Russian Space Program: News & Discussion #3

kvs wrote:

limb wrote:

kvs wrote:People need to try harder when pimping wonder "tech".   If someone is going to waste resources lofting rocket fuel to 60 km,
assuming a reusable first stage, then may as well use the fuel to propel jet engines on the way down.    By contrast a
glider does not need to waste payload to loft fuel for the return trip.    The US Space Shuttle was a glider and I don't
recall people bitching about it being inferior and should be replaced by some vertical lander.

All this vertical landing BS showed up thanks to Elon Musk the shyster.   Now you know why snake oil was so popular back
in the day.   A shyster can sell the fantasy delusion and basically create a cult following.

Nodoby bitches about the space shuttle? have you not seen the space tech channels like Scott Manley shitting on it for years for being an example of "government innefficiency" and touting "the free market", tech startups and ofc elon chungus as the solution against inferior state controlled NASA products.

You are making a non sequitur observation and for now I will pretend you are not a troll.
I am clearly talking about the functionality of the Space Shuttle and not its price tag.   Show
me any example of bitching about the Space Shuttle where its functionality is attacked and
people pimp vertical landing as a superior alternative.

Why are you attacking me? How is it trolling to tell you that the space shuttle is actually hated by westerners for being too expensive. Regarding its gliding, I admit that I haven't seen people criticising it, but criticizing it on a much more idiotic level in terms of it being government owned, and therefore inneficient, and also comparing the price per kilo for the shuttle vs the falcon 9. I see people constantly shitting on NASA in elon fanboy space youtubers videos.

I personally wish we could really know if the price per kilo of payload to orbit given by spacex for its rockets is actually true, which I personally think it isn't due to no production of scale, although elon fanboys always say its the magic of free market competition bringing the cost down. Spacex also advertises that it uses a lot of cost cutting measures, which alays remain unspecified.

limb wrote:Spacex also advertises that it uses a lot of cost cutting measures, which alays remain unspecified.

Why would anyone ever draw attention to that in a field where high quality is a basic requirement in order for the damned thing to not blow up.

What?  How does the shuttle return to the ground.  It does not land vertically or parachute.   So it is a true glider.   I think you are talking
about a HOTOL type space plane.   That is not what is being discussed.

Sorry, I am being technical... there is a difference between a glider and gliding.

(Edit: No, I am being a bit of a prick... )

Any powered aircraft can glide... just shut down the engine.

A glider however generally does not have the weight of an engine and so as a platform to glide it is much more efficient than an aircraft that does have an engine installed.

Conceptually the US space shuttle is a powered aircraft that requires an enormous external fuel tank to get into orbit which means the engines it uses are not powerful enough to even get it airborne so two solid rocket boosters... JATO or RATO depending on your religion... are needed to get the whole aircraft into the air and moving.

In comparison the Buran is a glider and has no big heavy engines.... it is a glider that sits on an enormous rocket that takes it up in to space.

It is essentially a real glider that it towed up into the air (and beyond) and then returns to the ground without having an engine inside it.

Yes, I know... Mr Picky... but I think the distinction is important.

I also think even as bad as the Shuttles design is it proved much safer than this design from Elon.

But the Energiya-Buran trashed its main engines when the Shuttle actually reused them for the life of the vehicle.  

The cost of the Energiya was much less than the launch of the US Space shuttle.... the cost of refurbishing the engines of the Space Shuttle was enormous and time consuming.

Equally the Energiya was more flexible... they strapped a Buran on its back to launch it into orbit but if they wanted to they could strap any item they wanted to launch into space up to about 130 tons or so... which would have been vastly more useful for building a space station than the Shuttle that could carry up 10 tons at a time.

Again the discussion is about vertical landings and the Shuttle was never attacked for not landing vertically.   In fact, I do not
recall any discussion of vertical landing during the 1980s, 90s and even the 2000s.   Musk made this BS popular.   And his
lemmings flood internet fora spreading his Gospel.

