Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
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This side of never, more like. I wouldn't expect anything near like enough investment for this until 21st century, maybe. After Moonshot cuts, we'll need to operate on a strict "Use already developed rockets to launch proven and cheap/economically relevant projects" budget, not develop novel means of propulsion.
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Never, we didn't pick Chelomei. And even with him I think it would have been difficult getting the politicians to accept it lol
Yeah, as much as I would love to go all in on that gas core NTR that the Glushko had mentioned in a report from 1963 OTL, I have to admit that in the context of the budget cuts we're likely to suffer after we make the moonshot or fizzle out before getting there it's just not that good an investment.
Whatever part of our space program that survives the budget cuts and couldn't work acceptable with just chemical rockets is probably just going to be a bunch of unmanned probes for the outer solar system, and even that is somewhat iffy given all we've been able to do with chemical rockets OTL there too.
If the niche is somehow large enough to justify spending the resources on making an entire new type of thruster, we'd probably be better off making something that could take advantage of the unmanned nature of the probes like an ion engine rather than a NTR. Maybe we slap a small reactor on one and have some NEP probes to get a bunch of really cool pictures of the gas giants, but I'm not hopeful.
Whatever part of our space program that survives the budget cuts and couldn't work acceptable with just chemical rockets is probably just going to be a bunch of unmanned probes for the outer solar system, and even that is somewhat iffy given all we've been able to do with chemical rockets OTL there too.
If the niche is somehow large enough to justify spending the resources on making an entire new type of thruster, we'd probably be better off making something that could take advantage of the unmanned nature of the probes like an ion engine rather than a NTR. Maybe we slap a small reactor on one and have some NEP probes to get a bunch of really cool pictures of the gas giants, but I'm not hopeful.
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Blackstar has mentioned before they've read from the same sources I think, his posts are definitely worth paying attention to.@fasquardon you can feel vindicated by history. the Discord is basically going all "we should have just let him decide everything about space votes"
It shouldn't be that bad, both the USA and USSR developed further rockets and rocket tech afterwards. It's just that what programs there are will have to be more measured and will probably be spread out over some what longer time span, as one won't feel the need as with the RLA to pay what it takes to make it complete on time.
So basically if possible, best to invest on programs really that will help expand the space budget because it gives good economic returns. For instance anything that helps substantially reduce cost of launch.
In our specific case we can hopefully focus a fair bit on just upgrading the RLA more over the 70s though, next gen engines, lighter structure, cheaper production, etc.
It is an interesting question. What can be said for certain is that the regime was definitely more pro-space than the US regime was. Which is no surprise, given that the USSR was mainly run by engineers, while the US, even then, was mostly run by lawyers. Probably helped that the space program was a military effort too.
This may be different in TTL however. OTL Kosygin came from the ranks of the professional managers, which isolated him in the big engineer's club in the halls of power. That ITTL he can be leader may mean less engineer dominance.
I suspect that the Soviet people were genuinely more pro-space, but disentangling propaganda from other influences is hard. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, perhaps the man who can be best described as father of manned spaceflight, probably had something to do with it. The early wins of Sputnik and Vostok likely encouraged people. And on top of that, the space program fit very well into the "we're going to build the world of the future, today" enthusiasm of other Soviet propaganda, so some of it might have been that the space program fit so well with the rest of what the regime said it was all about.
Most of the money spent on dead-end programs came early though, when we were racing to be first to orbit (though not hard enough, evidently) and weren't sure which approach would get lucky. I'm not sure we're spending much on dead-end efforts now, though in part that's because the moon mission requires so much supporting work.
What are we still spending on rocketplanes? We cancelled MKAS. And the PKA isn't much of a rocketplane - it's a capsule that can move side-to-side a little better while it drops like a rock.
And ya, after the initial bad roll we seem to be getting unreasonably lucky with the RLA so far. Of course, there's still plenty that can go wrong.
A nuclear tug might be 21st Century stuff (have to build those on the moon or be able to load them onto a rocket in a package that can survive the absolute worst catastrophes that a rocket can subject it to without spreading high purity plutonium all over Central Asia.
That said, the Soviets in OTL started working on nuclear rockets in the 1960s, and actually had working ones by the 1980s, so we may get the option to work on them soon.
@fasquardon you can feel vindicated by history. the Discord is basically going all "we should have just let him decide everything about space votes"
OK... What changed?
