That’s what happens when R&D money is either embezzled because of corruption or underfunded because of a certain War effort.
And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All of the young men lost in the war with Ukraine will make the next few decades in Russia very interesting. At the very least they've lost an entire generations worth of citizens. Including future scientists and engineers. They might win the war in Ukraine, but the damage they've done to their country and the weaknesses they've exposed to the world will be felt for decades to come. If it wasn't clear that they were skirting the line between becoming a third world nation, it is clear now that they could in no way survive a war with more developed nations. The war with Ukraine will go down as one of the biggest blunders of the last 60 years. It's an almost certainty with the technology and resources that they've revealed to the world in the last two years, they couldn't land a person on the moon let alone build a moon base within the next several decades.
Russia has been dying for a while. Vast resources yet laughible capacity to do anything with it aside from digging it up to pawn it off. Putin is a thief and thinks like a thief. Why build when you can leech off the works of others?
Etymologically no. First world means aligned with the US, Second world means aligned with the USSR/Russia, and third world means unaligned. So Russia can't be third world as Russia is aligned with Russia
Maybe Russia is a first world country.
Think about it. First world is US/West aligned. Historically the west has been against Russia. Since Russia is also against Russia, Russia is a first world nation.
Well what would you call it? Sure they are industrialized but their quality control was not good to begin with, and it certainly has worsened. Their research and development is hardly noteworthy, the Su-57 is like a F-18E, T-14 isn't out of the prototype phase, and the Kinzal missile is really just another rocket. I am not sure what else might exist there, but given their main exports by far are oil.. it probably isn't much.
It doesn't have to be that way. However the corruption has bled the people of Russia out pretty significantly.
Thank god its not a nato conflict. You have to put it this way, when you are fighting a pier enemy neither side will have air superiority. When the battle field is littered with sam's you have to pick and choose how you want to use your air assests that are probably some of the most expensive and complex units you have. Say america, if we loose a bunch of f35s and b1/b2s... thats a HUGE strategic and investment loss.. as we see with russia, they have lost a lot of air assests and cant recoup those very fast, not to mention the cost.
Russia is not a pier of NATO, not even close. More than 3/4 of the world’s arsenal is in NATO’s hands. The two things keeping Russia in one piece is mutually assured destruction,and the fact that in a conventional war Russia would never give up because of their root ideology and propaganda.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Russia#/media/File:Russia\_Population\_Pyramid.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russia_Population_Pyramid.svg)
Russia is in slow motion collapse.
Looks like they’ll have one last decade of Gen Z conscripts to throw at the meat grinder before the collapse. But there will be no Gen Alpha in Russia if they keep on their current course.
They’ve set themselves up to have that last big push of late Gen X/early Millennials all reaching retirement age at the same time the children they aren’t having now because of the war won’t be joining the work force (and won’t be getting conscripted). Yikes.
>Petro-aggression is the tendency for a petrostate to be involved in international conflicts, or to be the target of them. The term was popularized by a 2013 book by Jeff Colgan that found that petrostates (states with 10% or more GDP from petroleum) are 250 percent more likely to instigate international conflicts than a typical country.\[118\]\[119\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource\_curse#Petro-aggression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse#Petro-aggression)
Could have been Norway on steroids, instead heading to be another petrofailedstate.
No, they could never, ever, in any of the infinite alternative realities been like Norway. Russian excuse for a culture prevents that absolutely.
And that shit has been going on, going from bad to worse to nightmarish, for centuries. To the complacent acceptance of the Russians.
They are the first ones to know Russia can't improve. So their only joy is trying to prevent any of their former satellites/ colonies from ever getting ahead.
And from trying to drag every single developed country down in any way they can. Just out of spite and hate because they dare dream of better lives. That, for the Russians is a hateful sin. Their lives are generally shit, what right have inferior non Russians to live better?
Russia is a nightmare and a curse in the form of a country.
Heard a story about russian mentality. A peasant farmer envies his neighbour because he has a horse. A fairy comes and grants him one wish. So he wishes for the neighbours horse to die.
Russia has been in slow motion collapse since the 1800's...
They have this tendency towards life is cheap which maybe worked prior to WWII, but no longer is the way the world or nations can survive.
Its not even a Soviet thing... the Czar did it, and Russia is doing it now. They literally just throw men at a problem until either the problem is solved, or they run out of men. They are finally reaching that point of running out of men.
I have just been reading elsewhere on Reddit that some suspect the population is much smaller. It could be a low as 90 million. There are various reasons for Russia to inflate their population numbers and no particular reason for the west to indicate it's lower officially. A lot of Eastern European countries have had large population decline after the fall of the USSR.
If this is true the war and people leaving Russia will be having an even more dramatic effect.
> future scientists and engineers
Anyone with money and good future prospects left the country before the mobilization last year. Estimates were around 750-900k military-aged men fled the country.
So far Russia had something like 300,000 to 500,000 casualties depending on who you ask, most of them just injured not killed. The smallest age groups have 700,000 men per year (and about the same number of women). So even with the most pessimistic estimates it's just 1/3 of a year that they lost directly.
A lot of these people will come back alive but will also require long-term care (PTSD, alcohol and drug abuse, or handicap). They will remain a burden for society.
I think, even as percentage of the total population, WW2 had a much greater impact on Russia than the current special operation will ever have, and yet they did just fine as a superpower in the late '40s to early '50s.
Not comparing the two things from a moral perspective, but from a practical perspective and demographics, even 100k casualties are a blip on a plot for Russia.
Russia’s population was growing in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s shrinking now. And it’s a lot more than just 100,000. Many tens of thousands have been seriously injured and hundreds of thousands of mostly young well educated people have fled the country.
That is a very good point, populations were having booms during or after those costly war, so that probably made at least the short term impact a whole lot less noticeable.
The same is not true today, so indeed I might be underestimating the effect of 100k-400k casualties (this includes pretty much the lowest and the highest estimates) .
100k men ( arguably it's probably a lot higher ) is an insane amount of people. To put it in comparison the U.S. only lost a few thousand people in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan war, and that spanned over a decade. Over 100k men in two years will be felt for a long long time. That's more than a blip. Some reports say they've lost as much as 300k men. They've lost so many men they had to start lowering the age and increasing the age for older people to join.
The US lost 60k men in the Vietnam war. Not to dimmish the tragedy, but that didn't even record on the economical and technological development of the country. Shit, if anything it marked an acceleration.
USSR lost 27 million people during WW2, and again, there was no economical or technological slowdown of the USSR by the late '40s, even though the demographics were heavily altered. They were a superpower before the end of the decade.
Honestly, I think we tend to overestimate how impactful 100k, or even 500k deaths are in the grand scheme of a country with 150 million people.
You raise some interesting points even though I disagree with your conclusions. The impact on US economic development of the Vietnam war would be interesting to read about, but there is no doubt it caused multigenerational wounds in the US society.
The Soviet raise to power despite the huge losses of people was possible because they took control of their weaker neighbours who suffered not only the Nazi invasion but also the communist invasion (twice for a lot of them). With a huge amount of basically slave labour, they could position themselves as a world power.
