Meanwhile, NASA showed Russia this morning how exactly you do send a spacecraft beyond low earth orbit and on to Mars.

До свидания

/can't wait to see what happens when it re-enters the atmosphere, good times

Well.... NASA has had it's problems too... (new window)

malle-herbert: Well.... NASA has had it's problems too... (new window)

Russian problem: their probe will soon be a total loss, burning up in the atmosphere.

NASA problem: intermittent gaps in telemetry data for a short time, but everything appears fine now.

Hey Russia!

CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

Science and knowledge suck but 825 billion on countries that are basically glorified catboxes? That's okay!

CitizenTed: Hivejive: CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

Science and knowledge suck but 825 billion on countries that are basically glorified catboxes? That's okay!

No, it's not. My point is not "NASA is a total waste of taxpayer money muh nuh herp derp!" My point is the Russians have an extremely efficient and statistically safer space program, but we constantly trumpet NASA as "better". It isn't. If the Russians can do a space mission for 1/10th of what we would spend, let's just let them do it! The Science will get done.

Instead, whenever there's a SNAFU with a Russian mission, we get all superior and haughty about it.

Call it the price of doing business amongst a populace that gets squeamish about the chances of 12 tons of hydrazine crashing back to earth.

CitizenTed: My point is the Russians have an extremely efficient and statistically safer space program, but we constantly trumpet NASA as "better". It isn't. If the Russians can do a space mission for 1/10th of what we would spend, let's just let them do it! The Science will get done.

No. Because USA,. that's why.

Seriously though, why not both? Why not let both space programs do their thing and see what comes of it. If we limit space exploration and science to only the people who can do it most efficiently, we might lose out on some pretty great stuff.

Though I do agree on your main point. We shouldn't be concerned who discovers things, only that they're discovered. It's humanity we're trying to improve, not just our individual countries.

CitizenTed: Hivejive: CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

Science and knowledge suck but 825 billion on countries that are basically glorified catboxes? That's okay!

No, it's not. My point is not "NASA is a total waste of taxpayer money muh nuh herp derp!" My point is the Russians have an extremely efficient and statistically safer space program, but we constantly trumpet NASA as "better". It isn't. If the Russians can do a space mission for 1/10th of what we would spend, let's just let them do it! The Science will get done.

Instead, whenever there's a SNAFU with a Russian mission, we get all superior and haughty about it.

Hey, if Russia was capable of going to Mars for 1/10th of what we spend that would be impressive but they've never had a fully successful mission to Mars. Not one. This would of been their first spacecraft beyond low earth orbit since 1988 if they had made it (Phobos 1 & Phobos 2 both made it out of low earth orbit at least, but weren't completely successful missions either), instead it marks yet another failure. It isn't so much that we think ourselves superior because they have some failures every now and then, its because they have so many failures.

Again, Russia hasn't sent anything beyond low earth orbit since 1988. Meanwhile, NASA does it regularly and mostly successfully. Yes, we have failures sometimes too but at the moment we have missions focusing on Mercury, Saturn, Mars, the Vesta asteroid, Pluto soon enough, the moon, and so forth.

Russia meanwhile? Nothing beyond low earth orbit, NOTHING. I can't stress that enough. :P

Yes, Soyuz is reliable but as far as its manned program and earth based satellites the Russians don't really have much of a space program. The US meanwhile, will have three or four manned spacecraft soon enough.

ecmoRandomNumbers: Does this mean we stole the better German scientists after WWII?

Well, short answer is yes but we squandered that lead. The only reason the Russians beat the US with sputnik is because Americans never counted on the Russians reverse engineering the V-2's. Of course it goes back even further, the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched in 1926 by American Robert Goddard. Who was mocked and thought of as a crazy man by the US public. Not so by the Germans though, who took what he achieved seriously and thus became the experts by world war two.

Oh, and did I mention that we hardly used our German scientists at first? Instead Eisenhower gave the task of building a rocket to the farking Navy, who failed badly. Then the army finally gave the Germans a chance and they put their satellite up on the first bloody try.

The space race has no reason to be as close as it was, Americans had the advantage numerous of times but let arrogance and stupidity get in the way of reason.

Phobos-Grunt is a heavy metal band.

Wolfgang Hell is the lead singer.

bbfreak: ecmoRandomNumbers: Does this mean we stole the better German scientists after WWII?

