Posted on 04/18/2021 11:01:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov’s administration, the timeframe of the station’s operations has expired and its condition leaves much to be desired. "Lately, reports about technical malfunctions have been coming more often. In order to avoid any risks in case of accidents, it’s necessary to carry out a technical inspection of the station. After this, a decision should be made."
(Excerpt) Read more at tass.com ...
Just when starship is about to give the USA 100t lift capability.. hmm
Another Putin’s trick to influence US election?
They have time travel. That’s how they know they are going to pull out since 2025.
Thanks to SpaceX, Orbital, Blue Origin, etc... (no NASA, not you, though that’s more a fault of bureaucracy than the talents of the scientists and engineers who work there), the US is regaining the ability to put humans into low earth orbit. That means the Russians can’t subsidize their own space program with taxi fares and they’d have to pay full price to put their cosmonauts on the ISS. Suddenly, the Russians don’t see a need to keep up with the mission.
In truth though, there’s not a whole lot of objective value in putting people into space. The overhead is immense, you have to keep paying, training, and retraining a cadre of astronauts constantly to do things in orbit that robots can do much less expensively, and a human rated mission requires putting tons of extra weight and equipment into orbit that only serves to keep the human cargo alive. Robots don’t need oxygen, rest breaks, toilets, food, radiation protection, or exercise equipment to keep them from going crazy while falling around the Earth in a pressurized can. If we can keep the ISS on orbit without people flying it (and we can), it should be an optionally-manned mission.
You forgot to mention the coolest things about robots—they are not subject to “diversity” which means the best robots get the job regardless of which color they are.
Add to that the fact that robots don’t have any sexual preferences/gender stuff to deal with, and you now have a world where excellence matters and ideology is irrelevant.
That is gonna have to be the future workaround for real human progress—like water flowing down a river and moving around the rocks.
Great post. I’ve been saying that for years. Space dweebs — and I used to be one — never like to hear that. LOL.
English translations of TASS are troublesome, clumsy and have always been difficult to read, that’s one reason why TASS is rarely used as a source in the west.
For God's sake, let's do that with ISS if it really is approaching end-of-life. And get something new up there asap.
But the Russians are just yapping for mo' money, there is zero chance they would give up this grift, er, partnership and yield their co-ownership to China.
Reading TASS from years in the future doesn’t make it any easier.
Starship is Moon bound - Dragon is ISS bound.
Russia and China are both planing to build their own space stations.
Screw those Commie bastards and screw their wussy little space station.
Screw those Commie bastards and screw their wussy little space station.
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Screw away, but both are likely to be heavily militarized ... we got nothing.
It’s OK to poke fun at TASS.
Yeah but, Dragon is small loads.
For what Starship can deliver in total tonnage it makes sense that the platform would be purposed for additional maintenance and replacement of parts for the ISS.
Dragon is mostly a capsule delivery system. The Starship literally makes space economy at 100t per launch really thinkable.
Headline didn’t translate well, did it?
The Starship literally makes space economy at 100t per launch really thinkable.
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You do realize that the Starship is just the working scale mode of the BFR rocket? So if there is no ISS, they can either deliver cargo to the Russian or Chinese stations under contract or move on to build and maintain the Lunar orbiter station and lunar colonies.
SpaceX killed every existing orbital system provider. Typical prices were $5,000/lb. The Falcons have reduced that to about $1000/lb. Starship may put payloads into orbit for as little as $100/lb.
All the old players are ten or more years behind SpaceX.
It is a massacre. Congress will choose SpaceX by only giving NASA enough to buy SpaceX services. Blue Origin and ULA will fold up.
Russia, China, and Europe will try to match SpaceX, but they will always be at least five or ten years behind.
They will all have to ride SpaceX to orbit, or spend ten times more for their own home brew.
You do realize that the Starship is just the working scale mode of the BFR rocket? So if there is no ISS, they can either deliver cargo to the Russian or Chinese stations under contract or move on to build and maintain the Lunar orbiter station and lunar colonies.
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True, I was being general about the New Big Rocket platform Elon Musk is developing.
However, do you realize that BFR is not the Dragon capsule which you mentioned? I don’t think you’re quite grasping my point being that the new bigger platform means that assembling or replacing modules on the ISS becomes entirely more realistic?
The SpaceX reusable platform means that its way cheaper for us to maintain a station in space than Russia or China can. In fact, it would be critical to have an orbital space station if we would be building on the Moon or Mars regardless.
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