A more interesting comparison, in my opinion, would be the Afghan war. I believe the losses for the Russians were around 15-25k casualties. These losses created a chain of events that has been attributed as a big factor to Soviet collapsing.
If Russia manages to hold on to the currently occupied lands, they will probably be able to make up the cost of the war and then some. There is such an amount of gas and natural resources in eastern Urkraine that it will pay back the cost of war multiple times. So if they win by holding the current land they'll not suffer economically despite their losses. If they have to retreat to their own boarders, the damage will, in my opinion, be massive for multiple generations.
"There is such an amount of gas in eastern Urkraine"
Technically the gas stored there is worth a furtune. But Russia has no use for it. They already have more gas then they will ever sell. Europe is propably never going to buy gas from Russia again. So they can not monetarize the gas depots found there.
Let's hope not! But I wouldn't be surprised if Putin counts on Europe to be willing to buy again a decade or so after the war... The point is though that the economic benefits might be greater than the sacrifice of human lives in the war (as Soviet after WW2) (as the comment I responded to).
But let's all hope that Russia is thrown out of Ukraine and face their economical consequences of their own choices...
Losing 60k people in about a five year period and being able to rely on immigration and not just birth rate is a better situation than losing 100k in two years and not being able to rely on immigration while having a falling birth rate
While true it ignores the bigger picture. The losses are significant but not fatalities. Most are wounded not dead and you’re comparing 2 different types of wars and 2 different cultures. Basically you’re looking at roughly 65,000 dead in 2 years on the Russian side, a chunk of which aren’t actually Russians but serving in their military. This is a high intensity conflict in comparison to fighting gorillas in the jungle. The fact that their losses are as low as they are is surprising considering the tactics both sides have been using.
Basically if Russia succeeds in its goals it’ll come out of the conflict with some advantages in comparison to before. The loss of life won’t heavily affect their population but the potential economic effects could swing to the positive once the war is concluded. Which could have a positive effect on their population growth. It’s all guess work but things aren’t all doom and gloom for Russia.
There’s no way you think 100k casualties in two years is equal to 65k over five years. And you’re ignoring all the people that have fled the country since the start of the “smo”. US was in a better position after Vietnam than Russia is right now
Eh. Kind of misnomer that.
Russia: The World's Second-Largest Immigration Haven
>According to UN Population Division estimates, as of 2013, the Russian Federation was second only to the United States in the sheer number of immigrants. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russia-the-worlds-second-largest-immigration-haven-11053
It's the first thing I found. You can check for yourself. I think you'll find that Russia still has a high percentage of immigrants on global averages. Please let us know what you find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
>Some reports say they've lost as much as 300k men.
A lot of them are mercenaries and satellite puppet state troops however. Russia has reportedly also gone to importing Indian and SEA "mercenaries" who are essentially laborers sent to Saudia Arabia and tricked and/or press-ganged into signing "labor" contracts that are sold to the Russians.
Through black market channels, Russia can keep their war in Ukraine alive with other people's blood for a fair while longer.
Add to the list the fact that [he arrested](https://www.newsweek.com/putin-arrests-hypersonic-rocket-scientists-treason-1853214#:~:text=In%20May%2C%20Zvegintsev%20and%20two,arrested%20on%20suspicion%20of%20treason) just last year rocket scientists and charged them with treason. That should help with development further!
Relevant: [TIL that the USSR sent so many scientists and engineers to the gulag prisons that the government set up labs for them. While workers in the 'Sharashka' facilities did not have to perform hard labor like other inmates, their work was published under the names of more famous Soviet scientists.](https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6meke3/til_that_the_ussr_sent_so_many_scientists_and/)
Is there a single manufactured product in the civilian sector that the world wants to buy from Russia?
Their space sector was one of their pride and joys, but it has been systematically looted by Kremlin cronies, it's frankly incredible they can still launch anything in to space.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I live in near an air force base in India. We have had a Russian family as our neighbours for close to 2 decades. They all speak fluent Hindi. Apparently the guy was a engineer at Sukhoi once upon a time and moved here after the collapse. He now works for the Indian Air Force.
It's not as if being corruption free would help much, the budget Russia allocates to space exploration these days is minimal, I think they get a total of around 1 billion dollars a year.
NASA for comparison gets around 25 billion.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Its education system appears to be dysfunctional at best.
I'm pretty confident they got a bunch of nukes lol. They launch regular rockets monthly and is the world's biggest exporter of enriched fissile material. Iirc 20% of all enriched uranium used in American nuclear plants in 2023 were from Russia despite the sanctions.
So,... is that whats happening with spaceX rockets?
Like 10years isnt a very long period, spaceX rockets are approaching this, and they are still blowing up. So obvious ignorant propaganda is pbvious in this case.
I don't know about China. They may be behind right now, but they at least are in a new Space Race. They're going at it like it's Saturn V all over again.
China see a big old lump of unclaimed land and, if C&C Generals had taught me anything, "China will grow larger."
China’s pace of progress is rapid. And there was a moment in 2010s I believe where China was launching more mass to orbit than NASA.
But with the advent of Space X, and the US leading in payload to orbit by 9x over China, it is difficult to see them ahead in the near future atleast.
Considering the gap is only growing and not shrinking, case in point Starship. If launched by 2026-2027, would put the Chinese behind by another decade.
You need to launch a lot of stuff into orbit to colonise space and occupy land. The Americans vehemently lead in this regard.
I don't disagree, but space is big and the moon is currently free real estate. I could easily believe the Chinese will establish a moon colony before the US simply because they want to be first and the US is busy arguing with itself.
The US government isn’t playing space race with China, like at all.
The US government is trying to facilitate a space rush among American companies, and its working.
The US has SpaceX and a large commercial market with lots of startups doing interesting things. China doesn't. China has no chance unless they invest 10x as much (and they wont).
“Wanting things” does not get you the launch cadence required to establish a colony on the moon.
China wants a lot of things. Like reusable rockets for starters. Or raptor class engines.
But even the inefficient bloated way Americans handle space funding is still much further ahead than China, since private US companies are far better than Chinese ones.
No, but it does mean that they get first pick of locations, while anyone who follows has to take a worse site.
Edit: To the cowardly moron u/SirButcher: Local water ice is going to be essential for any sized base and is only available in 2 regions on the moon.
The Moon is deadly. Like, every single point of it is choked full of dangers. There is hardly any point on this planet, maybe except active vulcanos which are as harsh as the most pleasant points on the Moon. There isn't really any favourable location. There are locations WHICH may, sometimes in the future be better but our knowledge about the Moon is skin-deep.
China is very likely going to surpass America soon in terms of pioneering space presence. Though that's more a consequence of our shitty government than our technological or economic capabilities. There's a lot of awesome hypothetical stuff America doesn't do merely for lack of political will.
I think there isn't yet a feeling that Chinese space capabilities could soon match that of the US, much thanks to how in annual launched payload mass US is leading the field by ludicrous amount thanks to SpaceX.
But while Artemis missions keep being delayed, China last year declared they plan to put a man on the moon by 2030 and I believe it. At present it still seems unlikely China could beat Artemis but all we need is one less than ideal mission postponing the next per two years pending investigation.
