I guess I am a typical American, and have always wondered about the quality of their space program and equipment. Like you say, the Soyuz has been around a long time, but you would think some advancements and refinements have been made through the years?
Some of the avionics/control equipment has been updated or replaced due to obsolescence, but the basic design is about as it always has been since the R-7/Sputnik days. As rocket performance is generally measured, it's extremely inefficient and rudimentary, but it also is rudimentary that it doesn't require extreme precision. Where we would have (and did) attempted to optimize it, they avoided sophistication on purpose in favor of ease of production.
As an example of the rudimentary nature, for a long time, the Soyuz could only be launched from Baikonor, because the *guidance system* was designed and manufactured only for the latitude of the launch site. I think, in fact, that the mounting hardware for the inertial navigation system was machined to match the launch site latitude, and also maybe for a particular pad azimuth, because it had to be lined up with true north and local vertical. They have a modern strapdown inertial system now, so they can launch it anywhere. This also suggests that each R-7 ICBM *had to be purpose built for a particular launch site and target*.
They had an early lead in the space age, not because they had some special knowledge, but because they could only build big and heavy warheads, so they built a giant (for the time) rocket for them We, instead, knew we would have smaller ones soon enough, so didn't build the (for the time) huge boosters, just built relatively small ones. Same thing with engines, we kept designing larger and larger engines (up to the 1.65 million pound F1 on the Saturn V) to make bigger boosters. The Russians used *30* smaller engines and just lived with the complicated plumbing. Unfortunately for them, controlling such a beast was beyond them, and all 4 attempted launches of their lunar booster ended with some sort of control or plumbing failure. If they had kept going, they would have gotten it eventually.
Overall, the Soyuz and the Space Shuttle have similar reliability records. Two fatal flights each, about the same number of total flights, and about the same number of failures and close calls. More total fatalities on the Shuttle, of course, but that's because it was vastly more capable. These are the only two manned systems that have enough flights to have very good statistics. I think Apollo/Saturn had a predicted catastrophic failure rate of about 10%, and that's roughly what they got, one outright failure (13) and several close calls (Apollo 12 and 16 - first from lightning, second from multiple hardware failures in flight), and the pad fire. Gemini/Titan was about the same, with one failure (
. Gemini was as close as it ever got to an "operational" system as opposed to one herculean/heroic effort after another.
Interestingly, the spacecraft is almost always the source, there was never a Saturn 1b mission failure, one serious Saturn V failure (SA-502, unmanned test flight, failed second stage engine that caused two engine failures) and one non-impacting failure (engine failure on 13 due to pogo). All the Titan boosters (for Gemini, at least) worked. That makes sense, the spacecraft is much, much more complex than the booster, and the same is virtually always true of satellites and other unmanned launches, the payload is orders of magnitude mode complex, and has to last longer than 15 minutes.
I haven't been exactly hanging out by the TV lately, but haven't seen anything on the news shows I've watched, and just read snippets of information on line. Sounded like the recovery area was pretty remote and took a while for rescue crews to get to them? Do you think this might open up some opportunity for the private enterprises to make their way into the manned launches? One question just leads to another!!! I would imagine that the abort procedures changes depending on altitude and time from lift off? I would bet that some improvising had to take place due to the nature of the failure? Or at some point in time did some one just press a button and hope for the best? From what you described, I think those were two pretty lucky guys! And I'm thankful that they are safe.
The abort type and sequence definitely depends on point in the mission. Off the pad an up till (apparently) booster cutoff, it is accelerated off the rocket by an escape tower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=t7LTdfBfOVY (booster caught fire, escape tower pulls the capsule to safety).
Once the tower and shroud is jettisoned, it's some variant on what happened here. I don't know for sure what sequence they use, but, they have to get the descent module separated from the rocket and from the orbital and service modules. I think that in this case, the engine is shut down and they just separate the descent module from the service, then dump the orbital module. In other cases, they use the service module propulsion to fly away from the booster, then do a normal re-entry. Only the descent module has heat shields and parachutes, the other two parts are discarded on every flight.
I think that probably nothing is improvised at all, this all runs on canned sequencers (possibly even motor-driven switches, like a old washing machine) based on elapsed flight time. This was all considered long ago, and this is the third manned abort they have had - none fatal, they did get nervous that they had come down in China on a previous late-boost abort, but turned out OK. They also had one flight that landed normally, but in a frozen lake, and had to get out their self-defense rifle to fight off wolves! And had a pretty miserable cold night of it.
Brett
Topic: OT-Russian Launch Abort (Read 2974 times)