Why are they doing this, you ask?
Why do dictators do horrible and inhuman things to their subjects?
Why do children do shit they're explicitly told not to do?
All for the same reason: because doing something that's supposed to be Bad and getting away with it with zero consequences gives them a power high.
Putin is not a saturday morning cartoon villain. I'm pretty confident he does not get off on "being evil" or "doing bad things". Most dictators are not dictators For the Evulz, and imagining they are is very much oversimplifying things.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesThe prevalence of election fraud in Russian elections despite Putin’s genuine popularity indicates that he does have at least some level of Dick Dastardly cartoon villain to him.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranYeah, it's not like anyone has called them out for it. The fictional counterpart to Russia did eat that world's largest cyberattack for one of these stunts, but it's well fiction.
[Unfortunately I don't have much space related to add, except for a more medical question if humans could breathe a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen by medically suppressing the toxicity of the former]
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
We already do breathe a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen, although the former is only about 0.4% by molar fraction. Increasing the ratio of carbon dioxide affects the rate of diffusion across the lungs, meaning less oxygen makes it into the bloodstream. I have no idea if it is possible to medically alter the ratio of oxygen to CO2 needed for cellular respiration.
Speaking of Russia, the latest vague promise is to send a mission to Venus (again, I suppose). Per this tweet
, referencing a Russian media article, Roscosmos is attempting to work jointly with NASA to launch Venera D by 2030, although there is apparently not "political agreement" on the mission.
Maybe that's a carrot/stick that could be meaningfully applied to Russia if our government is willing to do so. "Stop it with the propaganda and the shooting satellites if you want your Venus thing to happen."
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 30th 2021 at 3:12:57 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Technically, oxygen absorption is a function of its partial pressure - hence why divers take gases that have far less oxygen than air; the partial pressure is comparable. The issue with carbon dioxide is that if you are breathing 10 bar air with 3% oxygen (same oxygen partial pressure as air) but 97% carbon dioxide it will alter your respiration and cause metabolic acidosis. A terraformed atmosphere on Mars might look like this.
Re: Venus. See, I thought that Venus was "Russia's planet"...
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Nov 30th 2021 at 9:24:13 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanSure, but it's got to be humbling that they are asking for NASA's help. Roscosmos is a shadow of its former self, barely able to keep its Soyuz and Proton rockets running, never mind develop new missions and spacecraft.
And the US has more Venus missions lined up, including one that Rocket Lab is going to launch on its Electron.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
While that may be the case, Rogozin doesn't seem to be in any hurry to ask Papa Putin to cut it out, and he's done more than his share of posturing anyway. It is a mistake to treat any Russian agency or state-sponsored corporation as "independent".
On that SpaceX thing, there was a frenzy of tweeting, reporting, and speculation over the course of the day. While I don't have a journalistic article to reference, Elon Musk finally weighed in. The Raptor issue is "getting fixed", which I take to mean that he's giving it his personal and direct attention to get things hopping.
Musk confirmed this summary
, which is that Raptor production is the bottleneck to Starship operating at a sufficiently rapid pace to repay the costs of development and thus getting Starlink V2 deployed quickly enough for the revenue to outpace the costs.
He also confirmed
that the "bankruptcy" thing was hyperbole meant to encourage performance.
Separately, in response to a tweet
asking about the postponed spacewalk this morning, Musk noted that some Starlink satellites had to be moved because of the increased debris risk from the Russian ASAT test.
It's looking like we'll have a few postponements. SpaceX's Starlink launch
and Arianespace's Galileo launch
are each slipping by one day. However, SpaceX may be performing
a Starship static fire test tomorrow. Also, BlackSky may be putting some rideshares
on the Starlink mission.
Edit: The ISS spacewalk is now scheduled
for Thursday.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 30th 2021 at 5:54:27 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Ars Technica: Asteroid-sample return turns up water on its rocks’ surface
Remember the Hayabusa mission that recently returned an asteroid sample to Earth? It's turning up some interesting results already. One of them is that everything from large asteroids to tiny pebbles may have surface layers with substantial water content thanks to solar radiation. Protons in the solar wind smack into them at high speed and interact with minerals to form the substance.
The process may be occurring everywhere in the solar system, providing a possible source for water on rocky planets like Earth. Moreover, it may resolve a problem in our deposition models, which is that the isotope mixes in water found in meteorites don't match the composition of our oceans. If dust particles are a major source of ocean water, it would explain the discrepancy.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 30th 2021 at 11:08:30 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Joking aside its a Cold War holdover. When NASA pipped them on a Mars missions with Mariner and Viking the various Soviet agencies decided to focus on Venus to get a few firsts in since there were no planned American missions announced. And to be fair once they were allowed to borrow a few submarine engineers from the Navy the later Venera missions produced some impressive results for the time.
