A New Russian Soyuz Spacecraft Launches to the International Space Station

[Purveyor]

Source: Latin American Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON, USA - A new model of the Russian spacecraft Soyuz, with three crew on board, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, heading to the International Space Station (ISS).

The Soyuz MS-01, a new model of the legendary series of spacecrafts, designed half a century ago in the former Soviet Union, took off at 01:36 GMT on July 7.

Russian cosmonaut Anatoli Ivanishin and astronauts Japanese Takutya Onishi and American Kathleen Rubins took a ride on the brand new model of the Soyuz, which presents important innovations compared to the previous models.

According to Director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center Yuri Lonchakov, the spacecraft is equipped with new control and navigation systems that increase flight safety.

Read more: http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2415886&CategoryId=13936

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damn that old soviet 'junk'....again

[uhnope]

1. laht lol

tell us another

[longship]

2. Well, how about the NASA site?

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-crew-members-including-nasa-biologist-launch-to-space-station

Here's ISS crew 48 poster:

The top three, from bottom-up, one Russian, one NASA (USA), one JAXA (Japan) are on their way to the ISS on a brand new Soyuz redesign.

And here's the god damned launch:


So much for questioning sources.

[raven mad]

4. Rock ON! Love your reply!

Go, Astro and Cosmo Nauts (LOL, I grew up at Kennedy Space Center).

[uhnope]

11. much better, thanks. nt

[uawchild]

3. The Soyuz design team

Russia is a country of amazing engineers, I wish they didn't have to spend so much effort engineering armaments. But that country is still reacting to their staggering human loses inWWII and make the military a priority.

[Igel]

5. They got a good start.

The Nazi scientists and engineers they brought back, plus the technology they packed up home as spoils of war, provided a good basis. Some reverse engineering didn't pass unnoticed, One humorous example had a nice Soviet watch dismantled, and on some of the parts were part numbers. The part numbers matched the parallel Western made watch, but these were Soviet-made parts. When they copied the design, some wit copied the part numbers. Freedom of thought and sarcasm still find ways of expression. And for things that couldn't be reversed engineered there were spies.

Their physicists and mathematicians were great. Not much politics in that. Even one of my dissertation committee members had been sentenced to internal exile. He worked in computer science when the Party declared it to be ideologically suspect and bourgeois. The real "crime," though, that got him exiled was when he was accused of being bourgeois he didn't do the McCarthy thing and inform against his colleagues. His last name was Ivanov. Father was a writer forced to write schlock until he drank himself to death. His grandfather was driven out of the country, a rathe famous poet. The guy refashioned himself into a linguist, literaturoved, and semiotician. Managed to stay out of trouble after that. Bulgakov's niece also had a few comments on that glorious era of Soviet culture. No insight, sadly, on a lot of the quirkiness in Master i Margarita. Zhal'ko.

But many Soviet engineers had to be inventive; most were just crap. Translating a lot of the RD-180 documents was a hoot, because the space program had pretty much the best of the best and these were uncensored. The docs were a hodgepodge of production processes and techniques from the '70s to the '90s--they recycled and reused anything they could to save money and grab old stuff out of storage. Nobody ever said Dr. Frankenstein wasn't inventive or creative.

One process required 2 l of pure ethanol, but then only used a few hundred ml at most. I asked an engineer what it was for and he tapped his finger against his neck. What you couldn't buy at the store because of rationing you could get through the space agency for that office party.

Another called for some sort of polyester thread. I kept trying to translate it "select threads", whatever the grammar had to mean, and finally it was explained to me. They'd get a few hundred of these threads made to the most exacting standards. But most would be trash and should have failed inspection but were passed anyway--to not supply them would have been sabotage. They'd go through them by hand to pick out the "hand-chosen" threads that met their standards. And dump the rest. Couldn't complain about the shoddy quality because sabotage and solidarity with those who'd be punished for Soviet quality technology. The engineers knew that the technology or engineering expertise for making what they wanted consistently wasn't at the places the political appointees assigned to produce them.

There was a lot of that. Take delivery of 1000 of something and hope to get 10 that were acceptable. Usually one of the first steps was verifying that the thing you were supposed to work with was suitable. Then if you needed a second component there'd be another page or three going over how to check for flaws and errors. That made for inventive engineers who quality-checked everything themselves because they had to. They couldn't blame the Lenin Machine Factory or the People's Collective Polymerization Plant or much less the Glorious Patriotic Bolshevik October Revolution Fastener Factory if they lost cosmonauts. It was their necks on the line. But they could put in the production docs the most common flaws and either how to fix them in-house or at least how to identify them and avoid disaster.

