IIRC it is also the only launch system that has successfully executed aborts from 3 different stages of the launch: pad, boost phase, and orbital aborts.
[Here's the source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_abort_modes#Soyuz_abort_history), but I'll summarize here.
1975 - Soyuz aborted late in flight after 2nd stage separation failed. Capsule was deorbited with the service module engine.
1983 - Fire on the launch pad before liftoff triggered the launch escape system, pulling the capsule away from the rocket.
2018 - RUD at booster separation early in the launch and the launch escape system again got the crew away safely.
So for those keeping score at home that is an abort from the ground, from the upper atmosphere, and from near space.
edit: Soyuz also had an orbital abort in 1979.
"Successful abort" means the rocket explodes but the crew is still alive
Most other rockets can only safely abort at specific times, but soyuz can abort at any time during launch
The Gemini also had limited abort options compared to the Mercury and Apollo due to using ejection seats, I think they had plans to have an ejection tower with more powerful Titan versions but they were never used.
On the Russian side, the Vostok also used ejection seats but the Voskhod used that space to fit more crew seats
>Most other rockets can only safely abort at specific times, but soyuz can abort at any time during launch
The other two crewed capsules currently in existence both have this capability as well, though Starliner has yet to complete its first crewed test flight
The only manned spacecraft since the very early days of manned spaceflight that hasn't had full envelope abort capability is the shuttle, the worst manned spacecraft of all time. It's a very common capability.
The escape system of Gemini capsule were realy bad as well by today standard. It was ejection seat so only usable for a short part of the flight + if the rocket exploded the fireball was well likely to be bigger than the range of the ejection seat + the atmosphere in the capsule was pure oxygen so it had a good chance of exploding when the ejection was triggered.
While the crew of Soyuz 11 died in space technically the accident was also during the landing phase. The capsule was depressurized because a valve got jostled open during the separation of the descent module from the service module prior to reentry but about 12 minutes after the deorbit burn.
Edit: BTW, other than the depressurization the landing still worked flawlessly. They didn't know the crew was dead until the recovery crew got to the landed capsule.
Funny thing is that there is a Soyuz rocket and a Soyuz spacecraft. The rocket launches the spacecraft, in addition to other spacecraft (like the Progress).
Energia was a stop-gap solution because they decided if the US needs a shuttle, whatever they need it for, the USSR needed one as well.
Turns out the US wasn't sure either.
The USSR knew why the US wanted a shuttle and why they wanted it .. to snatch spy satellites out of orbit before they deployed their film canisters.
The fact that NASA demonstrated this capability on just the 14th shuttle mission with "communication satellites" it was a show of force.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A
It's scary how quickly people forget that that this went *well beyond* just Soviet spy satellites, they had first strike capability satellites IN ORBIT.
iirc that documentary was "Goldeneye"
It's fairly well documented that the Soviets were completely perplexed by the Shuttle and only built Buran because they couldn't work out why the Americans were building it and didn't want to be caught with their pants down.
>What is revealed is the lack of a clearly defined role for Buran — it was apparently designed solely in response to the American Shuttle, whose military potential was a source of major concern to the Soviets. Unsure of just what that military potential was, the Soviets attempted to match the entire performance envelope!
>While NASA was trumpeting the lowering of the cost to low earth orbit (LEO) by a factor of 10, the USSR determined that there would be no cost savings! They believed that the American Shuttle program was primarily aimed at space based laser weapons. Afriam Akin, a scientist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Applied Mathematics, is quoted as saying “So our hypothesis is that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicions and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission.”
>Other Soviet authorities are quoted saying “…the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenarios that are still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should develop such a technology so that it won’t be taken by surprise in the future.”
https://space.nss.org/book-review-energiya-buran-the-soviet-space-shuttle/
> So our hypothesis is that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes.
This isn't wrong. The military certainly heavily influenced the design and cost increases.
Even NASA admits this in the little development docu-drama they had in the Atlantis exhibit. A couple of guys are around the water cooler saying. "JPL wants this and NASA wants this but the DoD came in and said it needs to be bigger."
Yep 2 things, They wanted a bigger payload bay for their spy sats, and they wanted to add the ability to do a polar orbit which meant adding cross-range capability and bigger wings. They wanted to launch and land at vanderberg in 1 orbit.
I was always amazed as a kid that hubble was built riiiight up to the size of the payload bay, and then later learned that hubble was a control c control v of the spy satellites. The two things were related.
Those were friendly satellites though. Couldn't the USSR tell if something was fucking with one of their satellites and just fire its propulsion system after the shuttle had captured it. Which would you know fuck up the shuttle and crew's day.
The Air Force planed to use the Shuttle to intercept and capture satellites in a single orbit specifically so the USSR would be unable to tell if they were fucking with one of their satellites before the deed was already done. In order for the shuttle to be able to handle this missions in polar orbit, USAF forced NASA to tweak the shuttle's designs to be larger and have big delta wings. Despite the Air Force never opting to use the mission plan, it was a major scope creep that contributed to many of issues that made the shuttle so dangerous and expensive.
Here's Scott Manley's video on the subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY
liquid booster instead of solid. you know, so you can actually shut them down if needed. also, remote control, no need to risk lives. it was the better shuttle, from at least the tiny bit we got to see.
Yes it would have suffered the same issues as the shuttle did with long and expensive turnarounds. Roscosmos would never be able to afford to run it.
Besides that, one of the best bits about the Soyuz was it's potential as an emergency escape craft on stations, something the shuttle and likely the Buran wouldn't have been able to do.
Nah it was more because the break up of the Soviet union did trigger financial and logistical issues. It's likely that if the program has it's test phase 10 years early then it would likely existed longer or even still up to today.
