Nauka's Troubled Flight–Before It Tumbled the ISS
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
By all accounts, Roscosmos is completely corrupt and NASA can't afford to lose Russia as an ISS partner.
You'll note that even though a SpaceX Crew Dragon was also attached to the ISS at the time, it was not used to counteract Nauka's thrust and the only mention of it was that it could be powered up quickly as an escape pod.
Part of that is due to the low lever-arm position of it, but I also believe it was probably never programmed to provide pitch and yaw support, and maybe not even altitude reboost. I am willing to bet that software is being written right now, though.
Dragon has a very minimal trunk with no thrusters. As a result, the best thrusters it has are 30 degrees off.
That said, allowing the thing to dock before they could implement more stable fixes seems quite unwise - and especially just before a flight path out of communication with the team. Why couldn't they just wait a few orbits or days?
Seems as unwise as launching a shuttle in out-of-spec cold conditions, they just barely got away with it this time. I recall seeing a recent high level criticism of NASA losing (again) its safety culture - seems like another supporting data point for that thesis.
In the second half of the 199x i had an acquaintance who was director of a department building some electronic systems for Russian space. He told me a lot of backstories of how the Russian space sausage was being made. From sourcing parts for the Mir station at the local flea market ("Avtovo" who still remembers) to "what do you want, the whole year the salaries weren't paid and nobody was working, and a month before the launch they pay the salaries and the satellite is hastily built, no testing to speak of, and launched, of course it quickly failed". These days the situation with salaries is a bit better while the rest is pretty much the same, and the surfacing story with Nauka sounds just like one of those backstories. And that is on top of that hole in a Russian module sometime ago - one can see the progression from the hole affecting ISS's air to the badly behaving Nauka affecting ISS's position to ...
It is one of the crowning achievements of humanity so far and helps to prove that we don't all suffer from the same petty xenophobia that your comment demonstrates.
Was it facts? How does stating the facts of how things were done in the late stages of the USSR space program and are done in the current Russian space program translate to petty xenophobia?
If you want xenophobia, didn't the Russians accuse us of drilling holes in their space station module? Or was that just domestic propaganda?
[0] https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/6115d42b9a794727d1266340
[1] https://www.gazeta.ru/science/news/2018/09/04/n_11990893.sht...
[2] https://www.gazeta.ru/science/news/2018/09/03/n_11988091.sht...
The actual launch stand for Energia is similar in scope and it was only used twice. Of course, during the first Energia-Polyus launch, Polyus seperated from Energia, did a 360 degress rotation and burned up in the atmosphere. It is difficult to reconcile this mixture of competence and incompetence.
> From sourcing parts for the Mir station at the local flea market
They use mil-spec parts for that, and you can't buy them at a "flea market".
> the whole year the salaries weren't paid and nobody was working
This, on the other hand, is plausible. 90s were a shitshow, hence Putin and "order".
NASA could have kept the Shuttle after 2011 if there were no other options. They figured they could rely on Soyuz for a few years until Starliner and Crew Dragon were ready. It's worth noting that during this time Roscosmos, like a true capitalist, jacked up Soyuz seat price to $90 million from the low of $21.3 million - [0]
[0] - https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/13/nasa-uses-final-purcha...
you probably just don't know what you're talking about. I've used mil-spec parts in my teenage hobby electronic projects in 198x.
The parts in the Mir story were already not available from manufacturer, nor there were any spare parts stores as most of the stuff was already stolen like many things back then in Russia (and many of those things ended on flea markets or sold for scrap). Fortunately, they were able to find those parts on that large flea market ("na razvalah" of old electronics, back then Avtovo was the place https://sudonull.com/post/160488-St-Petersburg-radio-market-...) in particular because the parts were already outdated for consumer use by that time.
well, one of the source of our parts were missile guidance modules from a used hardware dumps in our Navy base town :)
>Russia does not build its weapons and space tech from "flea market" grade parts.
don't worry, the parts were real deal, just not available through official channels anymore, and they bought on the flea market much more parts than was needed, tested all of them and sent to the Mir those which tested best. After all they were old school professionals. The people like this was that part "that haven't completely fallen apart during the 90s", and which brought the country through the 90s.
And wrt. weapons - nobody probably told you about electronic bays completely gutted in 90s for the "gold plated contacts" electronics even on active duty military systems like Navy ships for example. The things did fall apart during 90s much more than you seem to be imagining.
>Stuff that goes into space and to nuclear power stations in particular is the very highest grade available, no expense spared.
and that reminded me about the nuclear powered cruiser "Petr the Great". At some point i worked together with 2 accountants who had before been accountants at that Navy yards which was building "Petr the Great" and they worked on that project. They told me a lot, in particular about the state the cruiser was launched and delivered at (like completely missing almost all electronics as it was stolen each time despite having been ordered several times). Anyway, publicly available, that is just a minor item compare to the whole picture - rupture of the steam pipe of the ship's power plant killing 5 because the pipe had thinner walls and was of worse quality metal than what was specified in the design doc. https://lenta.ru/articles/2004/03/24/petr/
Yeah, yeah, man. As we all know pipes never rupture in the West, and there are never any crappy O-rings in Shuttle boosters. Ceramic tiles never fall off, either.
Mir has been decommissioned 20 years ago, your information on "how the sausage is being made" is from a different century.