Mighty Soyuz stands proud at Baikonur The Soyuz TMA-20M which will tomorrow transport 'nauts Jeff Williams, Oleg Skripochka and Alexei Ovchinin to the International Space Station is standing ready to roll on launch pad 1 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. As is the Russian custom, the lifter was prepared in a horizontal position*, trundled to the pad and …
@Mike Shepherd.
I agree that compared to take-off loads any forces will be small, but whilst all space launch vehicles are designed to withstand those launch forces vertically, I'm not so sure about sideways loads.
Would current US launch vehicles (for example) withstand the off-centre forces of installing the payload with the craft horizontal, or would that have to be built in as extra?
There was actually a link for this.
"Officials said the preliminary plan calls for the Ariane 6 rocket to be integrated horizontally, a practice long used for Russian launchers and more recently adopted by United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4 rocket family and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.".
Based on in interview with him in a documentary I saw (that was actually more about Tim Peake) it appears that he does have a pretty good sense of humour but that it is very, very, ... very ... dry indeed. Whether that is representative of Russians in general or Cosmonauts in particular, I couldn't say.
I suppose pronouncing cheese in Russian keeps your mouth shut. Or to be a bit serious, which is hard, a cultural thing. Looking back I don't think you will find that many people posing mouth open.Try the Royal family from the past. I would feel a bit stupid walking around with my mouth open for the draft. Blame Hollywood and look at Rubio, on occasions he forgot to show his teeth and then he suddenly remembered it.
It's simple. Russians don't have the habit of forcing a smile for politeness (and sometimes consider it bizarre). But some cultures are so accustomed to fake smiles (e.g. on greeting) that they consider them "natural", to the extent that you can read articles about why Russians "don't" smile.
"that glass of vodka". Reminds me of a cousin of mine who had to go to Russia to help them to assemble some machinery. Then there was a big party and at some time having had enough vodka he decided to hide his glass behind his back. In no time there was this gluc gluc sound behind his back as somebody was filling up his glass.
And to give a sense of scale, here's Tim Peake and colleagues standing in front of those massive engines.
Unfortunately the humans are what is known as "very close" and the engines can be referred to as "far away". So, for a sense of scale, ignore the picture entirely then consider that the first stage is bigger than a blue whale and the humans are normal human sized (I assume ...)
> Give me a nice Saturn 5 any day. Puts others to shame!
What others?
The slave labour that the US designers used... ah wait they used Nazi war criminals not slave labour. So who were the blokes that ran gasket goo around the concrete rings they built the errrrmmm someone remind me what did they use Loctite gasket goo on?
It can't be rocket science...
Or do you mean significan't others?
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