The Progress launch scheduled to deliver supplies and propellant to ISS has failed. This is the second failure of a Russian launcher in a week — a Proton put a comsat in the wrong orbit on Friday.
I don’t know how big a problem this is for ISS, or when the next mission is scheduled. I assume they have a contingency plan, but it sure would be nice if SpaceX and Orbital can get operational soon. I think there will be a press conference in half an hour to discuss the situation.
[Update after press conference]
summary
Suffredini is saying that there’s plenty of margin for supplies, even if the next flight is delayed. I wonder if this will affect Soyuz launches?
[Update a few minutes later]
A summary of the presser from Keith Cowing:
Shortly after third stage ignition the spacecraft shut the engine down. The third stage and Progress subsequently crashed. Soyuz-FG (crew) and Soyuz-U (cargo) have similar third stage designs so this will have impact on the planned 22 September crew launch. We can go several months without a resupply vehicle if that becomes necessary. We have a 40-50 days of contingency beyond normal crew stay time. Eventually the Soyuz vehicle on orbit will ‘time out’ and have to come home. If the anomaly is solved the Progress flight in October could fly sooner.
Doesn’t sound like a crisis, but it would still be nice to get some American systems going.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I’m wondering if this had happened on a crewed launch, that they could have safely aborted?
[Update a few minutes later]
A couple more tweets from Jeff Foust: “Suffredini: agreement to fly up to 800 kg on SpaceX COTS C2/C3 flight, but had not been planning on using much of it.”
“Suffredini: not desirable, but could go through all of 2012 without CRS flights; hopeful at least one vehicle enters service next year.”
[Update a few minutes later]
This is really another demonstration of the folly of our space policy for the last half decade, when Mike Griffin took over. With the retirement of the Shuttle, and now this, we now have no, repeat no way to get astronauts to ISS. The ones there aren’t stranded — they can come back on the Soyuz that’s up there, but we can’t replace them until we resolve the issue with the Soyuz launcher. For an investment like this we should have redundant means of accessing it, and right now we have none, and even after we get it fixed, there will be no backup. If we had a sane policy we’d be doing everything possible to accelerate commercial crew. Instead, Congress wants to cut the funding for it, so they can feed it to a jobs program that has no hope of solving this problem for years, if ever.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, that was a short era:
“From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability,” the Russian space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.
Roskosmos expressed its admiration for the shuttle programme, which it said had delivered payloads to space indispensable for construction of the ISS.
“Mankind acknowledges the role of American space ships in exploring the cosmos,” it added.
But Roskosmos also used the occasion to tout the virtues of the Soyuz (Union) spacecraft, which unlike the shuttle lands on Earth vertically with the aid of parachutes after leaving orbit.
It said that there was a simple answer to why the Soyuz was still flying after the shuttles retired — “reliability and not to mention cost efficiency.”
It lashed out at what it said were foreign media descriptions of the Soyuz as old spaceships, saying the design was constantly being modernized.
Anyone want to take up a collection to have an order of crow delivered to Roscosmos?
[Update early afternoon]
A haiku:
Eating Crow
This was the era
Of reliability
Well so much for that
From the comsat article:
But by midday Eastern Daylight Time Aug. 19, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network had located the Express-AM4 satellite, saying it was in an orbit with an apogee of 20,317 kilometers, a perigee of 1,007 kilometers and an inclination relative to the equator of 51.3 degrees. One industry official said it would be difficult, from this position, to maneuver Express-AM4 into operational position in geostationary orbit with sufficient life remaining to make the effort worthwhile. At press time, however, neither Roscosmos nor the Express-AM4 owner, Russian Satellite Communications Co. (RSCC) of Moscow, had declared the mission a total loss.
I wonder if this is a suitable candidate for the lunar slingshot maneuver to lower the inclination? This was successfully done on a comsat stranded in a similar orbit back in 1998. Lowering inclination takes a lot of energy, more than boosting the apogee out to the moon and using lunar gravity to lower the inclination.
