Monday, June 28, 2021

Russia Preparing Their Largest Module Ever for ISS ... But, Why?

According to Ars Technica today, the Russian space corporation Roscosmos released photos on earlier today showing the much-anticipated Nauka space station module being assembled at their facility in the Baikonur Cosmodrone in Kazakhstan.  

This will be Russia's first significant addition to the International Space Station in more than a decade, and it will provide the Russians with their first module dedicated primarily to research. "Nauka" means science in Russian.

This is a sizable module, including crew quarters, an airlock for scientific experiments, and much more. With a mass of about 24 metric tons, it is about 20 percent larger than the biggest Russian segment of the station, the Zvezda service module.

The module is tentatively scheduled to be launched on Russia's Proton rocket No Earlier Than July 15th, which deserves a little elaboration.  First, the Nauka module is more than a dozen years late due to a lack of budget for the project on top of technical issues.  The fact they pressed on to complete the program and get Nauka ready to launch can be interpreted as they saw the need for it and they intend to keep it crewed.  The second point is, the Russians have said they may pull out of the program in 2025 and build a brand-new station. The third point is, well, over to Ars:

So why launch a new module just a few years before exiting the station? One possibility is that the Russians are simply posturing. Some NASA officials have speculated privately that this may be an angle to obtain new funds from the United States. With the success of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle and nearing availability of Boeing's Starliner, NASA is no longer annually sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Roscosmos to purchase Soyuz seats for access to the station. This was an important source of funding for Russia's space program.

However, NASA would like to keep the station flying for another decade, and for this it needs the Russians. The first elements of the International Space Station were launched in 1998, and it was designed such that the US and Russian segments were dependent upon one another for attitude control, power, and other critical resources. The NASA officials suspect Russia may seek "maintenance" funding from the United States in return for keeping its part of the space station going.

Up close, it looks like an oversized Soyuz capsule.  Both photos from Roscomos, via Ars Technica. 

Ars Technica's space correspondent, Eric Berger, points out that Nauka's launch is an important symbolic win for Russia's space program, in that it is increasingly rare for Roscosmos to develop and fly new hardware. Mostly, the program maintains and launches decades-old spacecraft such as the Soyuz vehicle and the Proton rocket.

 

 

16 comments:

  1. Isn't this the module that had all sorts of manufacturing defects that had to be fixed? Weird stuff.

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    1. I thought that was a Soyuz - or however they got American astronauts up the station. A couple of years ago. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure about that. I'll see if I can find anything.

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  2. Wait. Are you suggesting that the Russians are blackmailing us? Nahhhh...

    Wait. Yeah... Like they did with Soyuz access to the ISS and, well, everything else about the ISS. If it wasn't for NASA (which means US taxpayers' taxes) the ISS would never have been put together and we'd have Space Station Freedom flying over our heads.

    When Freedom got 'shot down' by Congress in favor of the ISS, the battery company I was working for basically lost a whole division based on space batteries. That would be Gates Energy, by the way. They had really serious batteries designed and mostly built for Freedom, which meant a lot of money tied up in stuff that was far more real than most of Bezo's stuff. The hit was so bad that it took Gates Energy down and allowed Energizer to buy the company.

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    1. Back in those days, I was working on a system for Freedom. It was a wireless interface to the Space Station's Internal Audio/Visual System, and part of it was a full duplex radio link the crew would wear on their suits. It was my first engineering dive into batteries, NiCad in that case, and the Gates Battery Manual was my big source. I think it's still around here somewhere.

      That was before before Freedom shrank to the level we would say they had to change the name to Fred because it was too small to paint Freedom on the side.

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  3. I wondered what happened to Gates. They made some very useful "odd" sized batteries, like "D" size gel cells, and other unusual batteries.

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    1. Drjim, Enersys eventually bought the Cyclon line and still sells the 0810-0004 (D size). My memory is foggy, but I seem to recall Gates eventually sold to Hawker who got bought by Enersys, who had already bought Yuasa (who had successfully grenaded Gates AGM patent).

      Mike the EE

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    2. OK, I remember Hawker, and didn't know Yuasa busted Gate's patent.

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    3. The Gates Energy (Nickel Cadmium and Nickle Metal Hydride cells) and Gates Aerospace (aerospace batteries) plant in Alachua County was the best. I worked there.

      Then, well, outside forces and government stupidity screwed us. So like so many other US manufacturing companies of the time, everything went off-shore or to Mehico (don't even get me started on Juarez, if I could drop a nuke there I would.)

      If you see me in a burger joint, crying into my diet Coke, buy me another and I'll tell you the whole sob story.

      The plant is still there. Empty last time I passed it. A hole in the local economy (which the leftist bastids in Gainesville totally hated because it actually produced something...)

      Sad story of miss-management, mistakes, and stupidity.

      Dammit.

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    4. When I worked for Hughes, somebody had the bright idea to have one of our little RF modules built in Mexico. It was a disaster. Between constant "parts shortage", and outright theft of some of the components, the cost started going up. Then when the first units came in, the workmanship was below "shoddy". Solder splashes, blobs, poor/missed solder connections, flux spilled in units, wires not properly stripped and tinned, cigarette ash in units, etc, etc, etc. And this was for Flight Hardware! The save-a-few-bucks people quietly shelved the effort after about 6 months.

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  4. Maybe the Nauka module is designed to undock from ISS and join up with this rumored future Russian space station.

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    1. If this module is the one I think it is, that's exactly what it's meant to do.

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    2. Exactly, and in fact I don't see any reason why it couldn't just push off a little bit and let the rest of the ISS de-orbit when they put it down, the put the new Russian station is exactly the same orbit.

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    3. They could also create and attach a tug to move it to the Chinese Space Station. They both use the same docking structure.

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  5. Yeah, this module is the one in thinking of.

    https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a25773/mlm-delayed-russia/

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    1. Yeah, I was thinking of the leak in a Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS. Different thing entirely.

      https://www.popsci.com/iss-hole-russia-drill-inside/

      Thanks for the info!

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  6. Why?

    Because bigger has always been better in the Russian psyche. One-upmanship is in their DNA.

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