Storms cleared just in time for SpaceX to launch more Starlink satellites tonight from Cape Canaveral. Perfect launch but a photo fail here, I think. The launch itself was totally blown out — too bright — but I learned something and had a little fun. That’s really all that matters. FWIW, this is unfiltered straight out of the camera.
— at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 40.
In the late spring of 1982 shortly after the American shuttle had started flying missions, word reached the west that the Soviet Union had launched their own space shuttle. As was customary at the time, the Soviets gave little to no information on what the spacecraft was, and that left the western press to make their best guess.
The widely respected Aviation and Space Technology magazine released this rendering, which made its way to various periodicals.
Obviously, Buran was very different.
I drove out to Playalinda Beach on the Cape Canaveral National Seashore yesterday (it’s about 30 minutes away) and got a great look at Artemis-1 as it sat on Launch Complex 39-B awaiting Wet Dress Rehearsal on April 1-3, 2022.
Artemis will be at LC-39B until sometime the week of April 4th, when it will be returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building to be prepared for its launch to the moon. When it flies, it will be the most powerful rocket ever launched — 39,000 kN (8,800,000 lb) of force — more than the venerable Saturn V.
Given a successful dress rehearsal, it should head to the moon from Kennedy Space Center in June. It will orbit Luna for five days after arrival, and then depart back for the Earth.
“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.
My father Armand worked at Cape Kennedy (now Kennedy Space Center) during the Apollo program. He was the Pad Chief — his responsibilities included fire and safety during any launch pad operations — and that included astronaut safety except for when they were in the rocket itself. Once they were strapped in to the Apollo capsule, the Launch Escape System (a rocket on top of the rocket) was the primary safety system, but there were also others: the infamous Rubber Room, zip-lining drops away from pad, others.
One thing that may not immediately be apparent where a Pad Chief’s job was concerned: the Saturn V was launched off of a mobile launch pad. It was built over 3.5 miles from where it launched, and it had to be moved from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad complex on the edge of the coast. To get there, a huge system called the Transporter-Crawler moved the 362-foot rocket on a road of river rock at a whopping one MPH. It took a while. And every inch of the way, Dad and his fire and rescue team were right beside it just in case something happened.
When Apollo 6(1) was being moved out to the pad, it of course went down that rocky road, and Florida being Florida, there’s wildlife everywhere. It could be anything: from a battalion of mosquitoes to a Bald Eagle, a gator, a wild boar, lizards of all shapes and sizes, bobcats, or something else. Florida is alive, and Kennedy Space Center adjoins a National Wildlife Refuge, giving the local fauna plenty of space to roam. When you visit the place, probably the second thing you notice is how wild it all is.
On the day the rocket was lumbering out to its launch complex, a small snapping turtle was paying no attention to the 6,000,000 pound vehicle carrying the most powerful non-explosive machine humanity had ever built bearing down on it. It slowly crawled out of the marshes and was headed to the next one on the other side of the road. And once a turtle makes up its mind, there’s no stopping it. Sure enough it had bad timing: it walked squarely underneath the middle of one of the treadmills which then proceeded to drive right over him.
You might think that was the end of that, and that the turtle was ground into soup beneath the Saturn V as it rolled slowly over.
You would be wrong.
After 20 minutes or so, the crawler rolled of the spot where it had run over the turtle. “And there it was,” my Dad used to relate. “Squished into the rocks.”
“In one piece. And looking pretty pissed off.”
“So then we walked over to where the turtle was, embedded in the rocks, and the he stood up and walked off, like nothing had ever happened.”
I asked him if ever saw the turtle again. “Maybe. They didn’t like it when the rocket launched because it shook them all to hell. If I was him I’d have moved along to where the tourists were so I could get a free handout.”
The quip about gators is a quick story for another time: why you never went near the water for a day or so after a Saturn V launch. It made them rather salty.
(1) I am 90% certain Dad said it was Apollo 6.
We often view going to the moon as a political stunt. The thing is, it was actually a profitable investment made by the US Government.
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