Also, I will note that I wasn't able to vote on maybe the most key decision we made about the space program, to blame the military for the past failings and to keep Glushko. Other than that (I would have blamed poor Glushko, who wouldn't have deserved it, but it was pretty clear at that point that he wouldn't deliver unless he got his way) I was a proponent of Yangel or Glushko to get the job initially (Chelomei might have been a better choice), and after the shake-up when the Americans beat us to orbit, advocated for doubling down on Glushko and giving the guy pretty much everything he wanted (while also warning that this option would take serious political capital and may be the thing that loses Voz his job).
So while I may have given caveats, I still voted to shoot for the moon.
@Blackstar Say, any chance we could get some detail on what the US space program is doing and when they passed their major milestones? Am curious about how the two efforts are matching up so far.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Well the OTL failures in properly anticipating how the suit would react to vacuum didn't kill the cosmonaut so maybe we will get similarly lucky. The program was always going to iterate on the EVA equipment anyway as mission get more complex and cosmonaut feedback is incorporated.
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When the vote came up for what direction to take the space program, I and most of the Threadviet supported building up orbital capacity on the logic that it would lead to a more sustainable space program than a Moonshot. But then panic ramped up about how the Surpreme Shitviet would rake us over the coals if the Americans kept getting space race victories, and many of us fell for it. In hindsight we probably would have survived the consequences well enough.
I hope that during negotiations for the 8th plan we can buy ourselves a little more budget room for rocketry, even if we have to make concessions to difficult targets or such elsewhere.
Speaking of targets, I hoped to build Zoos soon but with the "wheat crisis" ramping up we'll probably have all four agri dice working on bailing water there for the rest of the plan. Or depending on how futile it is, just take the L and do zoos anyway. Even the action that's explicitly a response to the crisis does does even slow it's decline- it slows the acceleration of the decline. Good luck working with that.
By the way: Is there any obscure endangered species that went extinct OTL that might be preserved if we build zoos right now? In the SB Austria Quest the QM said that because we funded the Vienna Zoo for political capital we prolonged the existence of the Thylacine.
I hope that during negotiations for the 8th plan we can buy ourselves a little more budget room for rocketry, even if we have to make concessions to difficult targets or such elsewhere.
Speaking of targets, I hoped to build Zoos soon but with the "wheat crisis" ramping up we'll probably have all four agri dice working on bailing water there for the rest of the plan. Or depending on how futile it is, just take the L and do zoos anyway. Even the action that's explicitly a response to the crisis does does even slow it's decline- it slows the acceleration of the decline. Good luck working with that.
By the way: Is there any obscure endangered species that went extinct OTL that might be preserved if we build zoos right now? In the SB Austria Quest the QM said that because we funded the Vienna Zoo for political capital we prolonged the existence of the Thylacine.
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It would have costed us some political capital, maybe... but then again, so did spending as much as we did.
There was no perfect move, they both have valid points in their favor, but we completely underestimated the advantages and overestimated the costs of going with a more conservative pace.
Long term we could have gotten a win when USA burned out of the race while we proceeded with a slower and more reasonable pace.
If I remember right from Discord talks, it was mentioned that we could have sustained 50% of current costs relatively indefinitely if we resigned ourselves to not achieve moonshot first. As of right now, post-moonshot I think Blackstar mentioned we should expect a 75% budget cut, which will slowly grow up to only being a 50% budget cut over a decade or two.
A severe cut, but all in all a mostly acceptable one. We'll just have to be careful about what we fund there.
All things are mutable with the right politicking. Conspiracy to protect, delay, obscure, justify, and quibble the space budget is a risk who's political consequences would probably only grow over time, but it could all be worth it. Of course, failure might mean the total collapse of the space program, but that's all the more reason to get our hooks in the party colleges.
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So basically one way or another, we're doomed to never have an ongoing space budget of more than 60 resources per turn? Damn that sucks, and I'm all for taking hits elsewhere to beat the SupSov into letting us have more. If nothing else, I dearly hope we can convince them to let the space allowance grow as our GDP grows. Is it hopium to hope that after microchips and other new technologies start hitting the market they might be more supportive of us?
I think there was something too about how we could get away with only 50% cuts if we gave up on the moonshot ourselves instead of dropping down 75% before climbing back up again, but that would need us to actually give up on the moonshot and accept any side effects from that.
With how unpopular space is voluntarily cutting funding for use elsewhere might not have as bad a blowback though.
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well, not in the short-medium term, but let's be real: FOR ONCE, the politicians here are right.