You could also track improvements in technology. It was only the most sensitive and typical later-developed processes in these docs that used CNC lathes. And they were American or European made. Again, engineers had to be creative and inventive. Some of the kludges they came up with were truly impressive. Reminded me of a story about Edison--he had hired a mathematician, fresh out of school, and needed to know the volume of a glass vessel that woud be the glass part of a lightbulb. The mathematician modeled the curve so he could integrate and find the volume, but this took a few days. Edison was finally exasperated and when he found out the mathematician still hadn't come up with the answer dunked the bulb into a bucket of water and poured the water into a measuring cup. The engineer didn't need a precise answer, just a "good enough" answer.

Then again, it pays to remember that a few of the space scientists weren't exactly free to choose their line of work. They were political prisoners and if they failed they and more importantly their families would be in deep trouble. That's motivation for a lot of truly impressive creativity right there.

[appal_jack]

6. Excellent perspective, Igel. Thanks for sharing! nt

[uawchild]

8. Still living in the past? And another Gish Gallop? Sadly, yes.

Last edited Fri Jul 8, 2016, 10:57 AM - Edit history (4)

Good lord. And slavery built the US economy. But hey, let's all live in the past. Oh and let's not even mention the continued systemic fascism, Freudian typo I mean rascism that that STILL IS causing cops to kill black men needlessly. Didn't you even once go on about what Russia did 300 years ago in Eastern Europe?

Good lord, the stuff you are going on about happened two or three GENERATIONS ago. You need to get fresher material, the evil Soviet era is receding into the past just like our genocide of the Native Americans.

Funny how you don't hold the US to the same standard. Russophobia perhaps? Seems that way to me. It's really easy to dwell on the dark side of our country too. you just don't seem honest enough to apply your outrage equally. Prove me wrong, post a similarly long diatribe about the evil slave economy here in the US for over 250 years. I bet you won't.

Oh and our nazis gave our space program a similar start but of course you would not mention that. Lol. Why Nazi Verner Von Braun was HEAD of our space program! Talk about you very selective memory, hmm? More Russiphobia?? You can't even acknowledge the current work of Russian aerospace engineers. Instead you used it as another opportunity to exhibit what borders on rascism . How sad.

Time is working against you, Igel, your post would have been compelling in the 1950's or even the 1960's but it comes across now as a screed , harping back to distant events. Its 2016.

No one, including you, would have posted a diatribe like yours if I posted that Germany is a country of amazing engineers. No one would drag up its horrific past to slam Germany in a thread about current, say, automobile design. People, like you, only do that about Russia, like you did here. The double standard is just staggering.

Posts like yours continue to serve to fuel the Cold War II hysteria that our military and our media seem intent on ginning up. Your use of selective outrage, double standards and the Gish Gallop are standard propaganda techniques.

"The Gish Gallop (also proof by verbosity) is the fallacious debating tactic of drowning an opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that the opponent cannot possibly rebut each one in real time. It is similar to the on the spot fallacy, because it's unreasonable for someone to have an answer immediately available to every single argument presented.
Although it is a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper's part to make each point (particularly if they reuse an existing list of arguments), a refutation may take much longer, require significantly more effort. This is especially true in that the Galloper need only win a single argument for them to claim victory — while the refuter must achieve a 100% success ratio. Thus, Galloping is frequently used in timed debates (especially by creationists) to overwhelm opponents."

PROOF by VERBOSITY, the fallacious debating tactic of drowning an opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that the opponent cannot possibly rebut each one in real time, is EXACTLY what you did in your diatribe here.

You know what, your extremely selective outrage is starting to remind me of the people that rant about "black on black" crime. Again, how sad.

[uhnope]

13. thank you for taking the time to share your insight and knowledge. nt

[Night Watchman]

7. It IS Junk

Compared to anything we used to fly.

[Nihil]

9. Operative phrase: "used to". (n/t)

[uawchild]

10. Cough* space shuttles

Last edited Fri Jul 8, 2016, 11:25 AM - Edit history (1)

You mean like the fatally flawed, badly designed and poorly engineered space shuttles?

40 % of the shuttles (2 out of 5) blew up killing all the crew.

Foam would constantly fall off the auxiliary fuel tank at over 400 miles per hour and some of it struck the shuttles themselves. That design flaw, inherent in the shuttle system, meant NASA was rolling the dice each time it launched a shuttle. On one disastrous occasion, the foam damaged the heat shield tiles on the leading surface of one wing. This led to the burn up of the shuttle and all aboard on re-entry.

And lets not forget the badly engineered o-rings that could not cope with a frosty Florida morning and failed catastrophically, killing all on launch.

[NWCorona]

12. That's just not true and I'm a huge NASA supporter

[uawchild]

15. Why, once again, did this turn into another anti-Russian thread?

It's a nice upbeat story about current Russian aerospace achievements in upgrading the Soyuz line of spacecraft.

Good Lord.

[NWCorona]

17. Human nature unfortunately

[Sunlei]

16. Russias really gotten great at missle launches with 'interchangable' tops.

sometimes older simpler designs are much better and much less expensive.

How does the Russian 'spacecraft' land? the old tried and true parachute?

[NWCorona]

18. Yes. It's the safest and most practical way at the moment.