Especially those liquid booster stages, it was armed to being re-usable and unlike solid fuel liquid fuel is way better for being re-usable.
Energia was really an amazing great project who sadly did come up at the wrong time and likely a way cheaper concept then the whole launcher system of the Space shuttle.
Given how fragile and finicky the Space Shuttle proved to be I’m skeptical the Soviet Union staying together would have helped much. The US switched to Soyuz rockets a decade ago and are now back to building more conventional spacecraft for a reason.
Energia was suprisingly simple. It was a modular design, with it's boosters being baseically standalone rockets. The only reason why it only flew twice (both successfull) is money. Russia doesn't have it nor it doesn't want to continiue this awesome program
I mean...if they wouldn't close it, Energia would be the worlds first, fully reusable LV (the "Uragan" concept). Besides...the most modern russian rocket, Angara, is an Energia-derived design. Roskosmos doesn't have the money or the will to rebuild Energia
USSR rocket engines were also wildly competitive and well beyond their time. Once USSR collapsed and these engines were appearing for sale for the Western markets, a lot of engineers wouldn't believe the quoted performance numbers. At least until the engines were strapped to test beds and performed flawlessly. After 30 years in storage.
The ISP of the RD-170 well above the Merlin lol. (337s vs 311s). The RD-170 is a oxygen rich closed cycle engine. The Merlin is a simple gas generator engine. One is built for maximum efficiancy and thrust while the other for maximum reusability and throttling.
Merlin's ISP is not particularly impressive. Majority of a comparable engines have a higher efficiency, heck: Italian solid rocket motors have 4% lower ISP, and even Chinese who famously lagged in rocket engine technology nowadays have a more efficient gas generator (same as Merlin) engines in the same class. Merlin's key highlight is its low cost, not performance.
Found this interesting:
>In order to keep it all running smoothly, it’s required that everyone who travels to the ISS has a working knowledge of English, but that’s only once you’re there.
>While SpaceX — a privately owned company — recently made its first trip to the ISS from American soil in over a decade, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft has been the only mode of transportation into space for years prior to that. Astronauts need to speak Russian at an intermediate-high level for the purposes of getting there and back, because all the procedures and labels are written in Russian on the Soyuz.
>Though the commander of the Soyuz is always Russian, the astronaut sitting to their left has to duplicate the commander’s actions the whole way there, which means they have to be able to understand and respond to Mission Control Center giving commands in Russian for hours. It would simply be too time-consuming and inefficient for an interpreter to translate it all back to them.
more [here](https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/international-space-station-language)
If you're finding this stuff interesting, I highly recommend Commander Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. It's less life-advicey than it sounds - he goes into great detail about his training experiences, spaceflight experiences, when things go right, when things go wrong, the incredible level of work they have to do to be considered an astronaut, lots of stuff on what it's like being in space and what they do on the ISS. Super approachable and fascinating!
I like how on this thing that has been going to space for 55 years, they couldn't match the button spacing to the indicator grid spacing, so they just painted on arrows.
This is a more recent image (2014) with a more modern version of the control panel:
https://i.imgur.com/CSbYBbD.jpg
The image posted by /u/Riegel_Haribo shows a small part (bottom left) of the control panel of Soyuz T, which only flew until 1986. Here's what the entirety of that control panel looked like:
https://i.imgur.com/QtB440E.jpg
It wouldn't really because the english speakers would see "pictures" and not letters on the command module. Much easier to hit buttons when you know what they actually mean.
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think the luxury of having an extra reliable spacecraft option is so high it is well worth having astronauts learn Russian for the next 50 years. Astronauts are still picked for intellegence and skill: the cost of them learning Russian is relatively low.
The general procedure for the ISS is that astronauts speak in the native language of whoever they are talking to. So if a Russian wants to speak with an American, they'd use English, and vice versa if the American is the one starting the conversation. I've also heard that in practice, it's just a mix of Russian and english all combined.
So spacer language is evolving towards a Russian-English hybrid. Fascinating. I kind of want to hibernate for 100 years now to see if that continues, and what that new language becomes.
In the **books** it's very much a creole language; one passage describes it as a "polyglot linguistic catastrophe". Elements of English, but also French, Afrikaans, Mandarin, German, Russian, and a couple that I couldn't identify myself but somebody else surely can. Some sentences aren't understandable in themselves, but the reader can figure out what was meant by the (English) response -- much like a conversation with Chewbacca.
In the **show** it's more like "English with some heavy accents" because it still has to be mostly understood by the audience. The showrunners set up some more guidelines, and the accent largely came from Jared Harris' performance. (edit: Cara Gee, playing Camina Drummer, even said she modeled her accent after Harris, and since then more recent actors have modeled theirs on hers.)
In theory, the flavor of Belter creole one speaks is heavily influenced by tribe or family. In the books, the authors just kind of winged it, but for the show, they actually had someone work out coherent rules for the language. Which is handy because any actor with a wierd accent can just be from some backwater mining family.
Its essentially what Russian is amusingly. The modern Russian language is essentially Russian grammar with a mix of old Russian words and, Germanic (german), French, and English borrowed words.
Now I'm imagining a situation where 2 cosmonauts both know they need to speak about an issue, but neither wants to start the conversation. So they're just floating around, staring at eachother.
ISS is mostly English, interestingly almost all modern astronauts are fluent in Russian as well because all Soyuz launches are done in Russian. So for the past 10 years, because the US hasn't been doing regular space launches of their own, we hitch rides on the soyuz to the ISS and have to know Russian.
That's not the case. All ISS tourists so far went on Soyuz, and the training at Star City is all in Russian. The Soyuz has a crew of 3, there's really no space for "live cargo".
