NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station

Information from NASA News Emails
Post Reply
User avatar
bernomatic
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1169
Joined: Tue, 29 Mar 16, 03:55 am
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Contact:

#1 NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station

Post by bernomatic »

January 30, 2018
M18-018
NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station


cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station<br />Clad in a Russian Orlan spacesuit, cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station Aug. 22, 2013, during Expedition 36. On Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, Misurkin will participate in the fourth spacewalk of his career.<br />Credits: NASA
cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station
Clad in a Russian Orlan spacesuit, cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station Aug. 22, 2013, during Expedition 36. On Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, Misurkin will participate in the fourth spacewalk of his career.
Credits: NASA
M18-018.jpg (70.55 KiB) Viewed 2891 times
cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station
Clad in a Russian Orlan spacesuit, cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin conducts a spacewalk outside the International Space Station Aug. 22, 2013, during Expedition 36. On Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, Misurkin will participate in the fourth spacewalk of his career.
Credits: NASA

Two veteran Russian cosmonaut spacewalkers will venture outside the International Space Station on Friday, Feb. 2, for a planned 6.5-hour station servicing session. Live coverage of the spacewalk will air on NASA Television and the agency’s website beginning at 9:45 a.m. EST.

Expedition 54 Commander Alexander Misurkin and Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos are set to float out of the space station’s Pirs docking compartment airlock in Russian Orlan spacesuits at 10:34 a.m.

Misurkin and Shkaplerov’s primary objectives during the spacewalk will be to remove and jettison an electronics box for a high-gain communications antenna on the Zvezda service module and install an upgraded electronics box to communication between Russian flight controllers and the Russian modules of the orbital outpost. The cosmonauts also will take detailed photos of the exterior of the Russian modules and retrieve experiments housed on Zvezda’s hull.

The Russian spacewalk will be the fourth in Misurkin’s career and the second for Shkaplerov, as well as the 207th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance. Both of their suits will be marked with blue stripes.

-end-
Chief Cook -n- bottle washer
User avatar
bernomatic
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1169
Joined: Tue, 29 Mar 16, 03:55 am
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Contact:

#2 Re: NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station

Post by bernomatic »

I don't know about anyone else out there, but I actually found it more fun when the USA and USSR were in competition in space. I'm not saying we have to be at war with them, but we are now at the point were NASA is advertising Russian space walks?

One thing is for sure, advances seemed to come more quickly back then.
Chief Cook -n- bottle washer
User avatar
luke strawwalker
Space Admiral
Space Admiral
Posts: 1543
Joined: Thu, 07 Apr 16, 04:45 am

#3 Re: NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station

Post by luke strawwalker »

bernomatic wrote:I don't know about anyone else out there, but I actually found it more fun when the USA and USSR were in competition in space. I'm not saying we have to be at war with them, but we are now at the point were NASA is advertising Russian space walks?

One thing is for sure, advances seemed to come more quickly back then.
Agreed...

Could make an interesting book of alternate history (which is sort of a hobby/passion of mine... gotta love Harry Turtledove!) "What if" the US/USSR had not engaged in "the Space Race"; where would we have ended up and where would we be today?? For that matter, where would space/rocket/missile technology be today had we and the Soviets parted company as "friends" (okay, tolerated each other as best as our conflicting ideologies would allow for that time period) after WWII-- say Stalin died suddenly like Roosevelt did and was replaced by someone not as completely paranoid and driven to expand world Socialism and secure the entire eastern half of Europe as a "buffer state" against the West...

Hmmm... I'll have to think on that one some... This might deserve its own thread.... leave that up to you Bernie...

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
User avatar
luke strawwalker
Space Admiral
Space Admiral
Posts: 1543
Joined: Thu, 07 Apr 16, 04:45 am

#4 Re: NASA TV to Air Russian Spacewalk at the International Space Station

Post by luke strawwalker »

And, of course, the counterpoint... What if the "Space Race" had continued on through the 70's and 80's, and what if the Soviet Union had NOT collapsed in 1992 and the Space Race continued into the 90's and beyond??

This I CAN quickly come up with some likely scenarios...

