Soyuz: January 2009 Archives

credit Energia / caption: First seen at Farnborough air show 2008, will this design change?

A prime contractor is to be picked for Russia's Advanced Crew Transportation System (ACTS) following a meeting of the Russian Federal Space Agency's (Roscosmo) scientific and engineering boards. The maiden flight is expected around 2016 and its development schedule and design will be ready next year, according to the head of Roscosmos Anatoly Perminov

Its that time of year again and there's some interesting items on the Russian Federal Space Agency, aka Roscosmos, website

See pictures here of equipment arriving for the French Guiana Samara Space Center Soyuz rocket launch complex. And here see another picture but this time it is of the public affairs staff of Roscosmos and European launch provider Arianespace. The fella in the middle is Arianespace's Mario de Lepine. The blurb tells us that the Soyuz will launch from South America in "late 2009". Best of luck

Of longer term interest is this development in the saga of the reformation of the Soviet space industry. And I mean Soviet. When I was at Star City in 2005 senior officials referred to the Soviet space programme in the present tense. The report suggests the new name for an amalgamation of the multitude of companies that exist could be United Rocket Space Corporation

Perhaps taking its cue from the Russian aviation industry where its unified industrial company is United Aircraft. But be careful there guys, United Spacecraft was the name former NAZI SS major and Apollo programme overseer Wernher von Braun gave to his fictonal spaceflight corporation in his book Project Mars: A technical tale. Not the sort of person Russians want to copy

If you wondered where the Chinese may have got the idea of two Shenzhou docking before they decided to jump to the 2011 Tiangong-1, Shenzhou mission read this

Talking of non-Russians India's cosmonaut gets a slap on the back from Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and there is a reference to joint manned missions being planned. I hope to get a lot more on this in the coming months 

And for something very riveting there is the announcement that a top priority for Russia is satellite remote sensing technology, just kidding

But of the various postings to the agency's website this meeting that took place today is the most intriguing for me, when it says, "Technologies to appear in these programs will provide the opportunity to deliver cargo to LEO, to orbit spacecraft for commercial purposes. Initially, suborbital missions will be conducted." [my emphasis in italics]

That meeting was of the International Association of Space Activities Participants (IASP) and the text refers to its public private partnership session. There launch system technology programmes were discussed. The Roscosmos blurb reads and the IASP's website looks as though it is primarily Russian industry so why it is international is anyone's guess

Maybe its the just the translator's punctuation but as a native English speaker I would read that as launch systems for delivering cargo to LEO and then in addition the commercial orbital flights that follow suborbital. Well, that sounds like an approach for space tourism to me

But until then its all cosmonauts and Soyuz spacecraft and if you have ever wondered what cosmonaut training was like, check out these pics. Inspirational...

The Russian newswire RIA Novosti is reporting that the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency has stated that the International Space Station will be off limits to tourists, aka spaceflight participants, from June 2009

credit JAXA

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s rocket and spacecraft development establishment, the Tsukuba Space Center, has produced a concept for a four-crew capsule that is part of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIB rocket launched spacecraft consisting of four modules, the Launch Escape System (LES), Manned Re-entry Module (MRM), Orbital Habitation Module (OHM) and Propulsion Module (PM)

Designed for LEO missions the JAXA's 2025 vision includes a Japanese human spaceflight capability and the concept work has been drawn up in preparation for possible formal design cycles

credit: Energia

This would seem to make perfect sense with the potential cargo return crunch that could occur if Shuttle is retired in 2010 and NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services demonstration and Commercial Resupply Services programmes do not deliver in time. With ESA's member states hobbling that agency's efforts to turn its Automated Transfer Vehicle into a re-entry capable craft for cargo return the Russians once again are readying themselves to coin it in

credit CNES

Already delayed from 2008 to 2009 the European Space Agency (ESA) seems to be preparing for a possible delay into 2010 for the introduction of Arianespace/Starsem French Guiana Space Centre (CSG) operations of the Samara Space Centre Soyuz 2-1a rocket as the maiden launch slips to November or December this year, but ESA declines to confirm that end of 2009 target date as definite