The money we wasted on some of these projects could have been used to complete multiple other projects that would have been much more beneficial for the economy.
car factories and various kind of consumer goods. more plastics. the pipeline to china to export oil more cheaply. more coal power plants to have more electricity to play with.
we DID waste some money when we didn't need to. and long term moonshot is mostly for propaganda, because while it's possible it's not long-term sustainable. There's a reason why we're only now seriously reconsidering going to the moon.
If we want more rocketry budget, we probably need more actual applications for it. commsats, weathersats, mapping sats, economies of scales and so on. but it will take time for us to reach the necessary level of electronics to make them worth it beyond prototypes I think.
that's more or less what I said (well, I said "not doing it first", but close enough).
At this point it's just too late. we spent a lot already, and giving up now would just get us the worst of both worlds, having taken the space race seriously only to then give up.
At this point we're committed. We need to try and trim down the fat, avoid wasteful spending, maybe see if we can reduce our current budget a bit on our own before we get pushed to do it by the soviet, but losing the space race after all of this would be quite the blow to our reputation I think.
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Well, Voz got into office in, what, the late '50s? By the time it's apparent that the US is decisively winning the space race, Voz is going to be approaching his sell-by date. Even if he'd happily go on holding his job until he dies of old age (not implausible, given his personality), the greater good of the Soviet Union might well be served by having someone else with a different perspective take the position.
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NGL I feel a little... cheated? disheartened? hearing this recent news. Early on there was so much hype and discussion about what cool space stuff our super janked up ATL Soviet Union could do, now I'm being told we'll probably never have budget allowance large enough to do anything that was not done OTL by Russia or America.
God, 50% of our current limits! The RLA launcher alone eats over 80% of that! Perhaps taking Moonshot was the right idea so that we at least temporarily have the larger limit, because at a 60 RpT cap a lot of our just Fundamental Space Stuff would need to be postponed while we wait for the launcher.
God, 50% of our current limits! The RLA launcher alone eats over 80% of that! Perhaps taking Moonshot was the right idea so that we at least temporarily have the larger limit, because at a 60 RpT cap a lot of our just Fundamental Space Stuff would need to be postponed while we wait for the launcher.
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Wheat crisis?
Is being on discord a prerequisite for participating in the quest now? O.O
Youch!
By comparison, the US peak funding for NASA came in 1966, so we probably haven't even reached the peak of our funding for space (at least, not unless we give up on the moon landing). So 25% of the CURRENT space budget post-moon landing will make the post Apollo crunch that NASA had in OTL look mild.
(See here for the NASA budget over time, adjusted for inflation.)
I have a hard time comparing our level of investment in space to those of real programs, since we get told costs in arbitrary units that I don't know how to convert into US dollars... So I don't know for sure how much costs will need to rise to complete the RLA (which will be the main source of costs for the program), plus it will depend on rolls. But even if we just assume that we're at max funding now, a 75% budget cut is far more severe than the 66% budget cut that NASA faced after its peak spending in 1966.
If this correct, we should give up on the moon ourselves. Funding getting cut down to 25% of current levels for decades would make it pretty near impossible to actually use the expensive stuff we are building now.
Once the RLA is developed, if we don't utilize it enough (read: launch stuff), people will loose skills, the factory will be inefficiently utilized, low skill will lead to more mistakes on the launch pad and in the factory (which we'll have to spend money fixing) and we'll end up spending nearly as much money as we would by doing lots of stuff, but without the benefits of actually doing that stuff!
And just how unpopular IS space in the SupSov? I thought that besides Aristov, they were still real gung-ho?
That said, there are various ways to manage the fallout. For example, instead of a very expensive landing capability, we just send men to Lunar orbit - that's something that the OTL Soviet Union could have done with two Proton launches, if the Proton had been safe enough to ride at the time and the capsule had been ready. Or even a free-return trajectory for a manned capsule - that's something that one Proton launch could have managed. Such smaller rockets are vastly cheaper than the big Saturn V type vehicles, and due to the RLA's modular approach, we could get the smaller RLA up and running even if we scaled back and told Glushko he won't get to make the heavy versions of the RLA this decade.
Another thing that we can do, as the planners of the Soviet economy, is just say that landing on the moon this decade would cost exponentially more, and that while the Lunar goal is still a good one, because eventually the USSR will need to utilize Lunar resources to support true space industry, it is our view that the cost over-runs of the RLA program make this uneconomical to do so soon, that a landing will be more affordable in the 70s, and that we will be controlling costs in the space program in order to rebuild Moscow all the faster.
Hm... I'm not so sure we've wasted money yet.
Yes, some programs have been disappointments. But that's part of trying new things, sometimes it doesn't go well. It isn't a matter of "all programs must succeed" it is a matter of "how much success are we getting from the money we're spending and how much is learned from the successes and failures".