1) The fourth flight of the N-1 would have, at least to some degree, probably have been successful. The third flight of N-1 nearly was, as the turbopump on engine 4 exploded mere seconds before staging. The next N-1 was to be powered by "reusable" engines, that were designed to be capable of being test-fired in a test stand for verification testing prior to actual installation in the launch vehicle. Most of the problems with N-1 were due to "cost cutting" procedures that the Soviets either didn't want to spend the money or didn't want to waste the time developing the necessary hardware-- for instance, there was no test stand large enough to hold down and test fire the N-1's first stage,and they didn't want to spend the money to build one. Kuznetsov's NK-33 engines, which were high-pressure engines (basically, more similar to SSME RS-25's, than to their contemporaries, the Saturn V's F-1's) were designed for only a SINGLE firing... thus they could not be individually test fired before launch. SO, they built them in groups of six, with one being test fired to qualify the entire "batch". The need to test fire such a complex and high-performance engine at the bleeding edge of materials and engineering technology of the time period became readily apparent as things went on. Plus, the Soviets basically overestimated what they were capable of doing and underestimated the time and resources required to accomplish it. Their timelines were impossible, and their resources were too divided to be used for maximum effect. "Reusable" engines were in the pipeline and in fact were going to be on the next N-1 before it was canceled.

2) Had the Soviets stuck with it, they WOULD have ended up successfully flying an N-1/L-3 complex around the Moon. Now, it was limited technology to be sure, nowhere near as capable as the US Saturn/Apollo system, but it was generally "on par" with the Apollo 11, 12, and 14 mission hardware, although it could only land a single cosmonaut on the lunar surface. That kind of limited what they could do. By the time it would have flown, the US Apollo lunar missions were already finished, BUT, it WOULD have been possible (and in an environment of continued Cold War with the Soviets and a continuing Space Race) to revive Apollo and continue with a slower but more impressive exploration of the Moon-- perhaps using a Saturn V launch to land an unmanned pressurized rover on the surface to act as a portable habitat, or the "lunar base camp" type missions which were proposed using a Saturn V to land a LM designed strictly to land, not take off, and act as a "lunar hab" for extended surface stays-- the crew would land nearby in their own separate Saturn-V launched Apollo/LM. That would certainly upstage anything the Soviets had planned with N-1/L-3, and it would have made maximum use of existing hardware with only the "LM habitat" having to undergo significant development, but it too could have leveraged the already developed hardware and capabilities of the LM-- the landing stage and GNC (guidance, navigation, and control) systems to create an automated landing hab. The pressurized rover idea was nice, but would have required a lot more engineering, and creates some problems of it's own-- an autolanding stage is required to put it on the surface, which is probably the vast majority of the work for the "LM hab" but then it also required engineering the system to get this large pressurized rover off the landing stage and onto the surface, as well as engineering all the life support systems required for the hab module PLUS all the propulsion and mobility systems required to create a roving habitat. Astronauts would still have had to land near it in a separate manned LM designed to bring them down from an Apollo mothership to the surface, put their lander LM in extended hibernation on the lunar surface, and then they'd have to walk to the waiting rover. The biggest downside is safety-- how far do you dare drive from the landing LM that you cannot take with you?? If the pressurized hab/rover breaks down or gets stuck 100 miles away, that's a LONG WALK back to the LM to ascend back into lunar orbit... probably a fatal one. The "LM hab" (IIRC they called the proposal the "LM truck" because the idea was to eventually land "permanent" hab mondules on the surface to be emplaced under lunar regolith for radiation shielding, for lunar surface base. The "LM hab" would have been for ~2 week stays on the lunar surface). The LM Hab would have been designed to work with a regular lunar rover like the J-missions carried with them (15, 16, and 17). That would have allowed the astronauts much more working time and radius, BUT nowhere near as much as the pressurized rover concepts... and of course "walk back" restrictions would still have applied more than likely (unless they had a backup rover, which cuts into the payload you can land with your LM hab...

