Thoughts On A Soyuz Launch

This afternoon in Los Angeles I watched the latest Soyuz launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Fourth-time flyer Russian commander Foyodor Yurchikhin, space rookie Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, and second-time American astronaut Karen Nyberg left the planet safely and docked at the International Space Station six hours later.

Leaving the planet is incredibly hard. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different, no matter how routine it may be (I hope!!) in a decade or two.

It’s not the distance, it’s the speed and energy required.

Distance-wise, the ISS orbits just 230 miles above us. That’s just a good three hours on the interstate in the family car for most of us, so what’s the big deal? That’s barely Santa Barbara to San Diego, New York City to Washington DC, Chicago to St. Louis.

But those trips are done at (for the most part) less than 80 miles per hour. To orbit the Earth one needs to be travelling at 17,500 miles per hour. The management and “control” (just barely) of this amount of energy in that short a time (about eight and a half minutes from launch to orbit) is a staggering feat.

To top it all off, it’s pretty much “all or nothing”. If you need a burn of 8:30 to get to orbit, a burn of 8:25 leaves you in trouble, a burn of 8:20 leaves you coming right back down, and a burn of 8:15 may well mean a “bad day”.

Then to come back down, one has to shed all of that velocity and momentum, translate all of that energy that you put into the system at launch into some other form of energy, primarily into heat and light. The atmosphere can be used, carefully, as a brake, but it can be every bit as unforgiving as the launch process.

I have nothing but admiration for those who ride the rockets. I can’t think of a single thing in my life I would rather do, as unlikely as that is. It’s been a dream of mine since I was five years old, and it will still be my dream on my death bed.

The US, Russia, Japan, Canada, and a host of countries in the European Space Agency have built the most amazing laboratory ever, the International Space Station, using the single most amazing machine ever built, the US Space Shuttle. The ISS is supplied by automated one-way supply ships from Japan, Russia, and the ESA, and now by private, commercial, two-way space ships from SpaceX in the United States. (Another US company, Orbital, hopes to fly it’s first one-way supply ship in a couple of months.)

Yet none of these spacecraft can carry people, they’re all unmanned. For almost two years, since July, 2011, in order to keep the ISS staffed, we rely solely on the Russian Soyuz vehicle. The “leadership” at NASA and in the US government, decided that the Space Shuttle program would be shut down with nothing to replace it. For the last two years, and for probably at least two more years or longer, NASA, ESA, and JAXA buy seats from the Russians for rides up to and down from orbit, at $50M to $70M per seat.

I won’t argue here about the justifications given for the shutdown of the Space Shuttle program. Let’s take it as a given that “something better” or “cheaper” or “more safe” or whatever needed to replace the Shuttle.  Why in the world wasn’t that “something” built and working BEFORE shutting down the Shuttle program? Why was the Shuttle program shut down with no plan in place to replace it except for vague, undefined, and unfunded hopes that a commercial alternative would appear out of US industry someday soon, maybe?

I’m extremely pleased with the progress SpaceX is making toward getting its Dragon spacecraft ready for manned flight in another couple of years. Boeing’s working on their CST-100 spacecraft, and SpaceDev’s Dream Chaser is making progress but still in an early testing phase. I would LOVE to see all of them working in two or three or five years and have a half-dozen different ways to get off the planet in ten years. I like the idea of having lots of options and backups for critical systems, and I think the ability to launch men & women off of this planet regularly, routinely, cheaply, and safely is a critical system for our species’ long-term survival and growth.

But for now we have just the Soyuz. I love the Soyuz, it’s a truck, it’s reliable, it gets the job done. And in the big picture, as reliable as it is, it’s a single point of failure that could cripple our entire planet’s manned space program with a single failure. And that single point of failure situation exists because the “leadership” in the US voluntarily and knowingly pulled the plug on the Space Shuttle with nothing to replace it.

At the top, we had a failure of vision and a failure of execution, and I have yet to hear any explanation that makes any sense to me.

Let’s hope those truck-like Soyuz keep flying safely and often until the Dragons and CST-100’s and Dream Chasers and a dozen other spacecraft can join them.