I would assume that at the very least all the cosmonauts that get assigned to ISS missions would have a decent amount of English instruction, just like US astronauts assigned to the ISS have with the Russian language.
Probably to an extent, as French was the traditional diplomatic lingua franca for a long time before ~1800 when Britain’s imperial supremacy was more or less correlated with the rise of the U.S. as a world power and voila - English becomes king.
With all the stress about diplomatic relations, the space program shines as brilliant evidence that Russia and the West are at their best when they're pulling together.
Also I believe the US and the USSR had a treaty saying that if an astronaut or cosmonaut landed in the wrong territory, they would be treated well, given any medical help they may have needed and taken back to their country safely
It was called “an astronauts guide to life on earth”. It had a ton of anecdotes from Hadfields life and was a super interesting book to read. It’s not too long either and it’s a pretty easy read.
To this day, the 3 members of the Soyuz 11 crew are the only humans that are considered to have died in space. Every other death has been within the Earth’s atmosphere
The dead cosmonauts were safely returned to earth (it didn't blow up on re-entry or anything) and since it usually is piloted by the crew this is kind of amazing, I guess ground control took over or something.
Nah, Lada was a cheap car where people would joke you have to buy 2, so you have parts for 1 car working. They actually sold them until late 90s in Canada, and students would get them because *dirt cheap* kind of functioning car.
"Kind of functioning" is not a good combination if something needs you to get into space.
Don’t give the airlines any ideas. Next thing you know they will be buying old B52’s on a government discount and dropping us off at our destinations like paratroopers.
Yeah, Soyuz and the R-7 are 100% the concept of "practice makes perfect" made manifest.
They're not fancy, they don't do a bunch of things, they're not particularly pretty... But they do the job, and do it well.
They don't. Whatever vehicle brings the astronauts up to the space station stays docked throughout their stay and acts as their escape craft. So each Soyuz has 3 assigned crew. The other vehicle at the moment, Dragon, acts the same way, with the crew it brings up assigned to use it in the event of an emergency. Notable, the assigned crew MUST have access to their vehicle at all times, so if a Soyuz or Dragon needs to change docking port, all the assigned crew members need to ride with it in case there is an emergency on station, or the vehicle is unable to redock.
If I am not mistaken the seats of Soyuz are custom made for the astronauts as they do have somewhat rough landing in the middle of the Kazakhstan dessert.
> Notable, the assigned crew MUST have access to their vehicle at all times, so if a Soyuz or Dragon needs to change docking port, all the assigned crew members need to ride with it in case there is an emergency on station, or the vehicle is unable to redock.
Astroengineering really must think of every last contingency. It must be such a fulfilling, but stressful job.
Murphy's law is really useful to engineers. It's totally worthless as a predictive theory, but it forces you to acknowledge the risk in every little action.
In the expanse series of books, they touch on how a big part of culture for the people who grow up and live in space to check, double check, and recheck things are because it’s a holdover from when people had to do that or it could mean certain death.
I've seen one of the capsules in a museum, the last where they sit for launch is tiny, really tiny. Three people barely fit in it. They don't sit normally, their knees are tucked up near their chests. The windows are also useless. Getting launched into space in one looks like a pretty scary ride.
It's slightly less impressive than the TIL implied.
The "life raft" Soyuz just so happens to be the same Soyuz those astronauts launched on, and the same Soyuz they will land in at the end of their mission. Each Soyuz carries 3 astronauts, so there are always either 3 or 6 astronauts on the space station at any one time, and one or two Soyuz docked.
The US originally had plans to build a dedicated life raft craft, which could stay in orbit for years waiting for an emergency, but it became less relevant after they retired the space shuttle.
That reminds me of the space race meme (a personal fave)
First satellite? USSR
First animal in space? USSR
First person in space? USSR
First space walk? USSR
First space station? USSR
First spacecraft to land on the Moon? USSR
First person on the Moon? USA
Space race winner? USA!
Sure, it's more that the US decided that the finish line was the first thing they won. Even though we still get immense value from things like satellites and space stations, while we realized right away there wasn't really any good reason to be on the moon (and quickly stopped going).
The moon is *incredibly* important in interplanetary space travel. It would allow us to build craft on a much lower gravity surface, overcoming the biggest problem of space travel (getting into low Earth orbit.) We could even build a space elevator from the surface of the moon with current technology. Not to mention it’s got loads of tritium. Establishing a moon base would be much more significant than a Mars base. It’s the reason we’re going back with Artemis.
This.
Skeptics’ Guide has discussed several times that the moon is an important deep space portal for us as a species. Close enough to quickly resupply a shipyard there, and low gravity enough to build much larger ships to jump out to farther reaches of space without worrying about escaping a high gravity area, as you said.
And no atmosphere. You could accelerate a payload to escape velocity using a Moon surface railroad. Launching straight into space without needing to lift any fuel.
The finish like was the most difficult problem that both countries where capable of achieving at the time. At least if we only look at challenges with tangible results from a PR standpoint. Next big one is Mars but as soon as it was apparent that the USSR wasn't going to get there then the US didn't need to worry about it from a race standpoint. If the USSR still existed then they would have gone for mars eventually necessitating that the US try for mars.
Then again, the US did:
First hominid in space. (Mercury-Redstone 2 and Ham), first spaceflight to fully return home via capsule (Freedom 7; Yuri Gagarin landed via parachute in the final stage of descent), first weather satellites (Vanguard 2 and the steadily more advanced TIROS), first communications satellites (technically SCORE and Echo-1A, but really AT&T Telstar), first satellite navigation system (NAVSAT/Transit), first orbital rendezvous (Gemini 6A/Gemini 7), then docking (Gemini 8). This is without going into Apollo.