It is simply not very efficient in terms of energy.

It is very much like the hit to kill myth for interception, or exo atmospheric interception... they might be nice to have features but make everything much much harder for no immediately obvious advantages most of the time.

You guys seem kinda critical towards SpaceX, which I dont understand very well.
I dont care about Musk, what I do see however is that since SpaceX joined the game all the players, Russia included started moving again. Before them no business was touching space as it was deemed risky and not profitable. Today we have plenty of companies with pockets full of cash investing in space exploration, space technology, space mining and eventually human colonies on other planets. Which I think is great.

China too, has made great advancement in this field. I am really excited to see what else they have planned for the following year. Actually I would love to see a joint Russian-Chineese space agency or even better, a planetary one, but I guess we as species are just too far yeat from such utopia.

Nomad5891 wrote:You guys seem kinda critical towards SpaceX, which I dont understand very well.
I dont care about Musk, what I do see however is that since SpaceX joined the game all the players, Russia included started moving again. Before them no business was touching space as it was deemed risky and not profitable. Today we have plenty of companies with pockets full of cash investing in space exploration, space technology, space mining and eventually human colonies on other planets. Which I think is great.

China too, has made great advancement in this field. I am really excited to see what else they have planned for the following year. Actually I would love to see a joint Russian-Chineese space agency or even better, a planetary one, but I guess we as species are just too far yeat from such utopia.

Before them no business was touching space as it was deemed risky and not profitable.
...with the exception of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, Gazprom Space Systems, and a few dozen other examples that existed long before SpaceX.

Today we have plenty of companies with pockets full of cash investing in space exploration, space technology, space mining and eventually human colonies on other planets.
The problem is that we heard something like this about 50 years ago. Since then, nothing fundamentally new has been achieved in space exploration. You make such conclusions based on a couple of commercials and completely ignoring physics, technology and economics.

Nomad5891 wrote:You guys seem kinda critical towards SpaceX, which I dont understand very well.
I dont care about Musk, what I do see however is that since SpaceX joined the game all the players, Russia included started moving again. Before them no business was touching space as it was deemed risky and not profitable. Today we have plenty of companies with pockets full of cash investing in space exploration, space technology, space mining and eventually human colonies on other planets. Which I think is great.

China too, has made great advancement in this field. I am really excited to see what else they have planned for the following year. Actually I would love to see a joint Russian-Chineese space agency or even better, a planetary one, but I guess we as species are just too far yeat from such utopia.

The hoopla about "private space" is mostly a load of ideological virtue signalling. Western aerospace has always been privately owned. Profitable space activities such as telecommunications and remote resource sensing satellites have always been privately owned. Rocket manufacturing has always been privately owned. Private enterprise engages in these activities because profits can be made, and nothing has changed in this regard.

Conversely, basic science and manned space activities has always been government funded because there is no profit to be generated. You can't make money from landing probes on Mars or orbiting Saturn, and putting humans into space is a massive money sink that generates zero practical revenue (teflon and velcro don't even begin to repay the sums expended since the dawn of the Space Age...). Again, nothing has changed in this regard.

SpaceX has not created a private space economy. They have simply pushed aside established players in a bid to grab a big share of the pre-existing launch market, and they have been helped along the way by technology handovers and huge subsidies from the US gov, cunningly hidden within no-bid contracts at greatly inflated prices to provide SpaceX with its development capital at the taxpayers expense (but without the taxpayer getting any equity).

There is no private space economy when it comes to human flight. It is 100% driven by government spending. If the US gov closes off the funding spigot then SpaceX manned activities will simply stop. Private business won't spend money on useless endeavours that don't generate profit.

