Comment Re:That's what happens (Score 1) 179
Well this year they can rely on the oil price drop to camouflage the effect.
Well this year they can rely on the oil price drop to camouflage the effect.
Yeah but as it turns out Orbital will be using some modified version of the RD-191 on the Antares because the NK-33 went kaput. Also be Russians claim they are selling the RD-180s below cost.
Soyuz is more cost effective, and more reliable. What else do you need?
There are also plans to retrofit the KVTK LOX/LH2 second stage into A5. The whole A7 may or may not happen. It doesn't matter as A5 with KVTK would have more performance than Proton.
The cost of handling hypergolics can be quite high. That is one reason why everyone is moving away from them. The costs for manufacturing the actual rocket may be higher but I kind of doubt it. Angara A5 is manufactured with more modern tools and it has less engines and parallel stages than Proton. Once it goes into full production the cost per unit is bound to be lower.
That article is old news.
Aborted launches happen all the time in the industry. Let alone in a new launch vehicle.
The Angara A5 vehicle they are talking about in that article was successfully launched last December.
They could use a better second stage for the rocket (i.e. the A7 version) but what they have is working fairly well. It would have been ready earlier if they didn't keep stalling the funding all the time. But it is ready now.
All that's needed is for them to finish the construction of their new launch site at Vostochny and Proton can be killed.
Yeah no kidding. The SLS is supposed to fly once every two years.
At least Soyuz is still around. And will be for the foreseeable future.
The same engine design is also be basis for the RD-191 rocket engine used in Angara.
For all we know the Russians could build their next space station together with the Chinese.
They also decided that they didn't have the money to make the first stage design reusable so they tacked together a fuel tank with a couple of solid rocket boosters to do the same job. Then they gave the task of building the solid rocket boosters to ATK. The worst of both design choices. Why? So the pork could be spread to Utah as well. Then Challenger happened.
You can easily put an airlock in a capsule. Soyuz has one as does Shenzhou (orbital module). The manipulator could have been attached into the first space station core launched into orbit using a regular launch vehicle like a Delta IV Heavy. Delta IV Heavy has more payload than the Proton rocket which was used to launch the Mir modules and the Russian ISS segment. If, for whatever reason, you actually needed a mobile construction yard you could just launch a space tug into space and use that instead of wasting time and fuel getting it up and down all the time.
The Shuttle was a jack of all trades master of none vehicle. It is a pathological case of design by committee. NASA wanted an RLV, the DoD wanted the capability to launch and recover huge earth reconnaissance satellites, DoD wanted wide cross-range capability. These requirements don't mix well so the resulting vehicle was an abortion. Kind of like the JSF.
At the moment Dragon's only intended purpose is ferrying crews to the ISS
Google "DragonLab".
That is only happening because the printed dollars aren't filtering down the market. If they did you would get inflation.
It's not an ICBM like Proton. Angara was designed to launch satellites. Nothing more.
Proton uses toxic hypergolic fuel. Energia was too expensive. That's why they made Angara. It's a cost-effective replacement for Proton.
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.