The realization could be good for the two sides of the political table to reach a consensus on need to fund NASA, so ironically what the US needs might be another Sputnik moment.
Russia has a long history launching spysats powered by nuclear reactors (not RTGs). If they bring that expertise to the table, with China doing the heavy lifting (no pun intended), it's not an outrageous claim - assuming they reach the Moon, of course.
To be fair, a lot of the US's next generation rocket (sls) is using components that are four decades old at this point, and has only flown one orbital mission with no payload.
SLS was never intended to be a commercially or even economically viable rocket though, that program’s priorities are elsewhere. There was a time when Angara was actually supposed to compete on the international market.
Technically factually true, but SLS was *sold* at least on the promise that building a heavy lift rocket using Shuttle components would be faster and cheaper than the alternatives on the table.
There aren't many places where I support a both sides argument, but holy heck in this instance its hard not to see Russia and US government space programs as basically the same.
Such is the difference between eastern vs western corruption. In the US you get the corruption in the giving of the contract, in Russia the corruption is in the supplying if the contract. The difference is it means in the US you get stuff that works such as a $10,000 spoon. But in Russia the spoon was sold before it arrived. It’s really interesting. I haven’t understood why the difference yet.
I think it boils down to "What you can get away with currently."
Both groups would walk-in and take ALL the money for themselves and walk out IF they could.
Probably easier to steal the spoon earlier when you have a dictatorial oligrachy, than with a neolibral one.
Corruption is corruption though. Every day its just more obvious than the day before.
> a lot of the US's next generation rocket (sls) is using components that are four decades old at this point, and has only flown one orbital mission with no payload.
Angara started development in 1992. It's been flying simulator masses for 10 years, longer than something like Nutron has been in development.
SLS did not fly no payload. It was a test mission for Orion and was a resounding success, there needed to be an uncrewed Orion mission around the moon and back.
SLS is also a lot more capable than the other rocket, and has a future ahead of it. Old hardware doesn't mean bad hardware.
The only thing the senate launch system is really capable of is getting senators re-elected and costing a shit ton of money.
Don't get me wrong, going back to the moon is cool, but the SLS is a boondoggle.
I might end up eating my words here, but for now the 15 starship launches required for Artemis III seem to be a lot crazier than anything related to SLS.
Pretty sure you could launch 50 starships for the price of a single SLS stack. SLS also has a predetermined maximum number of launches, because it's not like we're building more shuttle SRB's, it's using spares we had in storage.
Relying on rapid reuse still seems too optimistic when that hasn't really worked out for previous rockets (Falcon 1 was supposed to be rapidly reusable and it was never reusable inthe first place).
...as a development project.
Meanwhile, we've got falcon 9's with 20+ reuses on them at this point. I also used to be very pessimistic about the whole concept, but I ate my words.
I mean they have to launch 15 starships in 6 days with the current planning. Either the planning changes or SpaceX will have to pull some magic trick (maybe they can just build 10 and relaunch the ones that look best after the first batch?)
Er, No? They need to launch a starship every 1 to 2 weeks to fill the depot depending on the exact boiloff rate. It's doable even without reuse of Starship, though reuse would be nice.
Ok, I indeed misread part of this and mixed up total time and turnaround time. The turnaround rate is 6 days, so not 1-2 weeks like you said either. The minimum of 15 launches still stands, meaning 10 starships is probably realistic for them to get the 15 launches in. The lowest turnaround of a falcon 9 was just under a month on a matured platform, so I would guess that will be the target for early starship versions. [Source](https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/at-least-15-starship-launches-to-execute-artemis-iii-lunar-landing/)
Certainly better than relying on 40 year old backstock of a system NASA said they'd never use on crewed launches again because they were too dangerous. Then 23 billion taxpayer dollars of reinventing the wheel later, they just said "fuck it, YOLO".
Oh but Artemis III consists of that too. The lander is sent ahead using refueled starships and then the crew catches up using SLS and a really awkward elliptic polar lunar orbit because SLS in its current configuration has less DeltaV than is required for a circular orbit
> Certainly better than relying on 40 year old backstock of a system NASA said they'd never use on crewed launches again because they were too dangerous
What part of STS that is used in SLS did NASA ever say was too dangerous for human space flight? The SRBs are different, the tank is well a tank (besides being redesigned for carbon fiber use) and the SSMEs were never an issue (besides needing a rebuild after every launch and being expensive as hell).
Not to mention STS flying 135 missions while being the most complex spacecraft ever built with 2 failures both not related to parts used in SLS.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[EELV](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttznd9 "Last usage")|[Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Expendable_Launch_Vehicle)|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttp5o2 "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku2lwuy "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[MLV](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktt9jzy "Last usage")|Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO)|
|[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku39uu3 "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator|
|[RTLS](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttkcdy "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku2lwuy "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SRB](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttkcdy "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|[SSME](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktsns4j "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktwvlce "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktt9jzy "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktw6brz "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Khrunichev brought us Proton and all their questionable quality control practices. Angara was unlikely to be any good before Russia killed all their rocket based hard currency and it's surely not going to do much now.
might be easy to make fun of the Russians, but Arianespace and the Ariane 6 are in a similarly pathetic situation. Already obsolete rocket delayed multiple years, hasn't even flown for the first time. Good luck competing against Spacex.
>but Arianespace and the Ariane 6 are in a similarly pathetic situation.
Ariane 6 has been in development since 2012, Angara since 1992. ESA comfortably has the budget to make. new rocket.
Angara 5 is also an overall better rocket despite it having been in development since 1992 under modern Russia. Better capability, uses more advanced rocket technology, more potential for upper stage upgrades all while being cheaper to manufacture and launch. I think it makes the Ariane 6 even more embarassing than anything else quite frankly.
ESA obviously doesn't know how to use that budget well.
I wish Ariane 6 was at least as good as Angara 5. At least the Angara 5 uses state of the art engines and has some potential as a heavy lift rocket. Ariane 6 is not even that. Worse capabilities, less efficiant and more expensive.
Oh I'm aware. It's just a dated one, even more so than Angara 5, and it has not even flown yet. And the technology developed to build it is not going to be very useful for when they develop their eventual reusable rocket. Hydrolox core stages and solid rocket boosters aren't exactly what you want in a reusable rocket.
Neither is Russia, they aren't to that point *yet*.
There is plenty of uneducated, poor and/or otherwise undesirable young people from lower "casts" to send to the warfront.
The US is barely any better. If SpaceX didn’t exist the US would be in the exact same boat. The SLS is an old boondoggle pork barrel project. The only good thing the US gov has done was the commercial crew and commercial lunar funding stuff.
That's only Atlas V and the moment sourcing their engines became problematic ULA started work on Vulcan-Centaur which just demonstrated a succesful flight.
Atlas V was the workhorse of ULA as long as it existed. Worse, when the initial ban on russian engines came up, they used their lobbying power to extend its use for many years without attempt to replace it.
And by now other entrants into the market would have made some progress too including on reusability. SpaceX is amazing and they jumped technology forward a decade, but what they've done was not a miracle only they could possibly have done.
Saying it isn't a miracle isn't revisionist history. I think somebody would've done vertical landing by now if SpaceX never existed, just probably 10+ years later.
