects designed to stroke his ego, and it makes me cringe to read so many fucking idiots singing his praises. It's a little depressing that the cattle are just so stupid.

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The kicker is that if these were state ran projects people would be trashing it. But since it's media friendly Musk, apparently they praise it.

Big_Gazza wrote:

kvs wrote:
Space X now charges $84.9 million for a Falcon 9 launch and $127.2 million for a Falcon Heavy launch.
Falcon 9 has an LEO payload of 22.8 tons.   The Proton-M has a payload of 22 tons and cost around
$60 million per launch.  The Angara equivalent of Proton-M is not supposed to cost more since it is
a modular design to save costs.

 

F9 only has a 22.8T payload to LEO if they don't recover the 1st stage.  You only get that performance if you burn your stages to completion rather than leaving a significant amount of fuel in the tank to perform your powered return flight. F9H is the same deal.  To recover stages you need to hamstring the vehicle with very significant performance losses.

In reality, the actual cost of Proton or A-5M is not relevant as the barrier preventing them gaining more market share is political, not technical or financial. If Russia makes a big effort to improve its market share then the US will simply sanction them under bullshit false pretenses and embargo Russian launch services for US payloads, or any payload that includes US-origin components.  They did this with Chinese launch services in the 90s and murdered their fledging international commercial space industry while it was still sucking its thumb in the crib. Murican nationalist idiots are salivating at the idea of dong the same to Russia (again), and once US domestic manned launch capability is restored (ie Russia loses a potential pressure point), what is going to stop them returning to their old ways and being complete cunts like the CW days?

GarryB wrote:The one redeeming factor of a space craft using rockets to land itself is that such a capability could be used on the moon where parachutes and wings wont make any difference... of course if you are going all the way to Mars or Venus then being able to descend with wings means gradual decelleration without needing to carry enormous amounts of rocket fuel and the potential to end up on the planet surface with a largely intact rocket you could then refuel with water (H2 and O2) and launch again found in situ...

Big_Gazza wrote:

kvs wrote:A real solution that saves fuel and is vastly more reliable is the the Baikal land like the shuttle approach.    So first stage boosters and core return to the surface via controlled glide descent like the Buran and the Shuttle.  

Despite the nonsense from SpaceX groupies (who insist a winged glide-back isn't "scaleable"), the Baikal would be a good option for 1st stage strap-ons that are ignited at the pad and whose job is simply to burn fast and hard and get the rest of the vehicle up out of the dense lower atmosphere.  Weight isn't really that critical and they don't need to be mass-efficient as the core and upper stages do.  Shuttle SRBs were heavy as @#^% with all that mass-inefficient solid fuel, but it didn't matter. Likewise, for the Baikal, the added weight of wings, guidance vanes and return engine won't really matter.