Heavenly bodies

The cause of the Soyuz rocket crash last month was given as being due to a clogged fuel line leading to a gas generator, thought to be human error rather than a design flaw. (NASASpaceflight.com articles: 31/8, 15/9.) Crew launches on the Soyuz rocket have been delayed a little, and the next Progress launch (Progress M-13M/45P) is set for 30 October. Crew launches are on the Soyuz-FG, which has a modifed fuel injection system on the engines of the first and second stages, but it and the Soyuz-U have the same 11S510-PVB Blok-I third stage.

China is to launch the first module of its planned space station next week on a Long-March Ⅱ-F carrier rocket (MSNBC/Spacedaily articles). The module is called Tiangong 1, or “Heavenly Palace”. The module is to be used to practice rendezvous and docking, initially with the unmanned Shenzhou-8 that will be subsequently launched. If it is successful, it will be followed by Tiangong 2 and 3 space labs in a few years.

New Scientist magazine had an article about the support operations for the Mars-500 mission in its 17 September issue. (Text online here.)

The July and August issues of BIS Spaceflight magazine have a 2-part article on death in space. I am debating whether to buy the issues as the magazine is now quite expensive in Australia ($17) and hard to find. On browsing through the July issue in a newsagent, the first part was more speculation about various medical issues that might occur during a long spaceflight. A bit disappointing as I was hoping for an actual list of procedures from NASA, or whoever! The somewhat morbid topic has interested me for years, but there are no actual documents online, only occasional speculations on forums. I actually wrote out my own version of such a document in the style of other online ISS documents as part of a somewhat irreverent short story I did some years ago (“Houston, we have a corpse”) that included a space autopsy (“2001: a space autopsy” – I had some fun making up those headings :-):

Progress launch failure

For the first time after 135 launches, a Progress cargo ship failed to reach orbit on the 136^th launch (since January 1978). Progress M-12M (44P) launched on 24/8, but the third/Blok 1 rocket stage of its Soyuz-U rocket failed 5m 25s into flight, achieving only a sub-orbital trajectory, and both crashed in the Choysk district of ​​the Altai Republic (South Siberia).

• NASASpaceflight.com
• NASA ISS news
• Orbiter Forum thread
• MSNBC.com/Space.com report
• Progress infographic

This comes the week after the telecommunications satellite “Express-AM4” failed to reach orbit on 17/8 after the Briz-M upper stage of the Proton-M rocket lost power after its fourth burn (NASASpaceflight.com report). Both are manufactured by Khrunichev. The damage for this, including launch costs, exceeds 20 billion rubles.

Khrunichev also manufacture the RD-0110 (11D55) liquid-propellant rocket engine used on the 3^rd stage of the Soyuz rockets

The loss of the cargo is a setback but is not yet critical for the ISS crew, who have enough supplies to last until the next Progress launch on 28/10 (STS-135 also brought up a lot of supplies). However the next crew launch in September will be delayed until the cause for the malfunction is found, as they go up on a Soyuz-FG. The ISS also needs Progress ships for its periodic reboostings.

Mars-500 pointless?

From NK 792. Former cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev is of the opinion that the Mars-500 experiment will not reveal anything new, and is not an effective simulation of a journey to Mars.

03/07/2009 / 00:05 – Valentin Lebedev: Mars-500 experiment “will not provide the necessary scientific data for a manned flight to Mars”

The Mars-500 scientific experiment, which is scheduled to begin next spring, will not give scientists the data needed to understand the possibility of interplanetary flight, said the member of Russian Academy of Sciences, pilot-cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union Valentin Lebedev.

“As for the ground experiments, the similar Mars-500 experiments, which now try to mimic the conditions of the Martian mission, offer little understanding of the problems of human flight in deep space, while we have for decades made long flights on orbital stations,” said V. Lebedev, whose paper is published on the Roscosmos site.

According to him, an experiment with human habitation in an enclosed space does not provide the necessary psychological conditions, as participants at any time may leave the premises. “It's conditional, as if preparing to drift on ice floes in the Arctic held in winter on a pond near Moscow,” said the cosmonaut.

As noted by Lebedev, ground-based studies have little relevance to real interplanetary flight, adding that experiments on living people in closed spaces were conducted in the country several times, and the Mars-500 experiment is just a repeat of this.

The cosmonaut suggested that a special module be developed that would simulate a Mars mission, and attach it to the ISS. “Then it will be possible to create conditions in the module closest to interplanetary flight,” said V. Lebedev.

The beginning of the Mars-500 experiment, during which the scientists are planning to simulate a manned flight of six volunteers to Mars, is scheduled for the beginning of 2010. During the 520-day virtual flight, scheduled work will take place on the Martian surface for a month by two participants in the experiment inside the simulator constructed in the Institute of Biomedical Problems building.

He does have a valid point – the experiment also takes place in full gravity with no worries about radiation exposure from deep space. Attaching a specialized module to the ISS is a valid alternative; but it would be expensive (though perhaps not much more than the $10 million or so for the ground experiment?).