This is the bottom line and it isn't about to change. Space is big and empty for the most part, and what resources it does have requires such massive expenditures of earthly resources for small returns that it just isn't profitable. There is nothing in Space that is so valuable and in such demand that profits can be made. Space mining is a bust, nothing but fanciful romanticism - who is gonna try to mine asteroids when the market cost of minerals is a pittance compared to the enormous cost of recovery. Even if asteroids existed made of solid gold (they don't...) it makes no difference to profitability. NASA will spend ~$800M to recover a paultry 1 kg of material from asteroid Bennu. A 1kg gold nugget will net a grand total of < $60k at todays spot price....

Don't get me started on the Musk groupies and their infantile yabberings how "StarShip" will transport 70 people to Mars to start "a new world"....

Fusion reactors are probably a very distant future. For this, the D + T reaction requires the production of tritium from lithium. Lithium is a very valuable element for batteries, among others. And his resources are not that much. I think it would be much better to develop traditional claim-based nuclear power. Modern fast reactors can replicate fuel from U-238 or Tor 232. These are incredibly huge resources. In addition, they can "burn" a large proportion of nuclear waste. Discharge-based reactors can range from very small, compact to large. Thermonuclear only possibly large dimensions. The yield of the synthesis reaction alone is only about 4 times greater than fission reactions.

Arrow wrote:Fusion reactors are probably a very distant future. For this, the D + T reaction requires the production of tritium from lithium. Lithium is a very valuable element for batteries, among others. And his resources are not that much. I think it would be much better to develop traditional claim-based nuclear power. Modern fast reactors can replicate fuel from U-238 or Tor 232. These are incredibly huge resources. In addition, they can "burn" a large proportion of nuclear waste. Discharge-based reactors can range from very small, compact to large. Thermonuclear only possibly large dimensions. The yield of the synthesis reaction alone is only about 4 times greater than fission reactions.

I believe Helium-3 was also proposed for fusion somehow

Which is similarly a rare isotope we don't have much of on Earth. There is apparently more of it on the Moon, but even there it's not overflowing with the stuff.

Fusion in any case is a far-off technology, not very distant future but I'd say 100 years until it's viable

Proposals for lunar mining of He3 are pure fantasy. I've read estimates that the moon might have ~1.1 million tons of He3 spread throughout the upper 2 meters or so of the lunar regolith, and that only 25T would be required to power the US for 1 year. Lets for the sake of argument accept that number.

The moons surface area is 3.793 ×10^7 km2, or 38 million sq kms. That means there is on average about 0.029T (29kgs) of He3 per sq/km. Now accept that the He3 is deposited in the upper 2 meters of the regolith (a reasonable assumption as the source is from the solar wind and inactive He3 atoms (its a noble gas) won't chemically combine with the crust but would be expected to diffuse). This means that this 29kgs is spread throughout a volume of 2 million m3. The concentration of He3 in the lunar regolith is therefore only 14.5mg per m3, or on a mass basis, equal to 9.7mg per tonne (based on regolith having an average density of 1.5 g/cm3).

Based on this low concentration, how much regolith must one process per annum to extract this 25T? If we accept an extraction efficiency of 50% (generous in my view) we would need 3,448 million m3, or a patch of ground 41.5 km square and 2m deep with a total mass of ~5,172 million tonnes.

Lets put this number in perspective. Australia is currently the world leader in iron ore exports and in 2019-2020 dispatched some 800 million tonnes of ore. We are talking about digging up a quantity of lunar regolith some 6.4x larger than Australias iron exports, then extracting a minute quantity of chemically inactive trace gas, before then reburying the now-useless mountain of tailings...

Does anyone really think that it is even remotely feasible to do this on a remote airless waterless desolate moon (ie an environment utterly lethal to humans) that is bathed in hard radiation and covered in a layer of powered material that is best characterised as microscopic razor-sharp flakes and needles of shattered rock? Just ridiculous - we couldn't do this on Earth, let alone on the moon. Now, consider how the fuck are we supposed to extract a paulty 9.7mg of trace gas from a tonne of dust and rock???

