US Senate Allows NASA To Buy Soyuz Vehicles 298
arc.light writes "According to a report at Space.com, the US Senate voted to allow NASA to buy Russian Soyuz vehicles for the purpose of servicing the International Space Station. Because Russia continues to assist Iran with its nuclear energy and ballistic missile programs, NASA would otherwise not be allowed to buy Russian hardware by the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000. The US House of Representatives still needs to give its approval before NASA can make such a purchase."
What? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember one US plane that had to be transported from China in a Russian Antonov-124. The US did not have any aircraft that was up to the task! How long shall we have to rely on so called "third world economies" to achieve our goals?
Why doesn't this [Bush] administration pay Americans to build these Soyuz like crafts instead of simply buying?
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:3, Informative)
In terms of the number of fatal accidents per flight, Soyuz has about the same level of safety as Shuttle.
The difference is that Soyuz continutes to improve, so that recent flights are safer than earlier flights. Shuttle safety is at best remaining the same over time, and I think the reason is complacency on the part of NASA.
Of course it doesn't help that the Shuttle is a huge monolithic vehicle, where changing one component requires changes to many other components. By comparison capsule based systems (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz) have better defined interfaces between the launch vehicle and the spacecraft. As a result they accomodate evolutionary changes with less overall redesign.
Re:Stop The Politics Stories!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
Now for a real shock, let's compare how many times each has flown. The total is 850 for Soyuz and 113 for Shuttle, but that's going back before the Shuttle existed. I wasn't able to find how many Soyuz launches since 1981, but I'll be it's at least twice as many.
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:3, Informative)
In 93 flights, Soyuz has had two LOCV accidents, at least 8 LOM incidents, and more close calls and near accidents than one can shake a stick at.
Yes, lets. How many Shuttles have failed on launch? (None.) How many Soyuz? (Two.) How many Shuttles have landed off course and threatened the lives of their crews? (None.) How many Soyuz? (Multiple - including one that landed in a lake and ended up under the ice, and another that landed on a ledge in the mountains and missed the edge by less than a foot.) How many Shuttles have had to abort their missions and land with their batteries dying? (None.) How many Soyuz? (At least 4.) etc... etc...The simple fact of the matter is this; The Shuttle is about 98% reliable, and the Soyuz about 98.1%. The Soyuz is only that high because they've been lucky.
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:2, Informative)
And this statement right here makes you look like a fool. Are you forgetting Challenger? It exploded fairly early into launch.
As for your critique of Soyuz.....all Soyuz are not created equal. There have been many varients of what is called "Soyuz." Are you claiming the track record of the earlier, far less advanced Soyuz should be counted against more modern versions? They are, basically, very different craft with the same name.
Re:What about SpaceX? (Score:3, Informative)
From SpacePolitics [spacepolitics.com], quoting a transcript of Griffin's recent announcement:
NASA has not had at its upper levels a manager or an administrator more supportive of commercial enterprise than I. We are base lining in the out years past the retirement of the shuttle, we are base lining commercial service to the station. That is the only known and knowable, at this point, market for those entrepreneurs that I have to give. We are base lining the use of that market for them and are providing, will be providing this fall a new procurement to try to stimulate that market.
That said, at the end of the day, what commercial means is, that it is not government directed. So, I can provide the incentive and I can provide the market that I have and commercial providers will either emerge or not. It is not acceptable for a publicly funded program not to have a way of meeting its mission requirements in the event that commercial operators do or don't materialize. So, the architecture that we have advanced allows NASA to meet its mission requirements, but also allows NASA to concentrate its resources on other more advanced activities if commercial providers can emerge in the next five to seven years. That is exactly our intent.
Our fondest desire would be to keep NASA on the very frontier of space activity, letting commercial provider fill in for those activities which are not frontier activities. We will be putting some money where our mouth is.
Re:Sad state of our National space program (Score:3, Informative)
Re:European versus American engineering. (Score:2, Informative)
Alot of people are making dumb claims about ISS and the russians doing everything. Its funyy how NASA's shuttle is responsible for delivering nearly every piece of ISS except for about 3. NASA's shuttle is the only spacecraft capable of carrying and assembling some of the very large and heavy payloads. There are 6 space agencies involved with ISS, you don't find it ironic how the Americans and Russians are the only ones that have done anything to help it?
The European space agency does few things, and those few things it does do take a long time. If they've had less failures its because they've had less to fail at. Until a year or two ago, space shuttle flights were very routine and made fairly often. It was one mistake that made the public freak out simply because they are used to safe airplanes and dont realize the risks of going to space. Finally all of that beauracracy has started to end. If you count all the time that the 5 shuttles have spent in space, it amounts to about 4 constant years (1045 days in flight), what is ESA's time? Oh thats right, they don't have manned space vehicles, rather they pay the Americans or Russians to fly with them.
I'm not saying ESA is useless, they are far from it and have done many useful things, but you opened your mouth and nothing but ignorance came out. One more thing, up until the 90's when the U.S. military decided to stop sharing its space secrets with ESA, ESA was pretty damn dependant on NASA and often only achieved things with NASA's assistance. This post isn't intended as a flame, I just find it amusing how NASA doesn't get one tenth of the recognition it deserves.
Regards,
Steve
You are completely wrong about An-124's (Score:2, Informative)
No we don't have an An-124, it's the largest plane currently flying, built by the russians partly as an expression of national pride, and it cost shitloads. Only flies a few times a year btw, not a lot of people need that much lifting power.
They were built to carry miscellaneous military and civilian equipment like a couple of tanks or Buran buster. They fly every day, and carry anything from Sony Playstations [vda.com.ru] to US military shipments to Afganistan [sovereign-...ations.com]. Volga-Dnepr Airlines has 10 An-124's in active use. New An-124 would not cost more than 80 millions of dollars [ainonline.com] - this can be hardly described as "shitloads" for the plane of its size. You might try to tell american military or u.s. companies like General Electric and Lockheed-Martin that they do not need this kind of lifting power, though they are not likely to listen to your advice.
So please stop being an idiot, and do not bullshit me and everybody on matters you have no slightest idea about.
Re:The Difference (Score:3, Informative)
One huge factor is reentry stability. The soyuz capsule is inherantly stable. Once it performs a retro burn it is set to go. Natural aerodynamic stability (just like Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, and hopefully the CEV). The shuttle has no such thing. If it loses power, we lose the shuttle. That is huge. Another factor is that the Russians use the same and similar launchers/flight hardware/flight computers to launch Progress computers. Now I know, while a system is a sum of its components the unique combination of its components will lead to uniquenesses in the system, but having the additional flight time on those components gains experiance and system use time.
The Russians also have much higher flight rates in general. Shooting rockets isn't a special event to them it is the status quo.
I'm not knocking the shuttle - it was a good piece of hardware, and honestly the two accidents that occured were due to management errors. But the Soyuz system is a good system with a lot of merits and is honestly where we should have went post-Apollo (and is where we are going with the CEV).
-everphilski-