As for the Progress loss, it’s disappointing but perhaps not too serious for ISS operations. The last Shuttle mission carried a lot of supplies to the ISS. I wonder if NASA will allow SpaceX to carry some actual supplies on the next Dragon mission (currently scheduled for the end of November) that’s supposed to dock with the ISS.
Back of the envelope, I get ~2500 m/s of delta-V for a lunar-flyby transfer from the current orbit, compared to ~1400 m/s for a direct GEO injection from the planned orbit. Based on its nominal 15-year life, I expect the total delta-V capability of Express AM-4 is ~2250 m/s. So, the lunar transfer looks unlikely, and if extreme astrodynamic cleverness can bring it into the barely-possible range there probably wouldn’t be enough useful life left to justify the effort.
All I’m suggesting is that they did it once before and it worked. Whether it would work again this time would depend on several factors such as the amount of delta-v capacity in the satellite and the exact orbit compared to the previous attempt.
When you’re considering the delta-v required to get into GEO, did you allow for lowering the inclination from about 50 degrees to near zero degrees? That’s where the real energy consumption is required. It would be relatively easy to raise the apogee and perigee to GEO altitudes but the high inclination would leave the satellite pretty useless.
When I was doing GEO satellite ops, a typical station-keeping delta-v would require a thruster burn of about 12 seconds. To change inclination by the same amount required a thruster burn of over 30 minutes. The satellite was launched with 600 pounds of propellant for a planned 10 year operational life, giving a propellant budget of 60 pounds per year. Of that, 57 pounds was to maintain the inclination within limits and the remaining 3 pounds for east-west stationkeeping and daily momentum wheel unload burns.
Prior to this Soyuz-U failure, my estimate for the reliability of this launcher is an “instantaneous” MTBF of 52 flights (so, roughly a 2% failure rate). Since there have been about 75 launches since the previous failure, this is about on track, I would say. [BTW title on the jpg is wrong — should say “RGM from 10th Failure”]
By committing to a Soyuz platform, you are committing to a 2% failure rate. I would say with a mature platform like this, what you see is what you get, and nothing is going to change this number radically except a wholesale redesign. You will see gradual improvement over time but the failure rate will not change noticeably for hundreds, if not thousands, more flights.
Back in the 1980s, I remember reading in an intel report that the old Soviet Union was launching about 60 space missions a year, most of them on the Soyuz (SL04) booster or the version with an additional upper stage, the Molynia (SL06). They were launching on average almost one Soyuz booster a week. When they had the rare launch failure, they didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. In one case that I read about, they just took the next satellite of that type from the assembly line and launched it on the next Soyuz booster. This took place about 2 weeks following the failure.
Today, they aren’t building and launching nearly so many missions, partly because their satellites are much better (last longer and are more capable) and partly because they can’t afford it. I wonder if the reduction in flight rate has had an impact on their failure rate. When you do something about once a week, you’re likely to be more proficient than someone who does the same things once a month.
When you do something about once a week, you’re likely to be more proficient than someone who does the same things once a month.
Which is why the notion of flying the Shuttle only once a year (or even twice) was always insane.
“I’m wondering if this had happened on a crewed launch, that they could have safely aborted?”
The Soyuz 18a failure in 1975 was very similar. It happened at 295 seconds (as opposed to 325), after the escape tower had been jettisoned. Incomplete separation of the second and third stages threw it off course, and the auto-abort system shut down the third stage and used the Soyuz SPS to perform the abort separation (as Apollo would have done in any abort after LES tower jettison).
The cosmonauts had an extremely high-G reentry, but their main concern was coming down in China — in fact, they were more afraid of that than they were of dying… Nevertheless, they got down safety.
Or “safely.” Grrrr…
When you do something about once a week, you’re likely to be more proficient than someone who does the same things once a month.
Which is why the notion of flying the Shuttle only once a year (or even twice) was always insane.
