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Comment by hadlock | Hacker News Reader

This apparently is a building/warehouse valued under $30 million that was under construction and never completed, never paid for. It is inside the boundary line of the cosmodrome which makes it notable, but this does not impact space operations for Russia directly.

However it's not like they just seized a Soyuz rocket or crates of rocket engines, or even a train load of rocket fuel and they're holding it in lieu of payment now.

Kazakhstan in recent days has been on record saying that they intend to take small steps towards further independence from Russia.

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Very nice. I guess Russia's lease on Baikonur is until 2050. I wonder what happens if it's not renewed...

Russia has now built a launch site inside Russia (Vostochny Cosmodrome), in its far east. Although they don't seem to be actually using it that much at the moment, they wouldn't be cut off from space.

I think the trajectories from there are nowhere as good as Baikonur

You’re right. 45.6deg vs 51.8deg N.

The eastward boost you get from the earths rotation is just: 2 * pi * cos(latitude)/day so the difference is: 2 * pi * r_Earth*(cos(45.2deg)-cos(51.8deg))/day = 40m/s.

Which doesn’t sound like a lot but can add up.

I compared Plesetsk (Russia) vs Baikonur (Kazakhstan) in the Silverbird Astronautics calculator for Soyuz v2-1B using 3.3m fairing and without Fregat, and I got 1552kg estimated payload to escape for Plesetsk and 1665kg for Baikonur. 7% performance hit to high energy trajectories.

http://www.silverbirdastronautics.com/LVperform.html

Plesetsk is more established than V, but is 63deg latitude.

I never considered this and your response made me ask google the question: "Where is the best place to launch a vehicle?"

"The land at the equator is moving 1670 km per hour, and land halfway to the pole is only moving 1180 km per hour, so launching from the equator makes the spacecraft move almost 500 km/hour faster once it is launched."

Neat, thanks for such an interesting answer.

Yeah it's no accident SpaceX built their test launch facility on the beach in Texas, less than 10 miles from the southernmost point in Texas. Brownsville is about 20 miles away and is a natural, true deepwater port which is also helpful, but primary reason was to get as close to the equator as possible while still being on the US mainland. You can throw about 9% more mass into orbit on the equator than from NYC. Florida coastal property is mostly built out and southern Texas is mostly vacant + has a very favorable business climate and lax (state-level) environmental regulations which doesn't hurt either.

wondering if there is an inhabited planet somewhere out there much more optimized for launching spacecraft

with its equatorial denizens barely hanging on to its surface

Size and mass are the other big factors.

Kourou, at 5° North, is very nicely positioned.

Baikonur is 45.62° N, 63.31° E

Vostochny Cosmodrome, (Tsiolkovsky, Amur Oblast) is 51.85° N, 128.35° E. 550 miles west of Sakhalin Island and the Sea of Japan.

51° N is like London...not the best latitude for launching to space

It's definitely not optimal, but GP probably wanted to highlight that it's not much worse than Baikonur (45°), at least when you compare it to Cape Canaveral (28°) or Kourou (5°). Actually, Roskosmos was cooperating with ESA to launch some of their rockets from Kourou, but of course since the Ukraine attack that is suspended (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-suspends-coopera...)

Yeah, most of the continental US is better than 45°.

I don't know anything about space launches, how come the first orbital launch site in mainland Europe is in Esrange in northern Sweden, latitude 67° N? Are different latitudes good for different trajectories?

Yes, Esrange is best suited to launches into Sun Synchronous Orbit, which is high-inclination (nearly a polar orbit). It's very popular for things like Earth observation satellites.

To clarify, SSO is very popular.

Got to love those dog-leg manouevres and a dashing of extra fuel :)

I do not believe russians will want or need to get into space until 2050, because the economy of this country is screwed and electronics tech-stack is dependent on global market to deliver required chips... Needless to say the window of opportunity to receive the electronic components is closing. They can't run a space program on gray market deliveries.

