> As result of the continued demand from the Russian government, International Space Station activity and commercial orders, the Soyuz LV is in uninterrupted production at an average rate of 15 to 20 LVs per year with a capability to rapidly scale up to accommodate users’ needs.
Wow that was surprising, I had no idea they were pumping them out at that rate. And this is 1960's base technology in action.
And considering they use four identical boosters for each, that's 60 to 80 cores per year. More than one per week. If they move to RD-193 engines that are used by the Americans as well, even more economies of scale.
Encyclopedia Astronautica posits that the Soyuz design is a multicore version of the German-designed Gröttrup G4.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/g4.htm
Its always fascinating to me seeing some of the technical papers on the space industry. Space and rocketry is a very complex topic that's always intrigued me.
I am actually more interested in the sociological aspects of the early space race. The technology was essentially lifted from German rocket engineers. A significant amount of them who would have been classified as war criminals and tried had their skills not been such an asset.
Wernher Von Braun exemplifies this.
I believe his team only worked on the lower or upper stage. The middle stage was a pain in the butt to develop because the overseer was incompetent, and I think a death occurred (via accident) before they finally got a grip of the situation.
The Saturn V was a stunning success, but it took a lot of work and a hell of a lot of money to get it to that level of sophistication and reliability.
Interesting document! As a contractor working for Chrysler, my father worked on the Saturn 1B stage telemetry system. The flight data recorder, I think. This was in Huntsville, AL, where I grew up.
The Intrepid Museum in NYC has a used Soyuz capsule on display in the same hall as NASA's Enterprise shuttle.
The Soyuz is fairly recent (around 2005 I think), yet it looks completely archaic compared to the Enterprise -- which is a late '70s vintage spacecraft design itself.
There's perhaps some kind of "worse is better" lesson in Soyuz, but I'm not sure what that would be exactly.
The Space Shuttle looks better in the photographs (some people believe that the Buran looks better), and has too many cutting edge technologies. But when you compare the cost it's worst.
Also when you calculate the accident rates of the recent ~20 years Soyuz vs the Space Shuttle, the Soyuz is much safer. (IIRC, with the overall records, the compassion is more even.)
The problem is that in some subjects you need to be an expert to compare correctly the alternatives.
Yes. IIRC it was Henry Spencer who made this analogy:
If you think about the airship, it's the ship mental model transferred into the air. It stays aloft with buoyancy and needs a vast hull. In airships they had signaling devices from the wheelhouse to the engineers working on the engines, to set the engine speed. Large crews, cabins, dining space, everything.
Then came the airplane and demolished all that. It was small and lean - and it was fast and required far less infrastructure or crew. Air was a different medium than water and it required a different paradigm. There was no space for dining and the flights didn't last for days anyway.
It can be argued that the Space Shuttle suffers from airship syndrome: it tries to be like an airplane with a cockpit, wings, landing gear, payload bay, carrying big engines in the back.
The Soyuz is just a capsule. Because weight goes above all else in space launch, when your payload is about 2% of total launch mass. And the simplicity is for safety. If all guidance fails, it can go to a spinning mode that still enables a safe re-entry.
In a sense, the earlier Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft are even more extreme embodiments of the lean capsule philosophy, as their re-entry vehicles are just balls with an offset center of gravity. AFAIK they could re-enter with any attitude and always turn up right. IIRC most other capsules have at least two stable modes, and there is some care needed that the wrong one is not used.
The same tight focus and lean principle can be seen in many other vehicles. Take a look at the A-4 Skyhawk or F-16.
The Space Shuttle had some extraordinary capabilities, but it was so large and complex that it took a large amount of the budget, just for launching humans to space. There couldn't be much human launcher development while the Space Shuttle was flying. Imagine you're renting a castle - hard to buy a house when all your money goes to rent...
I don't think it was a thought problem. The goal was to put satellites in odd orbits and still be able to return to a fixed airstrip, requiring great lateral transit. There were plenty of smaller lifting bodies that could have done most of the work, but the Shuttle was built to handle pretty exotic polar orbits from a west coast launch facility.. that never happened.
> (IIRC, with the overall records, the compassion is more even.)
You can consider ill-fated Komarov's flight as a part of early testing of Soyuz. Sort of like Apollo-1 crew forced making Apollo much more fire resistant.
Soyuz, as a non-reuseable technology (actually, some parts are reused) benefits from incremental improvements; Soyuz of today has quite different equipment than it had in late 60-s. Komarov, as well as Volkov, Dobrovolskii and Patsaev paid with their lives to make Soyuz safer... this is part of the reason this old design still carries two to four flight per year without casualties. Still way less safer than the aspired gold standard of commercial aviation :) - relatively recently Soyuz had some ballistic aerobraking scenarios, where safety margins are thin...
The 2.1v, introduced in 2013, makes this statement WRONG: "The Soyuz LV consists of: • A lower composite consisting of four liquid-fueled boosters (first stage)" (source: Annex C, A5.1.1.)
Wow that was surprising, I had no idea they were pumping them out at that rate. And this is 1960's base technology in action.