
Soyuz Users Manual (2012) [pdf] - jgrahamc
http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/Soyuz-Users-Manual-March-2012.pdf
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rdtsc
> 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.

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gcb0
Considering they waste 4 per supply mission to the ISS... /rimshot

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hobbes78
Yet it's still the most reliable vehicle... It's a hell of an industry...

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leemac
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.

Here's another for the Saturn V flight manual for those who love this stuff:
[http://history.nasa.gov/ap12fj/pdf/a12_sa507-flightmanual.pd...](http://history.nasa.gov/ap12fj/pdf/a12_sa507-flightmanual.pdf)

~~~
stuxnet79
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.

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T-A
I just can't resist...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio)

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ableal
(Tom Lehrer tinkling out a little ditty mocking von Braun, in case it's
blocked or whatever.)

[Sometime in the mid 60s, given the prefacing dig about "spending twenty
thousand million dollars of taxpayer money putting some idiot on the Moon."]

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pavlov
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.

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gus_massa
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.

Somewhat related: "Making Wrong Code Look Wrong"
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html)

~~~
Gravityloss
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...

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nickhalfasleep
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.

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Sharlin
Plus the design requirement to bring back satellites from the orbit. As far as
I know, this was utilized whole three times during the Shuttle program.

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Gravityloss
The requirements were too ambitious in hindsight.

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ansgri
Wow this looks oddly familiar having read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
recently. Quite a bit of non-fiction there.

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yummybear
"ROMULUS (“Réseau Opérationnel MULtiservice à Usage Spatial")" Nice reference.

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trhway
the Soyuz is old and pretty reliable, while the upper stage that failed in the
VS09 flight of the "Soyuz at Guiana"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_at_the_Guiana_Space_Cent...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_at_the_Guiana_Space_Centre))
program - Fregat - is relatively recent development - 199x and its version is
what also failed the recent Russian mission to Mars -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-
Grunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt)

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lfx
It is only 244 pages. Not as big as I was expecting. That's all actual
astronauts have to know about space this craft before boarding?

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trhway
no, it is more like introductory pamphlet to somebody who wants his/her
satellite delivered by Soyuz rocket from Guiana by ESA (not RosKosmos)

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iso8859-1
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.)

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intrasight
It is a good idea to keep your users manual so when you sell your used rocket
you can pass it on to the next owner.

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sizzzzlerz
Of course, the US version of this manual used for the Mercury missions was a
bit shorter. In fact, it only had one line: Let's light this candle!