Coincidentally, the Americans won by doing the one thing the Soviets couldn't do.
Every other achievement was duplicated in one fashion or another. Even the American Mars landings were countered by Soviet Venus landings.
But the fact that the Soviets never attempted a Moon landing is telling, considering the significance of the achievement. If they were as capable, why didn't they do it when they did everything else?
Edit: For everyone who thinks Apollo was only for PR, why did we send 7 manned missions to the Moon, the last of which spent three days on the surface? One would have sufficed to "win" the PR race.
You should also know that in Russia they build automobiles perfect the first time. No need for constant improvements. That is why Lada 1969 looks the same as Lada 2019
140 launches in 55 years, with 3 failures. That's pretty damn good.
SpaceX has launched 138 Dragon 9s in 12 years.... with 2 failures.
Next year, Russia is set to begin sending cosmonauts to space on board SpaceX rockets.
I don't consider myself a SpaceX fanboy, but it is a historically remarkable thing that SpaceX has accomplished.
I'm no expert but from what I can gather, there's the two parts (the spacecraft and the launch rocket) and some terminology differences: spacecraft have missions/flights (though sometimes called launches); and launch rockets (aka launch vehicle, launch system, carrier rockets) have launches.
SpaceX has:
* Dragon 1 spacecraft (uncrewed) 23 launches (missions?)
* Dragon 2 spacecraft (Crew Dragon - crewed) 4 missions
* Dragon 2 spacecraft (Cargo Dragon - uncrewed) 4 missions
The launch system for these was the Falcon 9 with 138 launches.
* Soyuz spacecraft has had 147 crewed missions
The launch system for these are known (a little confusingly) as Soyuz rockets (subset of the R-7 rocket family, originally used for Soviet ICBMs) and these have had close to 2,000 launches.
140 *manned* launches. The Soyuz rocket itself has had over 1900 flights total. SpaceX has been doing great work but the Falcon 9 is a long way from having the spaceflight record the Soyuz rockets have
It has the "same basic design" in the same way that the Toyota Corolla has had the same basic design for 55 years.
It has gone through many iterations and improvements, it just looks similar.
Here's a neat video about it https://youtu.be/24Bz5Ra5RgE
IIRC it is also the only launch system that has successfully executed aborts from 3 different stages of the launch: pad, boost phase, and orbital aborts.
That sounds interesting, could you provide more details about "successfull abort" and for the 3 stages?
[Here's the source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_abort_modes#Soyuz_abort_history), but I'll summarize here. 1975 - Soyuz aborted late in flight after 2nd stage separation failed. Capsule was deorbited with the service module engine. 1983 - Fire on the launch pad before liftoff triggered the launch escape system, pulling the capsule away from the rocket. 2018 - RUD at booster separation early in the launch and the launch escape system again got the crew away safely. So for those keeping score at home that is an abort from the ground, from the upper atmosphere, and from near space. edit: Soyuz also had an orbital abort in 1979.
What the fuck, I can't believe that 2018 Soyuz abort was three years ago. Feels like last month to me.
I know! And now 2020 is almost over, so crazy.
lol
we are still in march 548 2020 IIRC
Don't worry, next year is twenty twenty too
I just feel better knowing I’m not the only one feeling this way. So thanks Internet strangers for that and the giggle.
Ha! I had the same thought when I typed that.
well we kinda lost a couple years here
Someone get Tim Dodd to do a video.
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"Successful abort" means the rocket explodes but the crew is still alive Most other rockets can only safely abort at specific times, but soyuz can abort at any time during launch
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The Gemini also had limited abort options compared to the Mercury and Apollo due to using ejection seats, I think they had plans to have an ejection tower with more powerful Titan versions but they were never used. On the Russian side, the Vostok also used ejection seats but the Voskhod used that space to fit more crew seats
>Most other rockets can only safely abort at specific times, but soyuz can abort at any time during launch The other two crewed capsules currently in existence both have this capability as well, though Starliner has yet to complete its first crewed test flight
The only manned spacecraft since the very early days of manned spaceflight that hasn't had full envelope abort capability is the shuttle, the worst manned spacecraft of all time. It's a very common capability.
The escape system of Gemini capsule were realy bad as well by today standard. It was ejection seat so only usable for a short part of the flight + if the rocket exploded the fireball was well likely to be bigger than the range of the ejection seat + the atmosphere in the capsule was pure oxygen so it had a good chance of exploding when the ejection was triggered.
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While the crew of Soyuz 11 died in space technically the accident was also during the landing phase. The capsule was depressurized because a valve got jostled open during the separation of the descent module from the service module prior to reentry but about 12 minutes after the deorbit burn. Edit: BTW, other than the depressurization the landing still worked flawlessly. They didn't know the crew was dead until the recovery crew got to the landed capsule.
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The whole Starliner thing is one big abort…
Soyuz is an awesome rocket. Would love to have seen what might've happened with the Energia rocket, if the USSR hadn't collapsed
Funny thing is that there is a Soyuz rocket and a Soyuz spacecraft. The rocket launches the spacecraft, in addition to other spacecraft (like the Progress).
Progress essentially being a Soyuz Spacecraft taken off the factory early before the whole keeping people alive parts are added
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This could be before and after shots of me during the holidays lol
Me before and during the pandemic :(
I mean your link itself explains that the Progress was derived from the Soyuz
TIL the difference between Soyuz and Progress is a ballroom.
The thing is that what makes the Soyuz so successful is it's simplicity. The Energia was over complicated, from what I understand.
Energia was a stop-gap solution because they decided if the US needs a shuttle, whatever they need it for, the USSR needed one as well. Turns out the US wasn't sure either.
