New "digital" Soyuz troubles: another rough return?


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The updated Soyuz is having troubles that could make for another rough ride for returning astro/cosmonauts. Soyuz has had numerous incidents over the last several years that have forced it to make a "ballistic"a re-entry instead of a controlled one: loss of accuracy, very high G loads etc. The old girl has been showing her age.....

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/digital-soyuz-return-could-be-rocky

Soyuz.jpg

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kinda crazy doing a ballistic re-entry if i was on it i'd hope they pop it in the water certainly wouldn't wanna thud into a Kazakhstan desert at high speed.

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No thud - Soyuz comes down on 'chutes, then uses solid fuel rockets to slow dramatically before touching down. T^he rough part is during re-entry with up to 10 G's during a ballistic re-entry and 3-4 G's during a normal lifting re-entry.

SpaceX's Dragon will land this way using 8 liquid fuel thrusters, and with enough accuracy to touch down on a helipad. Just as God and Robert A. Heinlein intended ;)

It will also be able to come down over water.

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and the u.s is paying $700 million for this piece of crap to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, man, i want my taxes returned this is a ripoff. What our ingenious president should have done is kept the shuttle, but oh well

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Keeping the shuttle is NOT an option for numerous reasons, not the least of which is crew safety. #2 is un-Godly operational costs - nearly $1 billion/flight, and >$600 million/year upkeep per shuttle even if it doesn't fly. Compare that to a Dragon flight with the same 7 member crew size at $150-$200 million per launch and NASA doesn't foot the maintenance tab.

Safety wise there is no comparison: the shuttle loses.

An accident or malfunctikn during the first minutes of a shuttle launch is not survivable. Period. See Challenger. No launch abort system. OTOH, all the commercial ships will have launch abort systems to power them away from a failing rocket.

Then there are the shuttles problems with foam shedding, the resulting heat shield failures etc etc etc. The commercial spacecraft will be using far superior heat shields, most invented since the shuttle was designed, No, they can't be retro-fit to the shuttle in a practical manner. Too much weight due to its large surface area.

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