3) The Soviets DID have "proposals" for more challenging missions on the Moon and even "on to Mars" had been at least proposed... SO, if they decided to expand on their lunar activities, or even looked like they were seriously considering a Mars or Venus expedition, (flybys to start with most certainly) then that would have created a lot of pressure in the US to look long and hard at some of the proposals for Venus or Mars flyby's using Apollo hardware. It's entirely feasible under such pressure that we COULD have had at least a Venus flyby using an Apollo vehicle to "beat the Russians to the planets". Mars would be more difficult but a flyby would not be impossible with Apollo hardware, though Venus is easier and shorter transit times. Orbiting Venus or Mars, and particularly landing a manned expedition on Mars, would be MUCH harder and require a lot more advanced hardware and a MAJOR commitment of new resources.

4) I don't think the N-1 would have lasted a LONG time... it was too big, too inefficient, and really had little in the way of growth potential. It's spherical tanks and massive truncated conical intertank bands meant it wasn't possible to "stretch" the vehicle, unlike various proposals for Saturn V that involved rather simple tank stretches and increased engines (6 F-1 engine first stages and 6=7 J-2S engine second stages were quite feasible, though some redesign was required of course). N-1 upgrades basically hinged on replacing the kerosene and hypergolic powered upper stages with much more efficient hydrogen powered stages, but this would have been a major undertaking. At some point it would likely have been more efficient to simply retire N-1 and design an all-new launch vehicle. Pity that Korolev chose a design with such limited upgrade potential-- had he stuck with his clustering idea, as done on the R-7 launch vehicle, but upscaling it to the largest tanks that were rail-transportable from the rocket factories back in western Russia to the Baikonur launch site, or even had he adopted a "mega-size Saturn I-B" approach of clustered tanks building a single stage powering a group of rocket engines, rather than the all-different-size spherical tank tapered stages design of N-1, then upgrading N-1 would have been FAR more feasible (as it was, N-1 components either had to be built on-site in all-new factories, or were fabricated back west, sent east on railcars, and then welded together into tanks and the rocket constructed in Baikonur, because it, and even its assembled component tanks, were simply too large to transport by rail overland to the launch site.
Perhaps they would have retired N-1 and built something more along the lines of Energia...

5) In such a scenario of a continued space race with the Soviets, I'm not sure that the rationale for the shuttle would be there. The Air Force would of course have continued pressing for their own manned space program, perhaps they would have even gotten their "Dyna-Soar" and given the limitations and perhaps overly optimistic expectations of that system, once it became operational I think it would have given major "pause" to the idea of persuing a large-scale shuttle, certainly on the scale and design compromises we got in our timeline. I think Dyna-Soar would have revealed itself to, assuming that it worked at all, be an overly-expensive, limited, and fragile vehicle-- much as the space shuttle ultimately did in our timeline.

6) I think the Soviet's demonstration of their early Salyuts would have driven the US to develop something "on par" with their capability. In that vein, I'm not sure "MOL" would have been it... though certainly it could have been. MOL would have been a thoroughly "military space station" along the lines of Almaz (the Soviet's military version of Salyut, or, more properly, that the Salyut was the "non-military" (to the extent ANYTHING in the Soviet space program could be said to be "non military") version of the Almaz station (Salyut 1 was an existing "DOS" station hull, the basis for Almaz, which Korolev's people convinced the government that they could equip with their own modified Soyuz systems and launch much sooner than the Almaz's, which had all its internal systems "in development"). It's possible that cooperation between the Air Force and NASA could have resulted in a "Blue Skylab" being launched on a Saturn V to give the military a real 'permanent' station capability. MOL was not designed to be docked to repeatedly-- they were launched with their crew and the "Blue Gemini" mated together before launch. This would have been acceptable for a "short term" program but soon would have proven it's excess expense and limited capabilities, and wastefulness, compared to a more "permanent" solution. MOL "modules" docking either together or with an orbiting "Skylab" type base module would have been a substantial space station. Resupplying and manning it would prove more difficult-- Gemini was ill-equipped for the task (not designed for internal transfer dockings-- astronauts would have had to "spacewalk" to and from their capsule to the station, complication operations substantially) and a "blue Apollo" would have been feasible, but complicated, and would have drawn the Air Force and NASA ever more closer together, which is a big question mark... How would that be done, and what are the political and operational repercussions of such developments??

I think it's safe to say, that had COMPETITION between the Soviets and US had continued, it would have led to more ROBUST space programs on BOTH sides... certainly more robust that the shuttle we got and then the Mir and ISS programs...

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
Post Reply