Furthermore, consider that lunar regolith particles are on average ~ 10micron in size. This is equal to ultra-fine abrasives such as Emery 4/0 grade typically used for making jewelery. This stuff gets electrostatically charged by solar action and sticks to everything like glue. Apollo astronauts were literally painted in this shit. It gets into every crack and crevice and I shouldn't have to point out the engineering challenges trying to build mobile machinery to operate over decades in an enviroment composed of ultra-fine abrasive dusts. It is also likely to be lethal to humans - if you think asbestos fibres are harmful to the human respiratory system , wait until we have to deal with the first examples of lunar explorers with lungs chocked full of regolith dust...

Yeah, He3 mining on the Moon is so busted. Even more so that Russiagate and the Golden Golem being Putins personal manservent.

Then what kind of new manned spacecraft trips and tech or planetary colonies can we actually expect in the next 50-70 years?
Regarding asteroids, what about mining iridium or beryllium?
What makes it impossible to use some kind of charge neutralizing tech to prevent regolith sticking to surfaces.? Its hard to imagine that preventing dust sticking is more complex than designing HGVs.

he D + He3 reaction alone is much more difficult to achieve than the D + T reaction. For now, we cannot even control the latter in a controlled manner. D + He3 requires even higher temperatures etc. There is also a D + D reaction but also more difficult to achieve than D + T.

Arrow wrote:he D + He3 reaction alone is much more difficult to achieve than the D + T reaction. For now, we cannot even control the latter in a controlled manner. D + He3 requires even higher temperatures etc. There is also a D + D reaction but also more difficult to achieve than D + T.

Excellent point. He3 will be utterly useless even if we can get our hands on it unless we can develop effective fusion technologies that can generate clean energy in a reliable and cost effective manner.

limb wrote:Then what kind of new manned spacecraft trips and tech or planetary colonies can we actually expect in the next 50-70 years?
Regarding asteroids, what about mining iridium or beryllium?
What makes it impossible to use some kind of charge neutralizing tech to prevent regolith sticking to surfaces.? Its hard to imagine that preventing dust sticking is more complex than designing HGVs.

We need to identify asteroids that have useful concentrations of the valuable materials for which we have great need.  Not sure what that might be however, and i'd suggest that it makes more sense to extract rare materials from oceanic seawater rather than trying to prospect orbiting rocks out past Mars.

IMHO manned space activities will inevitably be driven by the desire to explore (and wave the flag) rather than commercial considerations.

Not sure about how we deal with the dust issue on lunar bases.  Rigorous segregation of dirty materials (such as EVA suits) from habitable spaces is probably the main focus. Suits would ideally be designed to include an integral airlock arrangement allowing the occupant to dock to the station and exit the suit without needing to bring the dirty suit in to the station interior. Something like a Russian Orlan suit with its rear hatch but where it engages with an airlock into the station interior.

The idea of mining asteroids is also Scifi bullshit...

When you see an asteroid field in a movie or even on a TV serious documentary it is wall to wall ball objects jostling and bashing into each other.

If our real asteroid belt was that densely populated with matter there would be more matter in that orbital band than all the material in all the planets combined.

If you really did go out to the asteroid field and landed on the biggest asteroid, you could get out a pair of decent binoculars and you wouldn't see any other asteroid within 20,000km of your position.... that band goes right around the sun... that orbit is enormous and if you scooped up all the material in and around that orbit... 360 degrees all around the sun you would not scrape together as much rock as there is in the smallest ex planet pluto.

Probably not even quarter of its mass... and it will be boring shit too.

The Oort cloud beyond Pluto there are hundreds of Pluto or bigger sized objects... that is why Pluto is not a planet because if it was a planet then there are hundreds of other planets further out bigger than Pluto and kids at school are never going to remember all their names.

The point is that even in the Oort cloud the distances are enormous and while there are much bigger objects there they are even further apart and it is rather too cold to run on solar power there... the sun would be just a really bright star from inside the Oort cloud.

