Report: Russia Won’t Meet 2018 Launch Date From Vostochny
OKA-T spacecraft (Credit: RSC Energia)
A Russian plan to launch cosmonauts into orbit from the new Vostochny spaceport in 2018 appears to have been abandoned, but officials have come up with a way to sort of meet that deadline.
‘RussianSpaceWeb.com reports the current plan is to launch a human-tended microgravity laboratory called Oka-T into space in 2018. The free-flying laboratory will conduct material sciences experiments and would be periodically serviced by cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station.
Technically, it is a “manned” spacecraft, because it is designed to dock at the space station and cosmonauts can enter its pressurized compartment in orbit. At the same time, it is launched unmanned and, with its eight-ton mass, the lab fits into the Soyuz-2-1b rocket!
To camouflage their “little trick,” Russian space officials began characterizing the 2018 milestone as the “first launch within the manned space program,” instead of the first “manned launch,” without specifying what exactly would fly from Vostochny in 2018. As a result, the official Russian media continued its cheerleading of the upcoming manned launch from Vostochny.
Located in the Amur region in Russia’s Far East, Vostochny is designed to break Russian reliance on the Soviet-era Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased from Kazakhstan. Russia would move much of its space operations to Vostochny while continuing to use Baikonur for certain commercial launches.
Vladimir Putin reviews a map showing the plan for the Vostochny spaceport. (Credit: Presidential Press and Information Office)
However, RussianSpaceWeb.com reports it’s not going to be quite as easy as it sounds to move operations over to the new spaceport. Officials are also straining to meet a deadline to launch the first satellite from Vostochny in 2015.
Unable to introduce any new vehicles within this timeframe, Roskosmos made a decision to build a launch pad for the old Soyuz rocket at the site with little justification but to meet the 2015 deadline. However, it created a new political problem in 2018, because the Soyuz rocket could not carry its namesake manned spacecraft from Vostochny due to technical and safety problems. Nor was it powerful enough to launch a heavier next-generation transport vehicle. Roskosmos promised to build another pad in Vostochny for the Angara rocket, which could do the job, but the facility could not be completed before the end of this decade.
In reality, no cosmonaut would be able to blast off from Vostochny until 2020s, when the new-generation spacecraft and the Angara-5 rocket are finally certified to carry the crew.
Prospective Piloted Transportation System
The next-generation spacecraft will carry six cosmonauts instead of the three occupants carried by the Soyuz spacecraft. The new vehicle will be capable of deep-space exploration to the moon and other destinations.
Vostochny is turning into a lengthy and expensive project for the Russian government. Work began back in 2007, with the government estimating that it will spend approximately $4 billion on the project through 2015.
Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the construction site, where he urged officials to get back on schedule. Putin said construction is an estimated 30 to 55 days behind schedule, and the project only has about half the 12,000 workers required.
Putin also took the project away from the Russian space agency Roscosmos and gave direct control to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the space and defense sectors.
9 responses to “Report: Russia Won’t Meet 2018 Launch Date From Vostochny”
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They can install a giant trampoline at Vostochny to launch their new manned laboratory. I’ll do it for them in half the time for only 1 billion dollars!
Zak’s anti-Vostochnyi vendetta continues to show when he swipes at “no justification other than”. Since I argued for Soyuz at Vostochnyi for years, it feels like my home sports team cruzhed Zak’s now. What a sore loser. However, he’s probably right that manned launches of Soyuz from Vostochnyi are not going to occur.
Although this is a story of a disappointing setback (paralleling to some extent NASA’s redefinition of the American president’s call to visit an asteroid by 2022 [or whatever] to rendezvousing with a boulder in lunar orbit – in other words, “Well yeah, kinda…”), I think the OKA-T free-flyer companion to the ISS is a great idea.
One of the biggest problems with doing microgravity research, perhaps especially materials science research, on the space station (which was one of its original primary justifications) is that the people keep moving around. Their various machines (for other purposes, including keeping the people alive) keep turning on and off. It’s a shaky environment that’s not actually at all ideal for a lot of the things it was hoped it could enable. By separating the running of some experiments from the living/working structure of the astronauts, a lot of this problem could be alleviated, all while having the station and astronauts right there to troubleshoot, take results out, put entirely new experiments in, etc.
I wish NASA would do something similar, maybe with a centrifuge (another area in which it was originally hoped the ISS would lead to long sought research progress that has never been realized [due to, in part, the vibrations a centrifuge would induce in everything else, iirc]).
I agree, another advantage of a free flier is that you can have experiments that have more energy than would be allowed in ISS. The reason is that if they go wrong they could endanger ISS occupants but in a free flier if the process has an oops moment it is remote from the occupants. The design would need to be that it was safe when docked to the ISS for retrieval of samples and recharge or consumables otherwise there is no point in separation.
As to NASA or the US doing the same SpaceX has Dragon Lab planned which there is no reason it could not also dock at ISS several times.
It frustrated me to no end when W’s admin canceled CAM for the ISS.
While I see value in ISS for helping the engineering, the fact is, that the science is somewhat limited. The biggest science SHOULD have been the ability to work in variable Gs so as to see how life will respond.
I will say that spaceX and others are looking at tethering a few capsules together and spinning them. Another would be to simply spin a capsule and have life racks that run from near the center (roughly zero g) to outside which could be even 1/2 G. With this approach, we could see how mice would do on 1/6 G(lunar) and 1/3 G(mars) just by being at a different radius.
Guys, next-gen spacecraft will carry just four cosmonauts.
no way. Really?
Why only 4?
Since 2012: http://www.russianspaceweb….
Also they consider the possibility of emergency return of six cosmonauts from ISS with replacing four new Cheget seats to six Soyuz-like Kazbek. But it’s just for the return trip. Some kind of special
space lifeboat.
So, “Prospective Piloted Transportation System/Angara” is Russian for “Orion/SLS”?