Really Rocket Science

What’s does “the soviet system” mean to you? Not much: it’s just one fuck-up after another.

You’ll recall the billion-dollar project to build a new Cosmodrome in Vostochny, where corruption, poor design and execution have been met with threats from the criminals in the Kremlin. Think they’re back on track?

Think again.

Seems the pride of the Russian space program’s future, the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle will not fit. So much for getting one up from Vostochny by December, bitches. The Moscow Times story from Friday has the details…

The cutting-edge facility was meant be ready for launches of Soyuz-2 rockets in December, but an unidentified space agency official told the TASS news agency late Thursday that the rocket would not fit inside the assembly building where its parts are stacked and tested before launch.

The building “has been designed for a different modification of the Soyuz rocket,” the source said, according to news website Medusa, which picked up the story from TASS.

The quote could not be found on TASS, a state-owned news agency on Friday. TASS’s report instead quoted a spokesperson for the Center for Ground-based Space Infrastructure (TsENKI) – a federal space agency organ tasked the managing with Vostochny cosmodrome.

“Work with the rocket at the integration and testing complex now can not be conducted because the facility is not ready,” the spokesperson said in the report. “There are still imperfections in the construction.”

Good thing Putin has Syria to obscure any bad news coming from within Russia.

In space exploration, global cooperation is the name of the game — it’s the only way to get the best people working together. Keep politics out of it. The International Space Station is the perfect example.

However, with Vladimir “No Truth” Putin running Russia like a tyrant-dictator, it’s become risker. Seeing everyone as an enemy and/or threat to his power, gaining control of access to space is key. Hence his pledging billions of rubles to finish the Vostochny Cosmodrome in record time. Since then, besides rubles losing most of their value, there seems to be a terrible shortage to said rubles to pay the contractor doing the work — or the contractor has none to pay their workers. They haven’t been paid in months and they’ve gone as far as painting a message on the roof to “save the workers.”

Last month, Rogozin said he would “rip their heads off” for embezzling the people of Russia.

If all the leaders blatantly lie to their people, and every boss is stealing money from big contracts, how does anything ever get done?

Putin’s kleptocracy is bound for spectacular failure.

The original agreement for the International Space Station was to operate it until 2020.

So why is deputy prime minister Rogozin telling NASA to use a trampoline?

Thanks to Emily Gertz for pointing it out.

The U.S. is relying on Russia for transporting astronauts to and from the ISS for several years, and Russia’s space station modules currently provide propulsion for the structure. But on board the station itself, Oberg says, Russia’s sections and crew rely upon American-made and operated equipment for electricity and communications. Further, Russia’s effort to to complete and launch its own science section is “years behind schedule,” says Oberg, so it must rely upon the labs contributed by other nations.

No matter what happens with Russian space policy, Oberg is excited for the next decade of space science, which he believes will be shifting from a “CERN model” of multiple nations contributing to and collaborating at one research facility, to “the Antarctica model” of many smaller stations forming and ending cooperative efforts as the science requires.

If Russia does exit the ISS soon after 2020, he says, it will happen at about the same time that new “human-rated” spacecraft like SpaceX’s Dragon come into use, and end Russia’s current lock on crew transportation.

“The Ukraine crisis has not diverted the station’s evolution into a new path,” Oberg says. “It may have put into sharper focus the different paths the station could follow, but that was happening anyway.”

Good luck with those sanctions.