The reality is that the space program is a long term investment. Yes, there's such a thing as investing too much in the long-term. But we need spy satellites, we need weather satellites, we need coms satellites. We also need scientific output. Space Telescopes and experiments on space stations or probes to other planets don't directly improve economic output, but the science return from those things will help in, for example, designing better electronics, as the better understandings of quantum physics that space telescopes support can go directly into building better computers. This is to say nothing of spin-off benefits - for example the work that was done on liquid hydrogen as a rocket fuel and an engine that could burn it will directly support better industrial chemistry. But perhaps more importantly, it is an area where we as planners have a chance to encourage higher quality control and better miniaturized electronics, which will be absolutely key for the USSR going forward.
And in the longer term, we need to have the capability to make a mass deployment of orbital weapons platform impractical for the USA. Star Wars is pretty inevitably going to have a strong appeal, and when it comes around, it is much more likely to squib instead of turning into a furious arms race if we have a healthy space launch sector and thus starting such an arms race is unappealing to the US hawks.
Also, solar power satellites are something we may need in the 21st Century if the nuclear roll-out can't go as far as I'd like. But we'll see what happens there.
Like so many things, space is a necessary area of investment for us, the issue is balancing investment in space with investment into the other necessary things. The issue at the moment is the RLA, which in true Glushko fashion is being designed as the very last word in rocketry (and should be something we can use into the 21st Century if we allocate a reliable budget for engineers to work on incremental upgrades over the years). So our space program is currently very front loaded. That's politically difficult, since the bill is arriving well in advance of the benefits. But from a strict engineering standpoint, Glushko had good reasons to push for the RLA. It's just... He isn't the guy who has to deal with the politics.
I note that I am talking about specifically what's going on in the space program now. We aren't yet in Apollo-mode. But if we ever got there, we'd have to spend a whole lot of money to develop things that would be useful for ONLY the moon program. At that point, yes, there may be a problem of mis-spending. Though it does depend on how important one considers prestige.
Hm, not sure if it is too late. For one thing, it's fairly unlikely that the US will continue their moon program without a martyr behind it. Kennedy getting assassinated was pretty necessary for the Apollo moonlanding.
I am also not clear if NASA even exists in TTL - in OTL NASA emerged due to the way Eisenhower and Johnson (then senate leader) bounced off each other. ITTL we've had no Eisenhower, so we may have no NASA. And even though Johnson will still be interested in using the Federal Government to stimulate high tech industry in the Southern states, will he turn to the space program to do that ITTL?
Then again, if there is no NASA, will the US Airforce have consolidated American space efforts under their oversight or will they still be fighting with the Army and the Navy to prove themselves the space service? That could cause the US space effort to be very different, and perhaps more driven by internal service rivalries than anything we do...
But anyway, my point is, it isn't clear that extending the timescale for the moon landings, or even breaking the committment entirely, would have such severe consequences, since the US might follow us. Or we could try to do what Kennedy did before his untimely death in OTL, and try to kill the program by seeking to make it a joint US-USSR landing.
In any case, we aren't currently programmatically committed - all of the stuff we've been working on currently could serve a space program with a space station, robot probes and no moon landings just as well. And as far as breaking our word... Well. We can just tell the SupSov what we expect the moon landings to cost if we push to do them this decade and ask them to tell us if it is their priority.
We will absolutely face political consequences, but... I think we aren't past the point where we just need to grin and bear it. I don't think we're yet at the point where a scale-back is Armageddon for Voz personally.
Yeah, the biggest cost for space programs historically has been developing new rockets. Which is why I was so set on trying to stick to the R7M as much as possible before Malenkov's fall.
Regards,
fasquardon
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I'm just tired and sad and disappointed by all this.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
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The wheat crisis was mentioned briefly in the last update in the agriculture section. It's not an existential crisis. Basically both we and the US have improved crop yields so much that the demand for wheat is far lower than supply, and with the subsidies it's getting very unprofitable. We can partially counteract it by diversifying fields and investing in better infrastructure for more perishable foods, but it's just a consequence of the Green Revolution.
We're subsidizing wheat, and between that and the fertilizer/pesticides we and the US are producing way too much wheat, there's no market left for us to sell it to. We expected it to come, that's why we started the free bread program a bit ago. It's now here, and we started the "Agricultural Diversification" action last turn to deal with it.
For the reasonably foreseeable future, all of nuclear, water, wind, and ground solar are likely to be far more economical. