Sergei Korolev wins again (Rus-M Cancelled)

[MKSheppard]

The first and last Russian Cosmonaut to travel to space upon a rocket will do it on a Semyorka

Link

Roscosmos has canceled its planned Rus-M rocket and will launch its new six-person Soyuz replacement spacecraft on an upgraded Soyuz-2 rocket instead, according to space agency officials.

“We have come to the conclusion that we do not need a new rocket, we can continue using those we already have,” Roscosmos Head Vladimir Popovkin told Russian media.

The two-stage rocket was designed to replace the venerable Soyuz booster. Built by Energia, Rus-M was schedule to begin test flights from the new Vostochny spaceport in the Far East beginning around 2015. Human missions would have followed three years later.

Instead, the Soyuz-2 rocket will be the first to fly from Vostochny, according to Roscosmos Deputy Head Vitaly Davydov. Engineers plan to upgrade the rocket to carry as much as ten metric tons of cargo into low Earth orbit. Flights with the new spacecraft could begin in 2018.

[K. A. Pital]

Because capitalist idiots in Russia can't even make a fucking new rocket, but they wasted the Energia, and so the only rockets left are the Proton and the Soyuz.

What a bunch of intellectual impotents. I have foreseen it, actually. In 2007 Ivanov, then Putin's "henchman", said that Russia's space industry position is rather dire and it cannot provide 80% of high-tech parts that are required for the development of new rockets.

A matter of time before Russia's space program hits the same issue as the American one: no money, old rockets, and nobody gives a shit.

[Simon_Jester]

While I understand the criticism, was there ever anything wrong with evolutionary improvements to the old R-series in the first place?

[K. A. Pital]

While I understand the criticism, was there ever anything wrong with evolutionary improvements to the old R-series in the first place?

Nothing aside from the fact these rockets are not useful for anything but ISS resupply. Proton services any interplanetary drone missions. Energia is scrapped.

Zastoi.

[MKSheppard]

That's due to the shitty upper stages on Soyuz which both use hypergols. A LH2 upper stage would significantly improve payload to orbit and high energy missions like drone missions.

[Darksider]

So, Is anyone working towards manned spaceflight anymore, or does no one care? I know there are chinese and indian programs, but what are the chances that they'll abandon theirs as well? So far it's happened to both the nations that pioneered manned spaceflight.

[Simon_Jester]

I doubt China will give up, though their progress may be slow since they have trouble with the aerospace industry in general. Unlike the US and Russia, their industrial economy still has good prospects for growth and a lot of room to make technological advances over the existing base, so they have... call it surplus capacity. The US doesn't- it's headed for an economic contraction in terms of what is affordable and what its people are educated to do, which doesn't lend itself to visionary projects. Russia doesn't- it never had anything like the same scale of capability as the US, but made do by sheer determination to build its prestige and military projects at the expense of consumer goods... and now the determination is gone.

Europe might- they have the wherewithal, and they may be less screwed than the US or Russia economically, but it's a gamble, and historically the incentive wasn't there.

But China is very much still an expanding power- they've got problems, but they've got the wherewithal to deal with those problems without totally derailing their growing industrial economy. And they still have a kind of government which thrives on prestige prospects, along with much greater long-term ability to afford those projects than the USSR had. Putting a man on the moon, or even a space station in orbit, by 2020-2030 would prove that China had advanced to the first rank of Great Powers in a very satisfactory way, from the point of view of the Chinese government. They can afford to do it financially, too; the question is whether they have the industrial capability to make it happen.

And, indeed, the challenge might be good for them, if it creates spinoffs in their aerospace sector.

So I predict, tentatively, that China will not abandon its manned space program, at least not in the near future, though their progress may be slow.

[Siege]

ESA is I believe still studying on some level the possibility of developing its ATV into a Crew Transport Vehicle, but is constantly running into financial constraints, and so these plans probably won't find any significant traction until the financial crisis is over.

[Skgoa]

And once again, americans cry about the end of human spaceflight because they are between LVs for a couple of years. *yawn*
EVERYONE* is actively developing new stuff. EVERYONE* is planing manned missions. EVERYONE* is still only human and constrained by budgets.

* That is, every space agency that matters.

[K. A. Pital]

Um... this was about the cancellation of new stuff by a non-American space agency, Skgoa.

[Skgoa]

One specific piece of new stuff that wasn't neccessary to begin with. The tangent started by Darksider is about human spaceflight in general. There really is no basis for asserting "no one cares for HSF anymore", "the two nations that pioneered HSF abandoned it", etc., because it's simply not true.