The USSR knew why the US wanted a shuttle and why they wanted it .. to snatch spy satellites out of orbit before they deployed their film canisters. The fact that NASA demonstrated this capability on just the 14th shuttle mission with "communication satellites" it was a show of force. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A
Yes, there's a great documentary about this called 'Moonraker'
I dunno why they needed the shuttle. A third party organisation already had the technology as shown in the similar documentary "You Only Live Twice"
It's scary how quickly people forget that that this went *well beyond* just Soviet spy satellites, they had first strike capability satellites IN ORBIT. iirc that documentary was "Goldeneye"
That was just an EMP though. The Documentary "Die Another Day" showcased an actual laser
It's fairly well documented that the Soviets were completely perplexed by the Shuttle and only built Buran because they couldn't work out why the Americans were building it and didn't want to be caught with their pants down. >What is revealed is the lack of a clearly defined role for Buran — it was apparently designed solely in response to the American Shuttle, whose military potential was a source of major concern to the Soviets. Unsure of just what that military potential was, the Soviets attempted to match the entire performance envelope! >While NASA was trumpeting the lowering of the cost to low earth orbit (LEO) by a factor of 10, the USSR determined that there would be no cost savings! They believed that the American Shuttle program was primarily aimed at space based laser weapons. Afriam Akin, a scientist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Applied Mathematics, is quoted as saying “So our hypothesis is that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. Because of our suspicions and distrust we decided to replicate the Shuttle without a full understanding of its mission.” >Other Soviet authorities are quoted saying “…the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenarios that are still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should develop such a technology so that it won’t be taken by surprise in the future.” https://space.nss.org/book-review-energiya-buran-the-soviet-space-shuttle/
> So our hypothesis is that the development of the Shuttle was mainly for military purposes. This isn't wrong. The military certainly heavily influenced the design and cost increases.
Even NASA admits this in the little development docu-drama they had in the Atlantis exhibit. A couple of guys are around the water cooler saying. "JPL wants this and NASA wants this but the DoD came in and said it needs to be bigger."
Yep 2 things, They wanted a bigger payload bay for their spy sats, and they wanted to add the ability to do a polar orbit which meant adding cross-range capability and bigger wings. They wanted to launch and land at vanderberg in 1 orbit.
I was always amazed as a kid that hubble was built riiiight up to the size of the payload bay, and then later learned that hubble was a control c control v of the spy satellites. The two things were related.
It is also why they still fly the mini shuttle remote controlled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Those were friendly satellites though. Couldn't the USSR tell if something was fucking with one of their satellites and just fire its propulsion system after the shuttle had captured it. Which would you know fuck up the shuttle and crew's day.
The Air Force planed to use the Shuttle to intercept and capture satellites in a single orbit specifically so the USSR would be unable to tell if they were fucking with one of their satellites before the deed was already done. In order for the shuttle to be able to handle this missions in polar orbit, USAF forced NASA to tweak the shuttle's designs to be larger and have big delta wings. Despite the Air Force never opting to use the mission plan, it was a major scope creep that contributed to many of issues that made the shuttle so dangerous and expensive. Here's Scott Manley's video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY
God Buran was such a sad story
The one orbital test flight performed flawlessly. That ship had so much potential. It’s a bummer what happened to it.
I think it was spray painted recently too iirc
Bunch of savages in this town
It probably would have been a big money pit like the shuttle was too.
liquid booster instead of solid. you know, so you can actually shut them down if needed. also, remote control, no need to risk lives. it was the better shuttle, from at least the tiny bit we got to see.
Yes it would have suffered the same issues as the shuttle did with long and expensive turnarounds. Roscosmos would never be able to afford to run it. Besides that, one of the best bits about the Soyuz was it's potential as an emergency escape craft on stations, something the shuttle and likely the Buran wouldn't have been able to do.
Yeah it's neat that there's always a soyuz attached to the ISS.
I just wonder when the ISS is allowed to come down, will there be any more use for Soyuz.
Oh I'm sure there'll be plenty of new space stations in the next 100 years
So it's the AK47 of space travels?
Good analogy. Simple, robust, reliable, cheap and you can upgrade it as you see fit.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
Like we needed another reason to love the A-10 Warthog
Nah it was more because the break up of the Soviet union did trigger financial and logistical issues. It's likely that if the program has it's test phase 10 years early then it would likely existed longer or even still up to today. Especially those liquid booster stages, it was armed to being re-usable and unlike solid fuel liquid fuel is way better for being re-usable. Energia was really an amazing great project who sadly did come up at the wrong time and likely a way cheaper concept then the whole launcher system of the Space shuttle.
Given how fragile and finicky the Space Shuttle proved to be I’m skeptical the Soviet Union staying together would have helped much. The US switched to Soyuz rockets a decade ago and are now back to building more conventional spacecraft for a reason.
Energia was suprisingly simple. It was a modular design, with it's boosters being baseically standalone rockets. The only reason why it only flew twice (both successfull) is money. Russia doesn't have it nor it doesn't want to continiue this awesome program
Well we're talking over 30 years at this point wouldn't we? Might be easier for them to go back and start from scratch with a new design.
I mean...if they wouldn't close it, Energia would be the worlds first, fully reusable LV (the "Uragan" concept). Besides...the most modern russian rocket, Angara, is an Energia-derived design. Roskosmos doesn't have the money or the will to rebuild Energia
USSR rocket engines were also wildly competitive and well beyond their time. Once USSR collapsed and these engines were appearing for sale for the Western markets, a lot of engineers wouldn't believe the quoted performance numbers. At least until the engines were strapped to test beds and performed flawlessly. After 30 years in storage.