I don't think you understand russian mentality. If it will be the only option, they will run their space program, however gutted and affected, from grey market. The war will only strengthen this mentality and approach.

Just don't expect thats the same grey market that we individuals are exposed to, currently places like Turkey, Georgia, Belarus and plenty of *stan countries are happily providing all the banned wares. Its not like they need to buy enriched plutonium (of which they have plenty), rather just chips and few things around.

Or they go completely China way, they can pay in raw materials like platinum, oil, gold, diamonds etc.

To run space programs they'll need money. Even with resources they have running both war and space programs will lead to catastrophic consequences. But I suspect that's exactly the way they'll choose.

For the time being, the West has been supplying Putin's troops with plenty of money (taxes from selling natural resources go into the federal budget, which is used to fund the military, and therefore the war). They made record profits last year.

https://svtv.org/gas-for-putin-war/

IDK about gas, but the price cap on Russian oil is lower than what Russians need to break even. They are now losing money on each exported barrel, but IIRC they can't just stop the production; the wells would become unusable.

Of course, the price cap is only in force since December 2022, so the effects haven't fully shown themselves yet.

Where do you get that information about profitability? According to BBC [0] back in 2019 expenses per barrel was $25 before taxes. Obviously sanctions make everything more expensive (hardware, extraction, transport, insurance), but not that expensive.

If selling oil was unprofitable Putun would just burn it instead of selling it at loss just like they burned natural gas for $10,000,000 / day for months.

[0] https://www-bbc-com.translate.goog/russian/news-50392407?_x_...

Many aerospace engineers have left Russia in the last year, too.

Yes, but it's unlikely they will continue their work outside of Russia and many people can very well be bought back. Western countries don't really help talent with Russian passports to leave the country and since space industry is very close to military it's only make it harder to get EU / US visas.

Source: I have a friend who worked at Sea Launch more than decade ago and now he wasn't able to get green card he won because of security clearance.

Access to space for the military is right up there with having a tank factory, rifle factory and bullet factory. You cannot be a superpower, let alone have a functional independent military without access to space.

They can run one where china supplies the required components.

I doubt China will pay Russia for the space program as the US did.

Last i heard, china is also being limited in acquiring advanced electronics :

  On October 7, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rule also restricts the ability of “US persons” — including American citizens or green card holders — to provide support for the “development or production” of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.

Doesn’t China create advanced electronics?

> Doesn’t China create advanced electronics?

It creates advanced electronics in the sense that it assembles them. It does not manufacture advanced or even mid-grade chips though which is the crucial point. That’s all Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA.

I’m not sure that 7nm is not good enough to be called “mid-grade”, but SMIC definitely has the capability of manufacturing chips good enough to get to space.

Advanced stuff isn't necessary for space, most rockets/aerospace worked fine with 1960s tech. Obviously nicer chips can be useful, but it's not like TSMC/Samsung are necessary conditions for getting to the moon or making an ICBM.

Rad hardened chips use really large node sizes

SMIC makes 7nm chips, which is considered high-end. It's not the highest of the high end, but it's not far from that, and it's definitely considered high-end.

Mostly assembly with some fabrication. Most semiconductor manufacturing is in Korea and Taiwan, with assembly in China, India, Malaysia, etc. The majority of the design work happens outside of China as well.

> Last i heard, china is also being limited in acquiring advanced electronics :

In the short term, I'm sure China will be able to get whatever chips it needs (for military applications, at least) that are available on the civilian market, they'll just have to setup front companies, etc.

In the medium to long term, this will motivate China to build the capacity it needs. It might ever exactly be cutting edge, but I'm sure they'll get close enough that it won't matter too much.

> In the medium to long term, this will motivate China to build the capacity it needs. It might ever exactly be cutting edge, but I'm sure they'll get close enough that it won't matter too much.

which says to me, that the export bans is a failure in policy then.

