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Russian Space Agency Confirms Progress Cargo Spacecraft Burns up in Atmosphere

posted by janrinok on Friday December 02 2016, @11:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-it-a-bird?-is-it-a-plane? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Russian space agency Roscosmos has confirmed that Progress cargo spacecraft burned up it the atmosphere and its debris fell in south Siberia's Tuva Republic.

"As a result of an abnormal situation, the loss of the Progress cargo ship took place at an altitude of 190 kilometers [some 118 miles] above an unpopulated mountainous area in Tuva; most of the fragments burned up in the [Earth's] atmosphere, according to preliminary data," Roscosmos press service said.

Earlier in the day, a source told RIA Novosti that the debris of the Progress cargo spacecraft supposedly fell in Russia's Republic of Tuva in south Siberia.

Roscosmos previously reported that Progress lost telemetry six minutes after launch on its mission to deliver several tons of consumables to the crew on the ISS. They stress that the accident "will not affect the routine operations of the ISS".

Sorry, guys, looks like it's borscht again tonight.

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  • (Score: 2) by driven on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:45AM

    by driven (6295) on Saturday December 03 2016, @07:45AM (#436447)

    The space elevator idea seems to have hinged strongly on using carbon nanotubes, but unless the nanotubes are produced perfectly (not to mention in staggeringly great numbers), the strength is very greatly reduced [newscientist.com].

    The results suggest just one misplaced atom is enough to weaken an entire CNT fibre, and since nanotube manufacturing processes are flawed at the moment, you will inevitably end up with a bad tube in your fibre.

    “Only CNTs with extreme quality are able to retain their ideal strength,” says Ding. “Most mass-produced CNTs are highly defective, and high-quality CNTs are hard to produce in large quantity.”

    That’s bad news for people who want to build a space elevator, a cable between the Earth and an orbiting satellite that would provide easy access to space.

    Estimates suggest such a cable would need a tensile strength of 50 GPa, so CNTs were a promising solution, but Ding’s research suggests they won’t work. “Unless great breakthroughs on CNT synthesis can be achieved, using CNTs to build a space elevator would be extremely challenging,” he says.

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