Well, short answer is yes but we squandered that lead. The only reason the Russians beat the US with sputnik is because Americans never counted on the Russians reverse engineering the V-2's. Of course it goes back even further, the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched in 1926 by American Robert Goddard. Who was mocked and thought of as a crazy man by the US public. Not so by the Germans though, who took what he achieved seriously and thus became the experts by world war two.

Oh, and did I mention that we hardly used our German scientists at first? Instead Eisenhower gave the task of building a rocket to the farking Navy, who failed badly. Then the army finally gave the Germans a chance and they put their satellite up on the first bloody try.

The space race has no reason to be as close as it was, Americans had the advantage numerous of times but let arrogance and stupidity get in the way of reason.

I'm in the middle of a book on this right now. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age by Matthew Brzezinski. It starts with the development of the V2 and tracks the progress of both countries' rocketry/space programs from that point. I knew most of the US political factors already, but I'm also learning a lot about cold war politics in the USSR in general that I never really bothered to understand.

I recommend it. 10 bucks on Nook and Kindle.

CitizenTed: No, it's not. My point is not "NASA is a total waste of taxpayer money muh nuh herp derp!" My point is the Russians have an extremely efficient and statistically safer space program, but we constantly trumpet NASA as "better". It isn't. If the Russians can do a space mission for 1/10th of what we would spend, let's just let them do it! The Science will get done.

you have a very interesting definition of efficient and safer

yet it looks like what you really meant was cheaper

Zeno-25: malle-herbert: Well.... NASA has had it's problems too... (new window)

Russian problem: their probe will soon be a total loss, burning up in the atmosphere.

NASA problem: intermittent gaps in telemetry data for a short time, but everything appears fine now.

Not to mention that momentary losses in telemetry are often expected due to uncontrollable factors ...as this one was.

CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

An apples to oranges comparison at best. The Phobos-Grunt mission was to to land on a very small moon (low gravity) take a sample and return, and do some observations. MSL is trying to land 900 kg mini-cooper sized rover on a planet. The MSL is packed with a dozen powerful scientific instruments and have it move around the surface for 1+ year (could be decades if lucky) Also stuff like the Chemcam (new window) could be extremely useful if the technology gets miniaturized and turned into a handheld device.

So yeah, it costs more, but the ROI could be huge if everything works.

/Not to sell Phobos-Grunt short
//Hope they make another one or fix this one

Well, January should be fun, as we wait to see who gets tons of Hydrazine Hurt dropped on them. If that stuff freezes solid before reentry, the hydrazine tanks will come down in one piece. Yuck.

tovarisch.

First time I think I've ever seen that term outside of old X-Men comics.

CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

You do know that we don't load the rocket up with dollar bills, right? That's $2.5 billion paid to engineers and contractors. $2.5 billion more circulating around in the economy right now. Somebody's got to spend money to keep the economy going when corporations are sitting on their war chests.

/Keynes FTW

rhiannon: "Our Russian colleagues provided a full set of telecommands for us to send up and Perth station was set to use the same techniques and configurations that worked earlier," said ESA's Wolfgang Hell, in charge of liaising with Russia over Phobos-Grunt.

That is such an awesome name.



I'm going to have to name my next Skyrim character "Wolfgang Hell".

It sucks when missions like this fails. I just hope that the new US rover makes it all the way to Mars.

CitizenTed: Hivejive: CitizenTed: Russian Phobos-Grunt mission cost: $165,000,000.
NASA Mars Rover Curiosity cost: $2,500,000,000.

The Russians can launch eight more attempts and still come in under half of what NASA spent. One of those will surely work. In the mean time, we keep stuffing missions with enormous piles of cash. Oh, but it's worth it because we might get the next great Scotch Guard from the R&D, right?

Science and knowledge suck but 825 billion on countries that are basically glorified catboxes? That's okay!

No, it's not. My point is not "NASA is a total waste of taxpayer money muh nuh herp derp!" My point is the Russians have an extremely efficient and statistically safer space program, but we constantly trumpet NASA as "better". It isn't. If the Russians can do a space mission for 1/10th of what we would spend, let's just let them do it! The Science will get done.

Instead, whenever there's a SNAFU with a Russian mission, we get all superior and haughty about it.