The rather graphic diagram below – “Mechanism of lumbar spine distraction fracture (Chance Fracture)” – is from a report on the STS-107 Columbia accident, showing the seatbelt of a crewperson cutting through their waist and snapping their spine. Ugh! That’s about the most gruesome image in the report – no photos of the bodies, alas. I suppose they would have looked something like the charred cosmonaut in my 30/11/2008 entry, but broken into pieces. There is another of a charred helmet, also below – temperatures it endured are given as 300-400°C, so one can imagine the state of the head inside. (If I go asking such morbid questions on forums though, I will be told off, so I will have to restrict my ghoulish curiosity about such things to my blog. Well, Dad was an Airworthiness Inspector [who saw dead bodies!] and Mum was a nurse [who saw dead bodies!], so I’ll blame this on them.)

News tidbits

In Novosti Kosmonavtiki №605 Nikolai Sevast’yanov made some more pronouncements. Energiya proposes four phases of the Russian space program up to the year 2050:

1. Modernization of the existing Soyuz transport ship by 2012 which would increase its load by 7-15 tons;
2. Creation of the “Parom” ferry to replace the Progress cargo ship; it would increase the cargo weight carried into orbit from 2.5 to 15 tons;
3. A piloted flight to the Moon by 2015 and an operational base by 2030;
4. A mission to Mars by 2030 and colonization to begin by 2050.

All these plans and schemes seem to keep moving into the future like a mirage...I will be 60 in 2030 and 80 in 2050! Hopefully things will happen sooner than that!

Russia is also considering a longterm plan to keep the Station operational until 2025 (article also at RIA Novosti). NASA also has changed its mind about supporting the ISS; it initially planned to stop support after 2016 but now plans to extend space station support to 2020.

A page on the Energiya site commemorates the 100th anniversary of the practical cosmonautics founder, academician Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov.

Andrei Kislyakov on the 11 January destruction of a satellite by China: “Oriental satellite killer: case No. 1”: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

“Astronaut diaries used to study mood”, MSNBC.com, 30/1. Unfortunately these diaries are not for public viewing! They would make interesting reading. The diaries posted at the NASA Astronaut Journal site are all cheery and perky, which can get a bit tedious.

A Sea Launch Zenit exploded on its pad destroying a communications satellite it was carrying. No one was injured. (Sea Launch site.) (There is an interesting post describing the Sea Launch procedures at NASASpaceflight.com.)

Vassili Petrovitch has posted an extensive collection of Aerospace Transport Systems: Book of Technical Papers on his Buran space shuttle site. It is an excellent resource for the Russian shuttle. I was interested in Buran until 2002 when the hangar collapsed in May, destroying the Buran orbiter that made it into orbit, and killing seven workers. Before that tragedy there seemed to be some hope of resurrecting the Russian shuttle, but it seems dead now, sadly.

Mars reality show

Mixed messages on Russian space tourism at Personal Spaceflight; commentary on this article, “A journey to space is not a jaunt to the Caribbean”, at RIA Novosti. It is a bit hard to figure out the author’s opinion in the second article, though he remarks:

I am no judge of the future tourist’s professional training or the value of his scientific program “in the interests of several space agencies.” But one thing is clear: the Russian-U.S. manned program, which just now pulled out of its critical nosedive with tremendous pain, and which is the only one in the world except for China’s, badly needs experienced and practiced professionals rather than amateurs.

As I have said many times before, Russia should prioritize sending up its own professional cosmonauts rather than space tourists. Roskosmos seems eager to fly up the paying guests of other countries, but this is demoralizing for its own cosmonauts (the Cosmonaut Group only has two flight opportunities a year – one seat per Soyuz flight).

Another article at RIAN (29/12/2006) reports that five volunteers were chosen for the Mars-500 experiment, to begin later this year. No names have been released yet. Be interesting to follow this and see how the crew cope with being locked up for a year-and-a-half! Maybe I should have volunteered (I have spent years as a semi-recluse already) but my embarrassing lack of any qualifications would preclude this. It sounds like it will be a real endurance test, though! And it will hopefully be more successful than the previous experiment in 1999 (Sphinx-99), described in this James Oberg article, “Violence and Sexual Assault in ‘Space’ ”.

The International Space Station Heads of Agencies met at ESA Headquarters on 23 January to review the status of the program. (Mr. NASA Watch was of the opinion it was a Yawn from Paris.)

NASA Cassini Image: The Greatest Saturn Portrait …Yet at Spaceref. Russia, sad to say, has never achieved anything like this.

James Oberg asks, “What suit do you wear to a spacewalk?” at MSNBC.com, looking at the advantages and disavantages of the U.S. and Russian Orlan spacesuits on the ISS. The U.S. EMUs have more technological advantages, such as live helmet cameras, but are somewhat more complicated to put on.

Worth visiting is Ivan Safronov’s Space Video Archive, with lots of videos and films to download. One is the Nedelin disaster video (a screenshot is below, with the arrows pointing to the burning people fleeing) on the Unique Footage page. Russian Space Web has a page about the disaster (as does Wikipedia), which I think is still the worst in the history of rocketry.

A more recent disaster was the Brazilian rocket explosion in 2003 where 21 people were killed (incinerated).