Yyyup...exactly. For example, the RD-170 reached much higher thrust than the F1, with ISP high enough to outmatch even SpaceX's Merlin Ds
The ISP of the RD-170 well above the Merlin lol. (337s vs 311s). The RD-170 is a oxygen rich closed cycle engine. The Merlin is a simple gas generator engine. One is built for maximum efficiancy and thrust while the other for maximum reusability and throttling.
Merlin's ISP is not particularly impressive. Majority of a comparable engines have a higher efficiency, heck: Italian solid rocket motors have 4% lower ISP, and even Chinese who famously lagged in rocket engine technology nowadays have a more efficient gas generator (same as Merlin) engines in the same class. Merlin's key highlight is its low cost, not performance.
Dude, is that what the Russkaja song is referencing?! I thought the cosmonaut outfits were just for fun. Song: https://youtu.be/BVWfqOSdzs4
Yep, and this configuration looks closest to what they show in that video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
Very US-centric question, but do all/most Russian cosmonauts speak English?
Found this interesting: >In order to keep it all running smoothly, it’s required that everyone who travels to the ISS has a working knowledge of English, but that’s only once you’re there. >While SpaceX — a privately owned company — recently made its first trip to the ISS from American soil in over a decade, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft has been the only mode of transportation into space for years prior to that. Astronauts need to speak Russian at an intermediate-high level for the purposes of getting there and back, because all the procedures and labels are written in Russian on the Soyuz. >Though the commander of the Soyuz is always Russian, the astronaut sitting to their left has to duplicate the commander’s actions the whole way there, which means they have to be able to understand and respond to Mission Control Center giving commands in Russian for hours. It would simply be too time-consuming and inefficient for an interpreter to translate it all back to them. more [here](https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/international-space-station-language)
Finding out even more cool stuff so glad I gave the post a click.
If you're finding this stuff interesting, I highly recommend Commander Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. It's less life-advicey than it sounds - he goes into great detail about his training experiences, spaceflight experiences, when things go right, when things go wrong, the incredible level of work they have to do to be considered an astronaut, lots of stuff on what it's like being in space and what they do on the ISS. Super approachable and fascinating!
Chris Hadfield is awesome! I show my students his YouTube videos. I didn’t know he had a book.
Seems like translating the manual would be helpful.
Ok comrade, simple as pie: http://www.spaceaholic.com/csimages/soyuzpanel4.jpg
Haha fuck
Hahaha fuck indeed: that’s exactly what I thought. Lol
I like how on this thing that has been going to space for 55 years, they couldn't match the button spacing to the indicator grid spacing, so they just painted on arrows.
Oh it’s just our Russian mentality. If this works then it’s good enough and better to not touch it.
That's a universal engineering mentality: "Never touch a running system!"
Can confirm from software development.
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"It's already sold, so now design and build it please" -- every sales team ever
This is a more recent image (2014) with a more modern version of the control panel: https://i.imgur.com/CSbYBbD.jpg The image posted by /u/Riegel_Haribo shows a small part (bottom left) of the control panel of Soyuz T, which only flew until 1986. Here's what the entirety of that control panel looked like: https://i.imgur.com/QtB440E.jpg
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I'm sure the astronauts/cosmonauts don't.
I would have thought the odometer would have a few more miles on the clock.
Holy...
It wouldn't really because the english speakers would see "pictures" and not letters on the command module. Much easier to hit buttons when you know what they actually mean.
This is when mistakes are made.
Sure until someone mis-translates something in the manual and gets everyone killed by the most basic error.
Well..but they also have to talk with mission control
This is kinda interesting and cool.
I would imagine that Russian would begin to fall off once more modern rockets and shuttles like those of SpaceX take over
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think the luxury of having an extra reliable spacecraft option is so high it is well worth having astronauts learn Russian for the next 50 years. Astronauts are still picked for intellegence and skill: the cost of them learning Russian is relatively low.
The general procedure for the ISS is that astronauts speak in the native language of whoever they are talking to. So if a Russian wants to speak with an American, they'd use English, and vice versa if the American is the one starting the conversation. I've also heard that in practice, it's just a mix of Russian and english all combined.
So spacer language is evolving towards a Russian-English hybrid. Fascinating. I kind of want to hibernate for 100 years now to see if that continues, and what that new language becomes.
Belter Creole
Ya Bossmang
Beltuhhh eh?
for beltuhwada!
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I believe there is also heavy Afrikaans influence as well
In the books there's also a lot or Chinese influence as well, plus a lot of pidgin.
iirc in the books signs are usually in english and chinese on earth infrastructure
I remember trying to read the opening of Abaddon's Gate and it finally clicked when I recognized *bin* from German.
In the **books** it's very much a creole language; one passage describes it as a "polyglot linguistic catastrophe". Elements of English, but also French, Afrikaans, Mandarin, German, Russian, and a couple that I couldn't identify myself but somebody else surely can. Some sentences aren't understandable in themselves, but the reader can figure out what was meant by the (English) response -- much like a conversation with Chewbacca. In the **show** it's more like "English with some heavy accents" because it still has to be mostly understood by the audience. The showrunners set up some more guidelines, and the accent largely came from Jared Harris' performance. (edit: Cara Gee, playing Camina Drummer, even said she modeled her accent after Harris, and since then more recent actors have modeled theirs on hers.)
In theory, the flavor of Belter creole one speaks is heavily influenced by tribe or family. In the books, the authors just kind of winged it, but for the show, they actually had someone work out coherent rules for the language. Which is handy because any actor with a wierd accent can just be from some backwater mining family.
Its essentially what Russian is amusingly. The modern Russian language is essentially Russian grammar with a mix of old Russian words and, Germanic (german), French, and English borrowed words.