Big_Gazza wrote:
We need to identify asteroids that have useful concentrations of the valuable materials for which we have great need.  Not sure what that might be however, and i'd suggest that it makes more sense to extract rare materials from oceanic seawater rather than trying to prospect orbiting rocks out past Mars.

A small, 10 km asteroid contian more gold, platinium, iridium and so on than the top ten km crust of earth.


Same for metals.

There are asteroids out there that composed from pure, high quality iron-nickel alloy.

16 Psyche is a 220 km diameter iron-nickel piece.

GarryB wrote:

The point is that even in the Oort cloud the distances are enormous and while there are much bigger objects there they are even further apart and it is rather too cold to run on solar power there... the sun would be just a really bright star from inside the Oort cloud.

On the Earth orbit a 20-40 tons solar furnance can generate 1gw of thermal energy, up to several thousands celsius.

Possible to make/do industrial processes on never seen scale, with very light and simple tools.

Example deposition Tungsten onto the internals of a metal sphere ? Not a problem, easy.

Melting million tons of iron and fomring a cylinder from it ?

Easy job with a pure metal asteroid, and with hair thick solar mirror.

Problem is it can't work in high tidal force zone, like in earth /moon orbit. The tidal force tear appart every light structure.

Singular_Transform wrote:There are asteroids out there that composed from pure, high quality iron-nickel alloy.

16 Psyche is a 220 km diameter iron-nickel piece.

Yes, but so what?  I'll repeat my previous position - the cost of recovering asteroidal materials and returning them to Earth for use is astronomically high and the intrinsic value of the recovered materials is far too miniscule to justify the expenditure. My example of NASA spending $800M to recover ~1kg of samples from Bennu is a great illustration of this fact.

Advocates of asteroid mining attempt to counter this by saying that the metals can be used in-situ rather than returning to Earth (or near-earth orbital facilities) but this argument falls flat as they can never adequately explain what off-world activities this is supposed to support, and again, what these activities will produce to justify the stupendous costs.

This is reality, not a computer game like NMS where the player shoots beam weapons at an absurdly condensed debris field and commercial quantities of valuable materals miraculously appear in the ships cargo hold...  

In regards to construction of structures in space, it's easiest just to construct them in outer space

Gather a few asteroids together, start building a scaffolding and production site around them, and use their materials as needed

Then you can simply maneuver the structure to where you want it, avoiding any planet's tidal effects

Big_Gazza wrote:

Singular_Transform wrote:There are asteroids out there that composed from pure, high quality iron-nickel alloy.

16 Psyche is a 220 km diameter iron-nickel piece.

Yes, but so what?  I'll repeat my previous position - the cost of recovering asteroidal materials and returning them to Earth for use is astronomically high and the intrinsic value of the recovered materials is far too miniscule to justify the expenditure. My example of NASA spending $800M to recover ~1kg of samples from Bennu is a great illustration of this fact.

Advocates of asteroid mining attempt to counter this by saying that the metals can be used in-situ rather than returning to Earth (or near-earth orbital facilities) but this argument falls flat as they can never adequately explain what off-world activities this is supposed to support, and again, what these activities will produce to justify the stupendous costs.

This is reality, not a computer game like NMS where the player shoots beam weapons at an absurdly condensed debris field and commercial quantities of valuable materals miraculously appear in the ships cargo hold...  

I think there is an issue regards of magnitudes.


From a single small asteroid magnitudes more gold can be mined than all gold mined during the history of mankind.


Other hand, in the space easy and cheap make materials that extremly expensive to make on earth, in extreme quantities.

Making ships, airplanes, buildings, and just drop them into the atmosphere with heatshield.Example.

Making aircrafts from material that has superior characterstics compared to the most expensive composites.

Hydrogen is the most common material in the universe.

Problem is example the exposed ice will sublimate inside of the moon orbit, due to the sunshine.

Means the water/hydrocarbons rest beyond the sun evaporative reach.