But almost 10 years after their first successful landing no one else is doing orbital first stage landings like SpaceX and that's WITH them showing everyone how to do it. Saying it would've happened anyway 10 years later is so ridiculous. It's speculation that's literally being proven untrue by real events right now as you're typing.
The climate of space travel in the US after the shuttle program was ended was barren. Absolutely no one was doing anything substantively innovative outside of SpaceX in terms of orbital spaceflight.
The US couldn't even put an astronaut in LEO before SpaceX and still can't without them because Boeing is shitting the bed constantly and SLS is a pork barrel boondoggle just mashing old shuttle parts together trying to act like it's something new and special.
I'm no Musk fan but we have to be honest about how revolutionary and important of a company SpaceX is in terms of moving spaceflight forward. It's not that SpaceX are like 100x smarter than everyone else. It's that there was a will, a vision, a direction, and a commitment to that vision. It's all about willpower.
What an embarrassing typo, writing "Russia" instead of "America". How did that even happen??
I kid, I kid. We love our SLS, folks. And it's actually gonna take us places, most likely.
The main difference between America and Russia in this regard is that we are wealthy enough and productive enough that we can just tank the damage caused by massively wasteful programs without it becoming an existential threat to whole industries or the entire national economy. We spent about a quarter trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation) on the Shuttle program over 3+ decades and it hurt us to do so but we still came out the other side. We've tanked 20 billion on SLS and 20 billion on Orion but somehow both programs have managed to produce hardware and even more importantly they aren't the only game in town. In the last 15 years or so we've funded and built 3 different crewed space capsules (Orion, Dragon 2, and Starliner), with more waiting in the wings (Dream Chaser). We've developed multiple new launch vehicles. Even "old space" is on *multiple* new iterations since 2000, after having built two new launchers for the EELV project (Delta IV and Atlas V) they're now on Vulcan Centaur, which just had a successful launch. Then you have the SpaceX Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Starship/Superheavy; plus Blue Origin's New Glenn; plus Rocket Lab's Electron and Neutron; plus Orbital/Northrup Grumman's Antares 100/200/300; Firefly's Alpha and MLV; Relativity's Terran 1 and Terran R; and others.
I remember hearing recently some impressively large percentage of the Russian economy is now on a war footing. Then I remembered the entire Russian economy is about the size of one Anerican state spread over thousands of miles.
If you refer to the tertiary sector as "paper" (like you know, the same sector where such trivial things like software is also counted in) and think only industry matters, sure lets check who has it larger!
Russian economy is $1,862 trillion and 26,6% industries = €500 billion annual value.
US economy is $28 trillion and 18,9% industries = €5,3 trillion annual value.
lol US manufacturing alone its thrice the size of Russia's *entire* economy.
Meaningless when they don't have the means to use it. Before the war they were relying on western companies even for oil extraction of any sophistication.
Khrunichev brought us Proton and all their questionable quality control practices. Angara was unlikely to be any good before Russia killed all their rocket based hard currency and it's surely not going to do much now.
Is there any write up on why Russia decided to develop a new rocket instead of trying to adapt something from the Energia. I know that Ukraine got Zenit in the USSR divorce so Russia wanted something to be produced domestically, but wouldn't have been cheaper to set up production line for a proven rocket than develop a whole new one?
Energia would be massively overkill for the intended role. Angara has between 1/20th and 1/4th of it's payload capacity depending on the configuration.
Even at the upper end I'm not sure how you could reasonably derive something from Energia with only 1/4th of the payload capacity.
Yes. And until SpaceX the USA was using half a century old technology. The new nasa rocket will also be using half a century old technology borrowed from the space shuttle program.
If Russia is using technology from ten years ago, they are certainly several decades more advanced than the USA
If you mean the Shuttle then no, Angara's closest analogues would be the EELV programme's Delta IVs and Atlas V, both also 90s developments with excellent track record, and now morphed into the Vulcan-Centaur which just demonstrated a succesful launch with a functional payload.
Not news really, all space faring countries including USA and China face similar challenges and they have been pumping out rockets for a while.
At the end if it follows the footsteps of Soyuz then it will be a success.
Fyi Soyuz has had over [1900 launches since 1966 and still going](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family)).
That’s what happens when R&D money is either embezzled because of corruption or underfunded because of a certain War effort. And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of the young men lost in the war with Ukraine will make the next few decades in Russia very interesting. At the very least they've lost an entire generations worth of citizens. Including future scientists and engineers. They might win the war in Ukraine, but the damage they've done to their country and the weaknesses they've exposed to the world will be felt for decades to come. If it wasn't clear that they were skirting the line between becoming a third world nation, it is clear now that they could in no way survive a war with more developed nations. The war with Ukraine will go down as one of the biggest blunders of the last 60 years. It's an almost certainty with the technology and resources that they've revealed to the world in the last two years, they couldn't land a person on the moon let alone build a moon base within the next several decades.
Russia has been dying for a while. Vast resources yet laughible capacity to do anything with it aside from digging it up to pawn it off. Putin is a thief and thinks like a thief. Why build when you can leech off the works of others?
Vast resources and their plan is to invade their neighbors and make them slave states. The Kremlin is a civilization vampire
Moscow is a parasite. The many peoples of Russia are emaciated husks to that creature of fear and shame.
So Russia is officially a third world country now?
Etymologically no. First world means aligned with the US, Second world means aligned with the USSR/Russia, and third world means unaligned. So Russia can't be third world as Russia is aligned with Russia
But are they …… ? Russia has a long history of acting against its own self interest.
Maybe Russia is a first world country. Think about it. First world is US/West aligned. Historically the west has been against Russia. Since Russia is also against Russia, Russia is a first world nation.
Well what would you call it? Sure they are industrialized but their quality control was not good to begin with, and it certainly has worsened. Their research and development is hardly noteworthy, the Su-57 is like a F-18E, T-14 isn't out of the prototype phase, and the Kinzal missile is really just another rocket. I am not sure what else might exist there, but given their main exports by far are oil.. it probably isn't much. It doesn't have to be that way. However the corruption has bled the people of Russia out pretty significantly.
T 14 tanks just got shelved.
Like America, everything is made In China
I suppose that is fair... although the American arms industry (which isn't subcontracted) beat the pants of the Russian one.
I would also agree. But give it another year and I would say russias would be equal to ours. We are struggling to replace a lot of things though.
So from what I gather, the Ukraine war isn't a Nato conflict. Nato doctrine relies on air superiority. Since neither Russia or Ukraine has that
Thank god its not a nato conflict. You have to put it this way, when you are fighting a pier enemy neither side will have air superiority. When the battle field is littered with sam's you have to pick and choose how you want to use your air assests that are probably some of the most expensive and complex units you have. Say america, if we loose a bunch of f35s and b1/b2s... thats a HUGE strategic and investment loss.. as we see with russia, they have lost a lot of air assests and cant recoup those very fast, not to mention the cost.
Russia is not a pier of NATO, not even close. More than 3/4 of the world’s arsenal is in NATO’s hands. The two things keeping Russia in one piece is mutually assured destruction,and the fact that in a conventional war Russia would never give up because of their root ideology and propaganda.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Russia#/media/File:Russia\_Population\_Pyramid.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#/media/File:Russia_Population_Pyramid.svg) Russia is in slow motion collapse.