The cost of the export ban is a drop in business value for all the companies being banned (and without compensation by the US gov't afaict). The ban isn't really going to prevent china from getting close-to-cutting-edge chips for military applications either. So the ban, and the associated costs, is for what exactly?!

> which says to me, that the export bans is a failure in policy then.

That's going too far. It's almost like saying "don't fight a battle that won't immediately win you the war." It's important not to overstate their effectiveness (an export ban won't hit some Achilles heel that grind their military to a halt), but that doesn't mean the short term effects aren't valuable and the right thing to do. These bans are delaying tactics, they'll make things harder but not impossible for Russia and China to do certain things, and they might have to make unwanted compromises (e.g. force short-term supply chain issues and redesigning using a less robust common civilian grade chip they can get on the grey market rather than the harder-to-get specialized chip they want).

Basically, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

> don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

this assumes that the "good" is enough, given just a bit more time.

My concern is that a delaying tactic is insufficient. The bans will force the domestic production, for real this time, in these technologies.

After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. If china was able to buy, at "slightly" elevated prices, western produced chips, the gov't would not really be able to convince businesses to take the hit and pay high capital cost to produce a worse version just as a stepping stone. The investment capital is likely to be wasteful, or misspent - since the "fallback" of western products are available (until they go to war like russia, and the cut off is abrupt and sudden).

A pro-longed ban, like what we see today, without the actual war to trigger it, is likely to give the domestic production the reason it needs to actually get their act together. There's no western "fallback" to make them complacent.

So either they fail miserably, or succeed and wipe the west's technological advantage.

The "good idea", might not be so good if that were to actually happen.

> After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. If china was able to buy, at "slightly" elevated prices, western produced chips, the gov't would not really be able to convince businesses to take the hit and pay high capital cost to produce a worse version just as a stepping stone. The investment capital is likely to be wasteful, or misspent - since the "fallback" of western products are available (until they go to war like russia, and the cut off is abrupt and sudden).

What do you mean? This is China we're talking about. Every major company has a cell of Communist party members. If the government makes a decision, you follow and don't complain too loudly or risk political consequences. And, IIRC, the Chinese government already made the decision to build up their chip industry years ago (Made in China 2025).

IMHO, it's quite plausible that not implementing an export ban would have just allowed them to make the transition to domestic production more cheaply and more smoothly.

Many years ago they ran a successful space program with no chips at all.

No they didn't. The Soviet Union did.

This is an important distinction. The majority of the aerospace know-how in the Soviet Union came from Ukraine, not from Russia.

What you’re missing is that factories were built in Ukraine as a part of reconstruction after WW2, but engineers were mostly Russian, relocated from Russia.

These days pretty much all Ukrainian space industry is dead, and it was dead even before war. Most competent people left for Russia or USA. Yes, they still provided some components just because it was cheaper to build them in the original factory, but in a last few years Russia just replaced all Ukraine components. Antares had Ukrainian fuel tanks I believe, but I doubt it’ll last long.

Regarding engineers, I don't think that's true at all — as a simple example, two of the three lead engineers on the Soviet space program were from Ukraine.

And the USSR actually traded with the West. Made tons of money selling oil, gas and grain. Putin's actions are devoid of economic logic.

The political logic works even if Russia’s economy tanks he can point to people outside the country as scapegoats. If Russia had normal trade relations with other countries and everything was in shambles then the only blame would be internal.

The crazy thing is their population was crashing so fast adding territory for the people is more important than adding territory for the natural resources.

> The crazy thing is their population was crashing so fast

Basically the case of every eastern european country since fall of communism

Besides it not being them, the Soviet Union stayed almost always close to the state of the art in chips manufacturing.

The land there is leased, but Russia have to pay annual fees for property of Kazakhstan on the territory separately.

Cases of Kazakhstan seizing something there because of late utilities payment happened before.

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