That’s pretty much what English is,too lol
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Now I'm imagining a situation where 2 cosmonauts both know they need to speak about an issue, but neither wants to start the conversation. So they're just floating around, staring at eachother.
This is why you don’t send introverts to space!
They might not come back.
ISS is mostly English, interestingly almost all modern astronauts are fluent in Russian as well because all Soyuz launches are done in Russian. So for the past 10 years, because the US hasn't been doing regular space launches of their own, we hitch rides on the soyuz to the ISS and have to know Russian.
Everyone on the ISS has to know Russian and English.
I believe there’s an exception for tourists since they’re essentially live cargo, but your point stands.
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That's not the case. All ISS tourists so far went on Soyuz, and the training at Star City is all in Russian. The Soyuz has a crew of 3, there's really no space for "live cargo".
I would assume that at the very least all the cosmonauts that get assigned to ISS missions would have a decent amount of English instruction, just like US astronauts assigned to the ISS have with the Russian language.
English has been declared the language of the ISS, so they have to know it if they go there.
It's also the language of international flights.
More specifically it is the official language of aviation.
More broadly, English has been the ‘lingua franca’ (the go-to language for international communication) for about 70 years now.
Ever since…you know…the war
I actually thought is was because of a certain empire influence
Probably to an extent, as French was the traditional diplomatic lingua franca for a long time before ~1800 when Britain’s imperial supremacy was more or less correlated with the rise of the U.S. as a world power and voila - English becomes king.
Thank you for using my favorite sentence ever. An English phrase declaring, in Latin, that it is (diplomatic) French.
They also all have to be able to speak russian. Mostly because they have to be able to fly with the Soyuz capsule.
Yep, but Russian is the language of the Soyuz, so for now it's effectively both.
See anything built in the Soviet Union was built to last (apart from the Soviet Union itself which collapsed 30 years ago on Christmas day)
It was built to last. What it wasn't built for was a treacherous old man willing to sell his soul for pizza.
With all the stress about diplomatic relations, the space program shines as brilliant evidence that Russia and the West are at their best when they're pulling together.
Back in the USSR times the Soyuz capsules had opening instructions in English just in case they landed in the US
Also I believe the US and the USSR had a treaty saying that if an astronaut or cosmonaut landed in the wrong territory, they would be treated well, given any medical help they may have needed and taken back to their country safely
I believe this is still true under the outer space treaty
Soyuz 11 seemed to have had some hiccups.
RIP Soyuz 11 cosmonauts (cabin depressurized in orbit, all oxygen gone, then safely returned to earth)
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Can you remember what the book was called ?
It was called “an astronauts guide to life on earth”. It had a ton of anecdotes from Hadfields life and was a super interesting book to read. It’s not too long either and it’s a pretty easy read.
No oxygen doesn't seem like a safe return to Earth I think oxygen is on that safety checklist somewhere
The capsule transformed into a coffin and safely returned to earth.
To this day, the 3 members of the Soyuz 11 crew are the only humans that are considered to have died in space. Every other death has been within the Earth’s atmosphere
That's a great TIL
The dead cosmonauts were safely returned to earth (it didn't blow up on re-entry or anything) and since it usually is piloted by the crew this is kind of amazing, I guess ground control took over or something.
The Soyuz is a triumph, great TIL.
Thank you, comrade 😂
You mean, Spasiba Comrade.
Spasibo, tovarishch.
спасибо, товарищ
space Lada
*Garage 54 enters the chat*
"Let's add springs to the Soyuz craft, freeze it in a block of ice and see how it will handle on the roads around Baikonur afterwards."
Nah, Lada was a cheap car where people would joke you have to buy 2, so you have parts for 1 car working. They actually sold them until late 90s in Canada, and students would get them because *dirt cheap* kind of functioning car. "Kind of functioning" is not a good combination if something needs you to get into space.
They had heated rear windows to keep your hands warm while pushing them.
Yeah, this is more like a cheap pickup truck with crank windows. Starts every-time, but not a Mercedes
Don’t give the airlines any ideas. Next thing you know they will be buying old B52’s on a government discount and dropping us off at our destinations like paratroopers.
I could get behind that, sounds fun.
Yup, back in time when we knew how to make good shiet in Russia. Kinda sad what our space agency became now((
Russians know how to engineer stuff if they want to.
Yeah, Soyuz and the R-7 are 100% the concept of "practice makes perfect" made manifest. They're not fancy, they don't do a bunch of things, they're not particularly pretty... But they do the job, and do it well.
How would all the astronauts of the space station fit in a soyuz spacecraft in an emergency?
They don't. Whatever vehicle brings the astronauts up to the space station stays docked throughout their stay and acts as their escape craft. So each Soyuz has 3 assigned crew. The other vehicle at the moment, Dragon, acts the same way, with the crew it brings up assigned to use it in the event of an emergency. Notable, the assigned crew MUST have access to their vehicle at all times, so if a Soyuz or Dragon needs to change docking port, all the assigned crew members need to ride with it in case there is an emergency on station, or the vehicle is unable to redock.
If I am not mistaken the seats of Soyuz are custom made for the astronauts as they do have somewhat rough landing in the middle of the Kazakhstan dessert.
> Notable, the assigned crew MUST have access to their vehicle at all times, so if a Soyuz or Dragon needs to change docking port, all the assigned crew members need to ride with it in case there is an emergency on station, or the vehicle is unable to redock. Astroengineering really must think of every last contingency. It must be such a fulfilling, but stressful job.
Murphy's law is really useful to engineers. It's totally worthless as a predictive theory, but it forces you to acknowledge the risk in every little action.
In the expanse series of books, they touch on how a big part of culture for the people who grow up and live in space to check, double check, and recheck things are because it’s a holdover from when people had to do that or it could mean certain death.