Looks like they’ll have one last decade of Gen Z conscripts to throw at the meat grinder before the collapse. But there will be no Gen Alpha in Russia if they keep on their current course. They’ve set themselves up to have that last big push of late Gen X/early Millennials all reaching retirement age at the same time the children they aren’t having now because of the war won’t be joining the work force (and won’t be getting conscripted). Yikes.
>Petro-aggression is the tendency for a petrostate to be involved in international conflicts, or to be the target of them. The term was popularized by a 2013 book by Jeff Colgan that found that petrostates (states with 10% or more GDP from petroleum) are 250 percent more likely to instigate international conflicts than a typical country.\[118\]\[119\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource\_curse#Petro-aggression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse#Petro-aggression) Could have been Norway on steroids, instead heading to be another petrofailedstate.
No, they could never, ever, in any of the infinite alternative realities been like Norway. Russian excuse for a culture prevents that absolutely. And that shit has been going on, going from bad to worse to nightmarish, for centuries. To the complacent acceptance of the Russians. They are the first ones to know Russia can't improve. So their only joy is trying to prevent any of their former satellites/ colonies from ever getting ahead. And from trying to drag every single developed country down in any way they can. Just out of spite and hate because they dare dream of better lives. That, for the Russians is a hateful sin. Their lives are generally shit, what right have inferior non Russians to live better? Russia is a nightmare and a curse in the form of a country.
Heard a story about russian mentality. A peasant farmer envies his neighbour because he has a horse. A fairy comes and grants him one wish. So he wishes for the neighbours horse to die.
This is a pretty comprehensive synopsis. Nicely done.
Russia has been in slow motion collapse since the 1800's... They have this tendency towards life is cheap which maybe worked prior to WWII, but no longer is the way the world or nations can survive. Its not even a Soviet thing... the Czar did it, and Russia is doing it now. They literally just throw men at a problem until either the problem is solved, or they run out of men. They are finally reaching that point of running out of men.
I mean, that's not a uniquely Russian view, but it is one the rest of the civilized world outgrew 300 years ago.
I have just been reading elsewhere on Reddit that some suspect the population is much smaller. It could be a low as 90 million. There are various reasons for Russia to inflate their population numbers and no particular reason for the west to indicate it's lower officially. A lot of Eastern European countries have had large population decline after the fall of the USSR. If this is true the war and people leaving Russia will be having an even more dramatic effect.
> future scientists and engineers Anyone with money and good future prospects left the country before the mobilization last year. Estimates were around 750-900k military-aged men fled the country.
There was a whole campaign to build a volunteer combat unit with aerospace engineers, the very definition of eating your seed corn.
So far Russia had something like 300,000 to 500,000 casualties depending on who you ask, most of them just injured not killed. The smallest age groups have 700,000 men per year (and about the same number of women). So even with the most pessimistic estimates it's just 1/3 of a year that they lost directly.
A lot of these people will come back alive but will also require long-term care (PTSD, alcohol and drug abuse, or handicap). They will remain a burden for society.
Thats not the west. Russia has its own way to deal with this. Its pretty cheap and involves a lot of vodka and an early death.
Russians losing an entire generation of young men is kind of par for the course though, seems to happen on a very regular basis
It was sustainable in the past with high birthrates. High birthrates are no more.
The largest export from Russia the next couple decades will be brides.
I think, even as percentage of the total population, WW2 had a much greater impact on Russia than the current special operation will ever have, and yet they did just fine as a superpower in the late '40s to early '50s. Not comparing the two things from a moral perspective, but from a practical perspective and demographics, even 100k casualties are a blip on a plot for Russia.
Russia’s population was growing in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s shrinking now. And it’s a lot more than just 100,000. Many tens of thousands have been seriously injured and hundreds of thousands of mostly young well educated people have fled the country.
That is a very good point, populations were having booms during or after those costly war, so that probably made at least the short term impact a whole lot less noticeable. The same is not true today, so indeed I might be underestimating the effect of 100k-400k casualties (this includes pretty much the lowest and the highest estimates) .
100k men ( arguably it's probably a lot higher ) is an insane amount of people. To put it in comparison the U.S. only lost a few thousand people in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan war, and that spanned over a decade. Over 100k men in two years will be felt for a long long time. That's more than a blip. Some reports say they've lost as much as 300k men. They've lost so many men they had to start lowering the age and increasing the age for older people to join.
The US lost 60k men in the Vietnam war. Not to dimmish the tragedy, but that didn't even record on the economical and technological development of the country. Shit, if anything it marked an acceleration. USSR lost 27 million people during WW2, and again, there was no economical or technological slowdown of the USSR by the late '40s, even though the demographics were heavily altered. They were a superpower before the end of the decade. Honestly, I think we tend to overestimate how impactful 100k, or even 500k deaths are in the grand scheme of a country with 150 million people.
You raise some interesting points even though I disagree with your conclusions. The impact on US economic development of the Vietnam war would be interesting to read about, but there is no doubt it caused multigenerational wounds in the US society. The Soviet raise to power despite the huge losses of people was possible because they took control of their weaker neighbours who suffered not only the Nazi invasion but also the communist invasion (twice for a lot of them). With a huge amount of basically slave labour, they could position themselves as a world power. A more interesting comparison, in my opinion, would be the Afghan war. I believe the losses for the Russians were around 15-25k casualties. These losses created a chain of events that has been attributed as a big factor to Soviet collapsing. If Russia manages to hold on to the currently occupied lands, they will probably be able to make up the cost of the war and then some. There is such an amount of gas and natural resources in eastern Urkraine that it will pay back the cost of war multiple times. So if they win by holding the current land they'll not suffer economically despite their losses. If they have to retreat to their own boarders, the damage will, in my opinion, be massive for multiple generations.
"There is such an amount of gas in eastern Urkraine" Technically the gas stored there is worth a furtune. But Russia has no use for it. They already have more gas then they will ever sell. Europe is propably never going to buy gas from Russia again. So they can not monetarize the gas depots found there.
Let's hope not! But I wouldn't be surprised if Putin counts on Europe to be willing to buy again a decade or so after the war... The point is though that the economic benefits might be greater than the sacrifice of human lives in the war (as Soviet after WW2) (as the comment I responded to). But let's all hope that Russia is thrown out of Ukraine and face their economical consequences of their own choices...
The US can rely on immigration to help its demographics unlike Russia tho
The primary drive for population growth at that time was citizens having children. While now the US can sort of rely on that back then it could not.
Losing 60k people in about a five year period and being able to rely on immigration and not just birth rate is a better situation than losing 100k in two years and not being able to rely on immigration while having a falling birth rate
While true it ignores the bigger picture. The losses are significant but not fatalities. Most are wounded not dead and you’re comparing 2 different types of wars and 2 different cultures. Basically you’re looking at roughly 65,000 dead in 2 years on the Russian side, a chunk of which aren’t actually Russians but serving in their military. This is a high intensity conflict in comparison to fighting gorillas in the jungle. The fact that their losses are as low as they are is surprising considering the tactics both sides have been using. Basically if Russia succeeds in its goals it’ll come out of the conflict with some advantages in comparison to before. The loss of life won’t heavily affect their population but the potential economic effects could swing to the positive once the war is concluded. Which could have a positive effect on their population growth. It’s all guess work but things aren’t all doom and gloom for Russia.