You obviously don't know much about Russia's history with Mars missions. They have yet to succeed. Meanwhile, almost every one of our missions has succeeded. (new window). It might take them another 20-30 missions to succeed. Whereas we have a nearly 100% success rate over the last 10 years.

I'll take our many successes any day over their shoestring budget failures.

When it comes to space exploration, no one even comes close to the success rate of the US.

devine: Am I the only one that thinks Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I see "tovarisch"?

Same here, every time. Pulled that paperback out last night to re-read, as I just finished reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls again...

Make fun of Russia's mishaps with Mars all you want, but they still have had more success with Venus than we ever had.

SN1987a goes boom: Make fun of Russia's mishaps with Mars all you want, but they still have had more success with Venus than we ever had.

S.A. Kamov sure kicked American asses
RIP Charles Hapgood
/might be somewhat obscure

The Russian Venus missions were way cool, but we didn't hear about them in school because that was during the Cold War and we weren't doing anything with Venus. No sense making the other guys look cool.

I had thought we'd outgrown that mentality, but a few weeks back an unmanned Chinese Shenzhou 8 successfully launched, docked with a target vehicle to practice space station operations, then returned safely to earth.



The morning after the docking, the CBS early show (or whatever it's called) showed some footage of the Earth at night taken from the ISS, no mention at all of the Chinese.

Effen weak, and blatant nationalistic propaganda. The Chinese weren't invited to participate in the ISS, and so are building their own. For some reason, this seems to bother some people.

SN1987a goes boom: Make fun of Russia's mishaps with Mars all you want, but they still have had more success with Venus than we ever had.

It isn't that they had more success than we had exactly, its that they had more interests in Venus than we did. To suggest that they had more success suggest that we failed, but we only had one dedicated Venus mission that failed. A flyby mission, and we've only put one orbiter around the planet.

The Soviets had more interests in Venus than Mars, and we had more interests in Mars than Venus. This article asks the very question of why NASA hasn't had much interest in sending spacecraft to Venus: Why is NASA Ignoring Venus? (new window)

At least the Rooskies manages to get color pictures back from the surface of Venus.

studebaker hoch: [upload.wikimedia.org image 640x153]

The Russian Venus missions were way cool, but we didn't hear about them in school because that was during the Cold War and we weren't doing anything with Venus. No sense making the other guys look cool.

I had thought we'd outgrown that mentality, but a few weeks back an unmanned Chinese Shenzhou 8 successfully launched, docked with a target vehicle to practice space station operations, then returned safely to earth.

[static.guim.co.uk image 460x276]

The morning after the docking, the CBS early show (or whatever it's called) showed some footage of the Earth at night taken from the ISS, no mention at all of the Chinese.

Effen weak, and blatant nationalistic propaganda. The Chinese weren't invited to participate in the ISS, and so are building their own. For some reason, this seems to bother some people.
To be fair, US media sucks when it comes to science and exploration in general. Remember, past CBS anchor Katie Couric who on air on nightly news blindly and stupidly declared NASA a waste of money that could be spent better on earth.

This opinion of hers was misinformed, and lacking in all the facts yet someone let her be a "journalist". The facts being that we already spend 2 trillion on well meaning things as medicare/unemployment/etc. Such programs and mandatory spending is clearly the biggest threat to the future of the United States economically as its clear that the costs are only increasing while members of congress are too scared of pissing off the old people to make any meaningful reform. You know, because the old people vote and the young people don't.

Not to mention that more money isn't the solution. We already spend boat loads on education and healthcare but that doesn't mean we have better education/healthcare as a result.

The small 18 billion or so that NASA receives annually is not going to do any good toward the deficit if you killed the program. Of course be mindful that there are very real benefits to a space program, the most obvious being earth and sun observing satellites that are as vital as anything to safe guard the US economy. Think solar storms, and hurricanes.

Anyway, I recommend you stick to the BBC (new window). It is the most complete news coverage that I know of. Excellent too when it comes to science. Or if you're wanting specific space news. I'd recommend Spaceflight Now (new window) & Universe Today (new window):

Darth Invictus: At least the Rooskies manages to get color pictures back from the surface of Venus.

They're the only one to try though, NASA obviously doesn't see the point of spending lots of money on a spacecraft that will last a couple hours after it gets there. The Russians have never had to be accountable to congress and to the public.