Russia slashes space station ship trip to just six hours Russia's space agency Roscosmos has successfully tested a new route that gets its spaceships to the International Space Station in an eighth of the time it usually takes. Progress M-16M blasts off from Baikonur The Progress M-16M zipped up to the ISS in just six hours – four orbits – instead of the two days – 34 orbits – it …
Sigh, there was a large list of issues the NASA guy talked about yesterday, and none of the websites are covering it.
This route takes a lot more launch precision. The new window is about 1 second long, so no unusual holds or issues, or you're out of the game.
Second, it collapses any sort of time to fix issues in orbit. You go straight from launch to rendezvous w/o any sort of breather in-between.
Third, it requires a little more out of the flight control system. Until recently, Soyuz didn't have much in the way of a guidance system, but now they've gone to an actual digital autopilot with real computers.
So they have not had launch/in-flight issues with Soyuz/Progress for a long time, so they figured it's not much of an issue any more.
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Taking two days over getting there means the launch window can be longer and timing of the various engine burns and staging events can be a bit looser. Some of the Gemini flights in the 60s even demonstrated first orbit rendezvous, but that requires everything to go perfectly. With the number of launches (getting on for 2000) and the amount of development (50+ years) that has happened with the Soyuz launcher it's likely the current version has tolerances well within what's needed for the shorter trip.
On the other hand, the longer trip gives crew a chance to get over any space sickness before trying something complicated like a docking. So far there's no reliable way to tell who will and who won't be affected by it, and someone who was fine on one flight may be barfing the next time up. Two days by no coincidence whatsoever is how long it takes to get adapted.
As you say, NASA developed rendezvous techniques on the basis of docking within hours of launch. This was in large part because this work was aimed towards having the LM dock with the CSM after a lunar landing, and the LM ascent stage had to dock as quickly as possible; it just couldn't carry the consumables for a prolonged flight. Even for Skylab, the Apollo ferry craft made RV within hours of launch. It wasn't until Apollo-Soyuz that NASA moved to the long-chase model of docking.
I appreciate there is probably some waste on there that would otherwise end up in landfill (so inceneration is fair game), but is there really so little or no recyclable waste coming from the ISS? Let alone the metal and stuff in the craft that could be recycled or the whole craft reused?!
Obviously, there is extensive recycling of water, oxygen and some other resources.
Apollo heat shields used to be a special thing. They were made by a proprietary company that went bankrupt. They used to cost over $250K for 3,000 pounds of 2.5 inch deep material. Some of them seriously cracked. The Shuttle's 24,000 TPS tiles cost up to $2K for each 13 inch by 10 inch tile (at least they were 'often' reusable).
Dragon & Orion are planned to have a reusable heat shield for human-rated flight. It costs ~$60-100K.
They still aren't cheap.
Not necessarily.
Usually the faster routes are more fuel intensive. The 2 orbits would have been the previously calculated way to get there on minimum fuel burn. That burn would drop you into an orbital pattern that would get you close in 2 orbits with no further fuel usage. OK, so you may save a bit on rations...
There is one benefit, apparently : gets there in 6 hours.
That means that an eventual emergency rescue operation can enter the realm of possibility.
However, to get this boost in speed the launch needs to perfect - not just "more accurate". Timing, launch profile, ascension, everything needs to be good to within the second.
This speed boost comes at a zero-tolerance price.
So I now ask : what if the launch is botched ? What happens if the launcher lifts on time, but loses an engine before reaching orbit and has to go for an additional burn or some other somesuch that voids the short trip ? Can they revert to the 2-day schedule, or is the whole thing written off and they just abort and go for re-entry ?
For resupply missions, time isn't important. But the Progress supply ship is an unmanned version of the Soyuz spacecraft, so it makes sense to test out new rendezvous techniques on Progress first and then implement them on Soyuz. Given that Soyuz is rather cramped, cutting the time from launch to docking from two days to a few hours would be a major improvement.
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