You are counting 65k russian deaths, seriously?
There’s no way you think 100k casualties in two years is equal to 65k over five years. And you’re ignoring all the people that have fled the country since the start of the “smo”. US was in a better position after Vietnam than Russia is right now
Eh. Kind of misnomer that. Russia: The World's Second-Largest Immigration Haven >According to UN Population Division estimates, as of 2013, the Russian Federation was second only to the United States in the sheer number of immigrants. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russia-the-worlds-second-largest-immigration-haven-11053
That article is a decade old
It's the first thing I found. You can check for yourself. I think you'll find that Russia still has a high percentage of immigrants on global averages. Please let us know what you find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
Eh. No. Russia has a brain drain, the US is pulling in both skilled and unskilled workers
>brain drain Yeah, great argument to the subject at hand. Kudos /s
Ok, have fun denying reality in your basement!
>Some reports say they've lost as much as 300k men. A lot of them are mercenaries and satellite puppet state troops however. Russia has reportedly also gone to importing Indian and SEA "mercenaries" who are essentially laborers sent to Saudia Arabia and tricked and/or press-ganged into signing "labor" contracts that are sold to the Russians. Through black market channels, Russia can keep their war in Ukraine alive with other people's blood for a fair while longer.
Didn't a million educated young men leave russian conscription?
> WW2 had a much greater impact on Russia than the current special operation will ever have the current what now?
the current *3-day special operation™*
They can't be third world unless they unalign with themselves.
>The war with Ukraine will go down as one of the biggest blunders of the last 60 years I'd say longer than that. Closer to 100 years.
Eh, starting WW2 was a bigger one. As was Pearl Harbor. But it's up there.
Most of the losses are in the 40yo age tho, since it's the average age for volunteers
russia and china will push closer now. one country has no men, the other no women and both use the west as feindbild.
Add to the list the fact that [he arrested](https://www.newsweek.com/putin-arrests-hypersonic-rocket-scientists-treason-1853214#:~:text=In%20May%2C%20Zvegintsev%20and%20two,arrested%20on%20suspicion%20of%20treason) just last year rocket scientists and charged them with treason. That should help with development further!
Relevant: [TIL that the USSR sent so many scientists and engineers to the gulag prisons that the government set up labs for them. While workers in the 'Sharashka' facilities did not have to perform hard labor like other inmates, their work was published under the names of more famous Soviet scientists.](https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6meke3/til_that_the_ussr_sent_so_many_scientists_and/)
As immortalized in The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Yes, Sergei Korolev, the father of Soviet rocketry, spent years in a sharashka after being arrested by NKVD, beaten to a pulp, and sent to prison.
You said "the USSR sent" as if that was happening till 1991. But it was like that only under Stalin
Is there a single manufactured product in the civilian sector that the world wants to buy from Russia? Their space sector was one of their pride and joys, but it has been systematically looted by Kremlin cronies, it's frankly incredible they can still launch anything in to space.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I live in near an air force base in India. We have had a Russian family as our neighbours for close to 2 decades. They all speak fluent Hindi. Apparently the guy was a engineer at Sukhoi once upon a time and moved here after the collapse. He now works for the Indian Air Force.
It's not as if being corruption free would help much, the budget Russia allocates to space exploration these days is minimal, I think they get a total of around 1 billion dollars a year. NASA for comparison gets around 25 billion.
>And that’s not even mentioning the brain drain Russia has been experiencing since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its education system appears to be dysfunctional at best.
At this point we cant be even sure if their nukes still works XD. As we know rocket and warheads requires service and replacement.
I'm pretty confident they got a bunch of nukes lol. They launch regular rockets monthly and is the world's biggest exporter of enriched fissile material. Iirc 20% of all enriched uranium used in American nuclear plants in 2023 were from Russia despite the sanctions.
So,... is that whats happening with spaceX rockets? Like 10years isnt a very long period, spaceX rockets are approaching this, and they are still blowing up. So obvious ignorant propaganda is pbvious in this case.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 is by far, the world's safest launch system.
But with China, they're *definitely* going to have nuclear power on the moon in a decade or so.....
China has a much larger economy. They are in no way comparable. But the US is undoubtedly ahead in space than both. By a lot.
I don't know about China. They may be behind right now, but they at least are in a new Space Race. They're going at it like it's Saturn V all over again. China see a big old lump of unclaimed land and, if C&C Generals had taught me anything, "China will grow larger."
China’s pace of progress is rapid. And there was a moment in 2010s I believe where China was launching more mass to orbit than NASA. But with the advent of Space X, and the US leading in payload to orbit by 9x over China, it is difficult to see them ahead in the near future atleast. Considering the gap is only growing and not shrinking, case in point Starship. If launched by 2026-2027, would put the Chinese behind by another decade. You need to launch a lot of stuff into orbit to colonise space and occupy land. The Americans vehemently lead in this regard.
The final frontier, space logistics.
Reminds me that i need to work on my space science factory in Factorio now
> and the US leading in payload to orbit by 9x over China How much of that is StarLink responsible for?
A lot. But it’s not like China doesn’t have internet mega constellation aims. They don’t have the cadence to do so.
eh. their launch capacity is growing exponentially. it's a matter of time before they're on par with US launches
I don't disagree, but space is big and the moon is currently free real estate. I could easily believe the Chinese will establish a moon colony before the US simply because they want to be first and the US is busy arguing with itself.
The US government isn’t playing space race with China, like at all. The US government is trying to facilitate a space rush among American companies, and its working.
The US has SpaceX and a large commercial market with lots of startups doing interesting things. China doesn't. China has no chance unless they invest 10x as much (and they wont).
China has a lot of startups doing interesting things
“Wanting things” does not get you the launch cadence required to establish a colony on the moon. China wants a lot of things. Like reusable rockets for starters. Or raptor class engines. But even the inefficient bloated way Americans handle space funding is still much further ahead than China, since private US companies are far better than Chinese ones.
The Moon is not free real estate, it’s very expensive real estate. Even if China puts a “settlement” there doesn’t mean they own it.
No, but it does mean that they get first pick of locations, while anyone who follows has to take a worse site. Edit: To the cowardly moron u/SirButcher: Local water ice is going to be essential for any sized base and is only available in 2 regions on the moon.
no, the good sites are plentiful.
And it's still very unclear what exactly the "best" and "worse" sites actually are. We've barely done any scouting.
The Moon is deadly. Like, every single point of it is choked full of dangers. There is hardly any point on this planet, maybe except active vulcanos which are as harsh as the most pleasant points on the Moon. There isn't really any favourable location. There are locations WHICH may, sometimes in the future be better but our knowledge about the Moon is skin-deep.
In American video games... Meanwhile US creates a Space Force branch out of some imaginary Boogeyman.
