Very nice. I guess Russia's lease on Baikonur is until 2050. I wonder what happens if it's not renewed...
Vostochny Cosmodrome, (Tsiolkovsky, Amur Oblast) is 51.85° N, 128.35° E. 550 miles west of Sakhalin Island and the Sea of Japan.
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.
"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.
with its equatorial denizens barely hanging on to its surface
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.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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically the case of every eastern european country since fall of communism
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.
Of course, the price cap is only in force since December 2022, so the effects haven't fully shown themselves yet.
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_...
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.
Cases of Kazakhstan seizing something there because of late utilities payment happened before.