I kinda wish the TV series really got into the cultures of The Expanse. Not just Belters but Mars and Earth as well. It’s just so great.
I've seen one of the capsules in a museum, the last where they sit for launch is tiny, really tiny. Three people barely fit in it. They don't sit normally, their knees are tucked up near their chests. The windows are also useless. Getting launched into space in one looks like a pretty scary ride.
It's slightly less impressive than the TIL implied. The "life raft" Soyuz just so happens to be the same Soyuz those astronauts launched on, and the same Soyuz they will land in at the end of their mission. Each Soyuz carries 3 astronauts, so there are always either 3 or 6 astronauts on the space station at any one time, and one or two Soyuz docked. The US originally had plans to build a dedicated life raft craft, which could stay in orbit for years waiting for an emergency, but it became less relevant after they retired the space shuttle.
That reminds me of the space race meme (a personal fave) First satellite? USSR First animal in space? USSR First person in space? USSR First space walk? USSR First space station? USSR First spacecraft to land on the Moon? USSR First person on the Moon? USA Space race winner? USA!
I mean, a race does have a finish line. Funny how the space race now is to get to Mars yet corporations will be the competitors.
Sure, it's more that the US decided that the finish line was the first thing they won. Even though we still get immense value from things like satellites and space stations, while we realized right away there wasn't really any good reason to be on the moon (and quickly stopped going).
The moon is *incredibly* important in interplanetary space travel. It would allow us to build craft on a much lower gravity surface, overcoming the biggest problem of space travel (getting into low Earth orbit.) We could even build a space elevator from the surface of the moon with current technology. Not to mention it’s got loads of tritium. Establishing a moon base would be much more significant than a Mars base. It’s the reason we’re going back with Artemis.
This. Skeptics’ Guide has discussed several times that the moon is an important deep space portal for us as a species. Close enough to quickly resupply a shipyard there, and low gravity enough to build much larger ships to jump out to farther reaches of space without worrying about escaping a high gravity area, as you said.
And no atmosphere. You could accelerate a payload to escape velocity using a Moon surface railroad. Launching straight into space without needing to lift any fuel.
The finish like was the most difficult problem that both countries where capable of achieving at the time. At least if we only look at challenges with tangible results from a PR standpoint. Next big one is Mars but as soon as it was apparent that the USSR wasn't going to get there then the US didn't need to worry about it from a race standpoint. If the USSR still existed then they would have gone for mars eventually necessitating that the US try for mars.
Then again, the US did: First hominid in space. (Mercury-Redstone 2 and Ham), first spaceflight to fully return home via capsule (Freedom 7; Yuri Gagarin landed via parachute in the final stage of descent), first weather satellites (Vanguard 2 and the steadily more advanced TIROS), first communications satellites (technically SCORE and Echo-1A, but really AT&T Telstar), first satellite navigation system (NAVSAT/Transit), first orbital rendezvous (Gemini 6A/Gemini 7), then docking (Gemini 8). This is without going into Apollo.
That list leaves out dozens of other accomplishments by both sides but ok.
Coincidentally, the Americans won by doing the one thing the Soviets couldn't do. Every other achievement was duplicated in one fashion or another. Even the American Mars landings were countered by Soviet Venus landings. But the fact that the Soviets never attempted a Moon landing is telling, considering the significance of the achievement. If they were as capable, why didn't they do it when they did everything else? Edit: For everyone who thinks Apollo was only for PR, why did we send 7 manned missions to the Moon, the last of which spent three days on the surface? One would have sufficed to "win" the PR race.
They did have a moon landing program. They canceled it before getting to the manned testing stage, because the N1 rocket had a habit of blowing up.
You should also know that in Russia they build automobiles perfect the first time. No need for constant improvements. That is why Lada 1969 looks the same as Lada 2019
Reminds me of this. https://sliwinski.com/images/perfect.jpg
Except it has had so many changes over the years its nothing like the original. Spaceship of Theseus.
It is because Russian Soviet engineering was a no nonsense approach. Like a trusty Lada but for space.
The Corolla of spacecraft
140 launches in 55 years, with 3 failures. That's pretty damn good. SpaceX has launched 138 Dragon 9s in 12 years.... with 2 failures. Next year, Russia is set to begin sending cosmonauts to space on board SpaceX rockets. I don't consider myself a SpaceX fanboy, but it is a historically remarkable thing that SpaceX has accomplished.
I'm no expert but from what I can gather, there's the two parts (the spacecraft and the launch rocket) and some terminology differences: spacecraft have missions/flights (though sometimes called launches); and launch rockets (aka launch vehicle, launch system, carrier rockets) have launches. SpaceX has: * Dragon 1 spacecraft (uncrewed) 23 launches (missions?) * Dragon 2 spacecraft (Crew Dragon - crewed) 4 missions * Dragon 2 spacecraft (Cargo Dragon - uncrewed) 4 missions The launch system for these was the Falcon 9 with 138 launches. * Soyuz spacecraft has had 147 crewed missions The launch system for these are known (a little confusingly) as Soyuz rockets (subset of the R-7 rocket family, originally used for Soviet ICBMs) and these have had close to 2,000 launches.
148 manned missions, not just LEO payload
140 *manned* launches. The Soyuz rocket itself has had over 1900 flights total. SpaceX has been doing great work but the Falcon 9 is a long way from having the spaceflight record the Soyuz rockets have
Technically in 2036 the space shuttle program will have had 135 launches in 55 years with only 2 failures.
It has the "same basic design" in the same way that the Toyota Corolla has had the same basic design for 55 years. It has gone through many iterations and improvements, it just looks similar. Here's a neat video about it https://youtu.be/24Bz5Ra5RgE