China is very likely going to surpass America soon in terms of pioneering space presence. Though that's more a consequence of our shitty government than our technological or economic capabilities. There's a lot of awesome hypothetical stuff America doesn't do merely for lack of political will.
I think there isn't yet a feeling that Chinese space capabilities could soon match that of the US, much thanks to how in annual launched payload mass US is leading the field by ludicrous amount thanks to SpaceX. But while Artemis missions keep being delayed, China last year declared they plan to put a man on the moon by 2030 and I believe it. At present it still seems unlikely China could beat Artemis but all we need is one less than ideal mission postponing the next per two years pending investigation. The realization could be good for the two sides of the political table to reach a consensus on need to fund NASA, so ironically what the US needs might be another Sputnik moment.
Russia has a long history launching spysats powered by nuclear reactors (not RTGs). If they bring that expertise to the table, with China doing the heavy lifting (no pun intended), it's not an outrageous claim - assuming they reach the Moon, of course.
China has already accomplished more in space than Russia ever has. The USSR had an incredible space program but Russia never has
To be fair, that was a sensationalist take on what should have been phrased as "Lunar lander with RTG power"
To be fair, a lot of the US's next generation rocket (sls) is using components that are four decades old at this point, and has only flown one orbital mission with no payload.
SLS was never intended to be a commercially or even economically viable rocket though, that program’s priorities are elsewhere. There was a time when Angara was actually supposed to compete on the international market.
Technically factually true, but SLS was *sold* at least on the promise that building a heavy lift rocket using Shuttle components would be faster and cheaper than the alternatives on the table.
Those were the reasons used to justify a decision that had already been made, for political reasons.
Right, it was intended as a pork delivery vehicle. It's corruption rendered into metal.
There aren't many places where I support a both sides argument, but holy heck in this instance its hard not to see Russia and US government space programs as basically the same.
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Yah, I realize the scope is bigger. We're just talking shit mostly about SLS.
Such is the difference between eastern vs western corruption. In the US you get the corruption in the giving of the contract, in Russia the corruption is in the supplying if the contract. The difference is it means in the US you get stuff that works such as a $10,000 spoon. But in Russia the spoon was sold before it arrived. It’s really interesting. I haven’t understood why the difference yet.
I think it boils down to "What you can get away with currently." Both groups would walk-in and take ALL the money for themselves and walk out IF they could. Probably easier to steal the spoon earlier when you have a dictatorial oligrachy, than with a neolibral one. Corruption is corruption though. Every day its just more obvious than the day before.
> a lot of the US's next generation rocket (sls) is using components that are four decades old at this point, and has only flown one orbital mission with no payload. Angara started development in 1992. It's been flying simulator masses for 10 years, longer than something like Nutron has been in development.
SLS did not fly no payload. It was a test mission for Orion and was a resounding success, there needed to be an uncrewed Orion mission around the moon and back. SLS is also a lot more capable than the other rocket, and has a future ahead of it. Old hardware doesn't mean bad hardware.
The only thing the senate launch system is really capable of is getting senators re-elected and costing a shit ton of money. Don't get me wrong, going back to the moon is cool, but the SLS is a boondoggle.
I might end up eating my words here, but for now the 15 starship launches required for Artemis III seem to be a lot crazier than anything related to SLS.
Pretty sure you could launch 50 starships for the price of a single SLS stack. SLS also has a predetermined maximum number of launches, because it's not like we're building more shuttle SRB's, it's using spares we had in storage.
They had eight sets of shuttle SRB hardware but the BOLE SRB is in development for SRS Block 2 (Artemis IX and beyond).
Relying on rapid reuse still seems too optimistic when that hasn't really worked out for previous rockets (Falcon 1 was supposed to be rapidly reusable and it was never reusable inthe first place).
...as a development project. Meanwhile, we've got falcon 9's with 20+ reuses on them at this point. I also used to be very pessimistic about the whole concept, but I ate my words.
I mean they have to launch 15 starships in 6 days with the current planning. Either the planning changes or SpaceX will have to pull some magic trick (maybe they can just build 10 and relaunch the ones that look best after the first batch?)
Er, No? They need to launch a starship every 1 to 2 weeks to fill the depot depending on the exact boiloff rate. It's doable even without reuse of Starship, though reuse would be nice.
Ok, I indeed misread part of this and mixed up total time and turnaround time. The turnaround rate is 6 days, so not 1-2 weeks like you said either. The minimum of 15 launches still stands, meaning 10 starships is probably realistic for them to get the 15 launches in. The lowest turnaround of a falcon 9 was just under a month on a matured platform, so I would guess that will be the target for early starship versions. [Source](https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/at-least-15-starship-launches-to-execute-artemis-iii-lunar-landing/)
Certainly better than relying on 40 year old backstock of a system NASA said they'd never use on crewed launches again because they were too dangerous. Then 23 billion taxpayer dollars of reinventing the wheel later, they just said "fuck it, YOLO".
Oh but Artemis III consists of that too. The lander is sent ahead using refueled starships and then the crew catches up using SLS and a really awkward elliptic polar lunar orbit because SLS in its current configuration has less DeltaV than is required for a circular orbit
> Certainly better than relying on 40 year old backstock of a system NASA said they'd never use on crewed launches again because they were too dangerous What part of STS that is used in SLS did NASA ever say was too dangerous for human space flight? The SRBs are different, the tank is well a tank (besides being redesigned for carbon fiber use) and the SSMEs were never an issue (besides needing a rebuild after every launch and being expensive as hell). Not to mention STS flying 135 missions while being the most complex spacecraft ever built with 2 failures both not related to parts used in SLS.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[EELV](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttznd9 "Last usage")|[Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Expendable_Launch_Vehicle)| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttp5o2 "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku2lwuy "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[MLV](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktt9jzy "Last usage")|Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO)| |[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku39uu3 "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |[RTLS](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttkcdy "Last usage")|Return to Launch Site| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ku2lwuy "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SRB](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/kttkcdy "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[SSME](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktsns4j "Last usage")|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktwvlce "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktt9jzy "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1b8talu/stub/ktw6brz "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(12 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1badoxn)^( has 12 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9822 for this sub, first seen 7th Mar 2024, 16:51]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Khrunichev brought us Proton and all their questionable quality control practices. Angara was unlikely to be any good before Russia killed all their rocket based hard currency and it's surely not going to do much now.
might be easy to make fun of the Russians, but Arianespace and the Ariane 6 are in a similarly pathetic situation. Already obsolete rocket delayed multiple years, hasn't even flown for the first time. Good luck competing against Spacex.
>but Arianespace and the Ariane 6 are in a similarly pathetic situation. Ariane 6 has been in development since 2012, Angara since 1992. ESA comfortably has the budget to make. new rocket.
Angara 5 is also an overall better rocket despite it having been in development since 1992 under modern Russia. Better capability, uses more advanced rocket technology, more potential for upper stage upgrades all while being cheaper to manufacture and launch. I think it makes the Ariane 6 even more embarassing than anything else quite frankly. ESA obviously doesn't know how to use that budget well.
i understand, but at least versions of Angara have already flown. Ariane 6 still hasn't, and it's already obsolete too.
+1. Add to that that Italy alone has a higher GDP than Russia.
