NASA

“Rogozin is at it again,” harked a post on Twitter today. Rogozin is of course Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin, the Director General of Roscosmos, Russia’s state corporation for spaceflight activities and systems. “At it” meant that he had given a speech regarding the current state of the Russian space program, its future and its plans. I suppose “at it” was also meant that Rogozin had made sensational sort of statement, something he’s known for from time to time. He didn’t really do that this time, however, instead he gave a frank statement of how his program needs to improve and what his viewpoint of the American space program is.

Rogozin makes some good points, with a touch of the same sort of jingoism Americans were applauding as it came from the Cape and Houston just a couple of weeks ago as NASA and SpaceX sent two astronauts to orbit on the ISS. Write off the Russian space program at your own peril — they are the ones who have uninterrupted access to orbit for over forty years.

He called out NASA spokesperson Stephanie Schierholz, who told Forbes magazine last week that “cosmonauts will fly on Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner and vice versa.” Aside from Schierholz’s statement, there’s no evidence that Russia is planning to fly on either craft — they have purchased no contracts, nor have they publicly submitted any RFP’s for one. Russia has no need to buy seats, as it has a reliable ride to space of its own.

Rogozin also offered a riposte to Elon Musk, when he said “on May 30 Elon Musk did not bring us down — he brought down his compatriots from Boeing passing them with the beginning of the flight tests. This war is theirs, but not ours. We have a long-standing and continuously working national transport system; we constantly refine it, at the same time building a new and more advanced spacecraft.”

What do you expect him to say? Should he fawn like a SpaceX fanboi on Twitter and suggest that the Russians shut down a program that has ~1900 successful launches, 173 crewed? That is absurd. Rogozin is correct, besides. The competition was not with them, it was Boeing vs. SpaceX. Yes, Russia charged NASA far more than SpaceX will, but the Russians were also charging what the market would bear, something that should be near and dear to a country to claims to love the free market and capitalism. The only possible competition would have come from China, a country that NASA is forbidden to work with in any international space effort. It was Russia or America would have had to abandon ISS entirely. Given that stark choice, Russia’s price was a bargain.

Much was also made in the about the vast superiority of Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 versus Soyuz. Certainly Crew Dragon is more modern, after all, its base design is a little more than a decade old. Its crewed flight capabilities are still being tested for the first time — while it is successfully in orbit, that was only one-third of its mission: go to orbit, stay there and test the long-term capabilities of the craft to stay functional and then return the crew safely home. Until it meets the latter two milestones, one underway, the other yet to come later in the summer, the mission cannot be called a success. On the other hand, Soyuz was and still is the most venerable human launch system in existence. It’s record speaks for itself.

“We have a unique record of 173 successful flights. Even the three emergencies caused by the carrier rocket failures in 1975, 1983 and 2018 occurring during various injection stages showed its unique survivability due to the launch escape system reliability. By the way, the Soyuz rocket of various configurations has performed over 1,900 launches,” said Rogozin.

True. Soyuz is, by far, the most experienced and iterated design of any spacecraft, ever. Is it dated? Yes. But it has continued from its maiden launch in the days of Gemini until now. The Soviets/Russians have not had the capability gaps that existed here between Apollo and STS, the delays after STS tragedies, and the last gap between STS and Commercial Crew.

And it will stay that way, because not all nations want to depend on America for access to space. That is why Rogozin mentioned “the time-honored spacecraft created and designed by Sergey Korolev to conquer the Moon, will serve for a while even after the new Oryol spacecraft becomes operational.” In other words, the Russians will continue to have access to space now and for as far as one can peer into the future.

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Here’s a fun little thought experiment for the space enthusiast: suppose for a moment that NASA and the US had followed what the Soviets and later Roscosmos did with Soyuz: kept improving the existing system incrementally and kept the system flying while they did.

Instead of building a new booster stack for every new program – STS, now ISS, and later whatever we do with SLS when it finishes, we had kept the Saturn IB / Apollo CSM system in service and had iteratively improved it as technology improved? At least on the surface, the answer seems be a “yes.”

Soyuz launching the Soviet part of the ASTP mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1975. Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov would later meet in space with Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton in orbit on the last spaceflight of the Saturn family.

photo: TASS, via NASA.

While it was hardly sexy, “Cluster’s Last Stand” had a great track record. Save for Apollo 13 (caused by human error) the same can be said for the CSM. I think the H-1 (later RS-27) engine would have evolved to something similar to the Merlin in performance terms (both are gas-generator engines) and the J2 engine on the S-IVB Saturn IB second stage had plenty of go (1,033.1 kN).

 A Saturn IB lifts off from Kennedy Space Center in the 1970’s. Seen below the rocket’s plume is the distinctive pedestal used to match the relatively diminutive IB to the launch tower.

photo: NASA

On the top, literally, an Apollo capsule with even the second generation Shuttle avionics much less CST-100 or Orion avionics would have been something to behold, plus whatever improvements to another 40 years of development and manufacturing would have brought. Would the Apollo CSM have evolved to something reusable? Maybe.

Did we quit flying every time we built a new kind of airplane? No. But that’s what the US has effectively done with its space program: nothing launched from US soil during the development of the next program. This happened in the 1970’s between Apollo and the Space Shuttle and it has been since 2011 and the end of the Shuttle program that US astronauts have gone to space on an American rocket. It seems illogical, but that’s what has happened.

Ironically, the US and NASA depend on the venerable Soyuz workhorse to ferry astronauts to ISS. Soyuz has been in service since 1967, and its replacement is only now in advanced development in Russia.

One thing is certain: the US would have never had the launch gap in the 1970’s between ASTP and STS, nor would we have one now. The Russians have never had a flight gap since Soyuz entered service in the late 1960’s, save for the short periods following incident investigations. And even today, they can continue to use the venerable Soyuz while RKK Energia works through the issues with their new Federation spacecraft (its maiden launch is expected to slip from 2022 to 2024.)

A breakdown of the Saturn IB flight stack. 

Source: NASA msfc-71-pm 1100-29

Meanwhile, our *three* human spaceflight programs all have their own issues. At the time of this writing in May, 2019, SpaceX is piecing together the data and the remains of its first Crew Dragon capsule after it exploded during a test, Boeing is working through its own issues with its onboard launch escape system engines on the CST-100 and SLS continues to plod through development and testing (and is years behind schedule.)

Perhaps we should have kept the old uprated Saturn I system. It would be interesting to have seen what we could have done in space had we kept the old bird flying.

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