While we're on that subject, Russian state TV apparently broadcast Kremlin threats that the ASAT system tested on November 15 could blow up GPS satellites, rendering NATO "blind". Sources: SatNews
, GPS World
, Daily Mail
. Not sure if all of those are reliable but there's enough synergy for me to be confident in the reporting.
With Russian military forces said to be massing on the Ukraine border, this could be a preemptive threat against any sort of retaliation. Regardless of whether the threat is acted on, it represents a deliberate escalation of "space warfare", and not in the "space fighters go pew pew" sense that everyone thinks is so cool.
What I don't know is whether Russia is actually insane enough to carry out such a threat. I said quite a while ago that I found it unlikely that any nation advanced enough to be capable of reliably hitting satellites in orbit would dare to actually do so because they would destroy their own access to space. Russia appears willing to put that assertion to the test. I would not be happy to be wrong.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 1st 2021 at 7:01:30 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Which would be an act of war no matter how it is accomplished. I'm sure that the Kremlin understands this. Civilized nations don't blackmail other civilized nations as cover for invading their neighbors. It's nekulturny, a diplomatic faux pas, as it were.
Just to be clear, my interest isn't in who wins an international dick-measuring contest but in preserving Earth orbit for everyone to use peacefully. Anyone who intentionally threatens that is an enemy of the entire world.
With the Starlink mission moved to tomorrow at the earliest, the main event for today is a potential Starship static fire test between 10 AM and 6 PM CST. I'll post a link to the fan livestream if that seems likely to happen.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 1st 2021 at 7:45:13 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"So, bit of a political worldbuilding question: What kind of space program does 5.29 billion US-$/per year suffice for, assuming that the what-to-spend-on decisions are done by the government and election aspects are of low relevance?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanIt's hard to be specific with a question like that, but the easiest way to figure it out would be to research existing national space budgets. Also, you have to be careful to consider different funding sources. In the United States, NASA gets about $23 billion per year, but the military also builds and launches satellites and that comes from a completely different part of the budget. The military also provides a lot of support, such as weather monitoring and range safety, while civilian agencies like the FAA provide commercial licensing and regulation. Researching and adding that all up would take some effort that I don't feel like doing this morning.
This Wikipedia article
enumerates national space agencies and their estimated budgets. NASA is by far the largest. China comes in second at $11B (2018 value), the ESA at $7.4B, Germany at $4.2B (2017 value), France at $3.4B, and Russia at $2.5B.
It's not clear why the ESA and the European national budgets are considered separate. I am not aware of Germany launching any rockets, but it does appear to have suborbital capability.
We also have to separate current from legacy capabilities. Russia has a crewed space program while spending about a tenth of the US budget, but it inherited that from the Soviet space program. Europe has never had its own crewed launch capability. India is developing that capability but its budget is even lower than Roscosmos'. Even NASA is riding on a period when spending was much higher in relative terms, which provided a significant chunk of the current infrastructure.
There's also the question of how much of your launch capacity is provided commercially vs. by state industry. With a company like SpaceX around, you could focus your efforts on satellites, probes, and/or astronaut training and pay for someone else to fly them, saving a ton of money, but that still leaves you dependent on third parties.
I'll very roughly estimate that, for a first-party, DIY space program, $5.3B/y or the equivalent would get you satellite launch capability and either crew to LEO or deep-space probes, but not both. You might be able to eke out a basic space station. Developing these capabilities from scratch would take you 10 to 20 years.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 1st 2021 at 9:02:35 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
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Not necessarily - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoofing_attack#Russian_GPS_spoofing
- no war.
Edited by Smeagol17 on Dec 1st 2021 at 5:05:35 PM
X4,
North Korea jammed GPS
signals near the DMZ several times, and yet Pyongyang is not a radioactive puddle yet.
Russia specifically threatened to destroy GPS satellites with their ASAT missiles. That is a massive escalation over jamming and represents a form of MAD. It's serious business.
Edit: And Roscosmos continues to posture
about debris conjunctions with the ISS. This time it's a Pegasus stage with a miss distance of 5.4 km on December 3. That's practically an order of magnitude outside the danger zone. This is the sort of shit that Russia does now.
ESA provides an update
on its Themis reusable first stage test article (similar to SpaceX's Grasshopper). The first hop tests are planned for 2023. This is an important step forward, if an extraordinarily late one. Peter Beck with Rocket Lab said recently that if you aren't building a reusable rocket you are going to lose in the long term.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 1st 2021 at 10:28:40 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Sure, but we have plenty of empirical evidence of Russia making grandiose accusations and/or proclamations that have no possible or plausible truth behind them, especially right after suffering a major international embarrassment. This goes well beyond the space industry, although it's what comes to the attention of this thread. For example, Roscosmos has proudly announced reusable launch vehicles, a Moon rocket, a nuclear rocket, and a space station. It has zero money with which to do those things.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"