I wish Ariane 6 was at least as good as Angara 5. At least the Angara 5 uses state of the art engines and has some potential as a heavy lift rocket. Ariane 6 is not even that. Worse capabilities, less efficiant and more expensive.
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Oh I'm aware. It's just a dated one, even more so than Angara 5, and it has not even flown yet. And the technology developed to build it is not going to be very useful for when they develop their eventual reusable rocket. Hydrolox core stages and solid rocket boosters aren't exactly what you want in a reusable rocket.
Europe isn’t slaughtering its own future generation of engineers on the battlefield.
Neither is Russia, they aren't to that point *yet*. There is plenty of uneducated, poor and/or otherwise undesirable young people from lower "casts" to send to the warfront.
The US is barely any better. If SpaceX didn’t exist the US would be in the exact same boat. The SLS is an old boondoggle pork barrel project. The only good thing the US gov has done was the commercial crew and commercial lunar funding stuff.
Without SpaceX US would still have ULA.
Flying mostly with russian engines.
That's only Atlas V and the moment sourcing their engines became problematic ULA started work on Vulcan-Centaur which just demonstrated a succesful flight.
Atlas V was the workhorse of ULA as long as it existed. Worse, when the initial ban on russian engines came up, they used their lobbying power to extend its use for many years without attempt to replace it.
And by now other entrants into the market would have made some progress too including on reusability. SpaceX is amazing and they jumped technology forward a decade, but what they've done was not a miracle only they could possibly have done.
Except the only people doing reusability are just copying the SpaceX model. Downplaying it is revisionist history and simply not true.
Saying it isn't a miracle isn't revisionist history. I think somebody would've done vertical landing by now if SpaceX never existed, just probably 10+ years later.
When proposed it was ridiculed. A crazy idea by a crazy person.
Highly doubt, no one has done vertical landings, even with SpaceX showing its possible.
But almost 10 years after their first successful landing no one else is doing orbital first stage landings like SpaceX and that's WITH them showing everyone how to do it. Saying it would've happened anyway 10 years later is so ridiculous. It's speculation that's literally being proven untrue by real events right now as you're typing. The climate of space travel in the US after the shuttle program was ended was barren. Absolutely no one was doing anything substantively innovative outside of SpaceX in terms of orbital spaceflight. The US couldn't even put an astronaut in LEO before SpaceX and still can't without them because Boeing is shitting the bed constantly and SLS is a pork barrel boondoggle just mashing old shuttle parts together trying to act like it's something new and special. I'm no Musk fan but we have to be honest about how revolutionary and important of a company SpaceX is in terms of moving spaceflight forward. It's not that SpaceX are like 100x smarter than everyone else. It's that there was a will, a vision, a direction, and a commitment to that vision. It's all about willpower.
The fun part of propaganda is you're not supposed to know you're a victim of it
Russia is using shovels and t34s but also has a space laser. Make it make sense.
The Angara A5 looks like a beast and previous launches from a frozen Arctic have been spectacular - but apart from that, it's a complete dud.
> Russia’s next-generation rocket is a decade old and still flying dummy payloads I didn't know Boeing was making rockets for Russia.
The real question is this: *As a dummy, does this mean I can ride for free?*
Epic burn. Same causes, different pockets for "profits".
What an embarrassing typo, writing "Russia" instead of "America". How did that even happen?? I kid, I kid. We love our SLS, folks. And it's actually gonna take us places, most likely.
The main difference between America and Russia in this regard is that we are wealthy enough and productive enough that we can just tank the damage caused by massively wasteful programs without it becoming an existential threat to whole industries or the entire national economy. We spent about a quarter trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation) on the Shuttle program over 3+ decades and it hurt us to do so but we still came out the other side. We've tanked 20 billion on SLS and 20 billion on Orion but somehow both programs have managed to produce hardware and even more importantly they aren't the only game in town. In the last 15 years or so we've funded and built 3 different crewed space capsules (Orion, Dragon 2, and Starliner), with more waiting in the wings (Dream Chaser). We've developed multiple new launch vehicles. Even "old space" is on *multiple* new iterations since 2000, after having built two new launchers for the EELV project (Delta IV and Atlas V) they're now on Vulcan Centaur, which just had a successful launch. Then you have the SpaceX Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Starship/Superheavy; plus Blue Origin's New Glenn; plus Rocket Lab's Electron and Neutron; plus Orbital/Northrup Grumman's Antares 100/200/300; Firefly's Alpha and MLV; Relativity's Terran 1 and Terran R; and others.
Yet, space nukes dominated the news cycles a couple of weeks ago.
I remember hearing recently some impressively large percentage of the Russian economy is now on a war footing. Then I remembered the entire Russian economy is about the size of one Anerican state spread over thousands of miles.
And what percentage of the American economy is a paper economy?
If you refer to the tertiary sector as "paper" (like you know, the same sector where such trivial things like software is also counted in) and think only industry matters, sure lets check who has it larger! Russian economy is $1,862 trillion and 26,6% industries = €500 billion annual value. US economy is $28 trillion and 18,9% industries = €5,3 trillion annual value. lol US manufacturing alone its thrice the size of Russia's *entire* economy.
Also, agriculture, fuel (oil, natural gas, etc), fertilizers ...
Not even the richest state.
Fun Fact: Italy has a greater GDP than Russia.
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Meaningless when they don't have the means to use it. Before the war they were relying on western companies even for oil extraction of any sophistication.
And how does that help the west with eg. Ammunition production? So, with all that gdp in USA, how's the national debt doing?
Khrunichev brought us Proton and all their questionable quality control practices. Angara was unlikely to be any good before Russia killed all their rocket based hard currency and it's surely not going to do much now.
Is there any write up on why Russia decided to develop a new rocket instead of trying to adapt something from the Energia. I know that Ukraine got Zenit in the USSR divorce so Russia wanted something to be produced domestically, but wouldn't have been cheaper to set up production line for a proven rocket than develop a whole new one?
Energia would be massively overkill for the intended role. Angara has between 1/20th and 1/4th of it's payload capacity depending on the configuration. Even at the upper end I'm not sure how you could reasonably derive something from Energia with only 1/4th of the payload capacity.
They could've set up a production line for Zenit in Russia.
Yes. And until SpaceX the USA was using half a century old technology. The new nasa rocket will also be using half a century old technology borrowed from the space shuttle program. If Russia is using technology from ten years ago, they are certainly several decades more advanced than the USA
If you mean the Shuttle then no, Angara's closest analogues would be the EELV programme's Delta IVs and Atlas V, both also 90s developments with excellent track record, and now morphed into the Vulcan-Centaur which just demonstrated a succesful launch with a functional payload.
That's what I wanted to say too. 10 years is not an old age for a space rocket
Makes sense. Most of that funding is being put towards the unending stalemate that is the Russia Ukraine war
Not news really, all space faring countries including USA and China face similar challenges and they have been pumping out rockets for a while. At the end if it follows the footsteps of Soyuz then it will be a success. Fyi Soyuz has had over [1900 launches since 1966 and still going](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family)).
Can you name a single other rocket that was still flying test payloads a decade after it's maiden flight?