OT: And that’s why developing the shuttle-derived SLS and only launching it from once a year to once every few years makes no sense, either. They’ll have to maintain a large standing army (cast of thousands) of personnel along with all of the necessary infrastructure, paying for everything whether the SLS flies or not. It’ll absorb a lot of the NASA budget leaving little for anything else. And they’ll justify all of the personnel by saying that because so much is riding on each launch, they need a lot of people to make sure things work properly.
Insanity.
As for the Soyuz booster family, it’s arguably the most successful set of rockets ever made. It not only has flown more than any other rocket, it’s possible that it has flown more than all other rockets put together. Yes, it has had some failures. Come back to me when any other booster has flown over 1500 times and we can compare the success rate.
Rand you are a man of integrity. Our president would not be letting this “Crisis” go to waste. Perhaps he won’t. If he can get off the golf course early today he may still have time to talk to the press about the situation that our present NASA policy and leadership in congress have gotten us into.
Larry J: Yes, I did include the inclination change. And yes, they did do it once before. They did it from a 400 km by 36,000 km orbit; this time they are stuck in a roughly 1,000 x 20,000 km orbit. That equates to about 400 m/s of extra delta-V, and judging by its subsequent life HGS-1 had maybe 200 m/s of delta-V left after reaching GEO. Try the same trick with Express-AM4 and you come up about 200 m/s short.
Feel free to check my math, but this is what I do professionally.
I wonder if NASA will allow SpaceX to carry some actual supplies on the next Dragon mission
Currently only wheels of cheese are authorized, although even that required a hundred guvmint lawyers to cut through the red tape. Cutting the cheese still allowed.
Heh, I love the haiku. Is it your own work?
Yes. A friend over on Facebook arbitrarily declared it rocket haiku day. I came up with that one, then decided to repost here where more people would see it.
Choices
Pork is tasty
But control elusive
Let’s go commercial
“But control is elusive…”
The cosmonauts had an extremely high-G reentry, but their main concern was coming down in China — in fact, they were more afraid of that than they were of dying… Nevertheless, they got down safety.
No, they got down alive. One was injured so badly that he never flew again.
The fact that the biological specimen still has a heartbeat does not mean it was a safe landing.
Imagine if we applied that same standard to aviation. The airlines would be out of business in no time.
Ken, a few wheels of cheese might be welcome aboard ISS.
Perhaps Elon can open a general store.
I wonder if the astronauts have an authorized per diem?
Alert SpaceX to break out the backup cheese wheel!
The remainder of the 800kg test payload should consist of Ritz crackers and bottles of a decent Chablis (California, of course).
Of course they have per diem. It’s the government. Any government worker gets per diem when travelling. But there is a suspicious amount of suspect receipts being turned in.
“No, they got down alive. One was injured so badly that he never flew again.”
Actually, neither of them ever flew again, but the extent of Lazarev’s injuries isn’t really known — it has been rumored, but never been officially acknowledged as far as I can tell. There is no official connection between any injuries he might have sustained and his future flight status, as far as I know.
More likely they didn’t fly again because of the ruckus they made over not being paid their 3,000 ruble space flight bonus — a fight they eventually won.
Of course they have per diem. It’s the government. Any government worker gets per diem when travelling.
I doubt that the matter has ever come up before.
Where do you find this per diem? Neither GSA, State Department, nor DoD lists a rate for Low Earth Orbit.
But there is a suspicious amount of suspect receipts being turned in.
Given the lack of stores and restaurants, I think even one receipt would be considered suspicious. 🙂
the extent of Lazarev’s injuries isn’t really known — it has been rumored, but never been officially acknowledged as far as I can tell.
Meaningless. Official medical records are always confidential, even in the US.
More likely they didn’t fly again because of the ruckus they made over not being paid their 3,000 ruble space flight bonus
Makarov flew again on Soyuz 27/26.
3,000 rubles is much less than the cost of training a new cosmonaut.
But having cosmonauts who don’t buck the system — priceless.
You are, however, correct about Makarov flying again. He flew twice more, in fact.
The Russians call it docking with the ground.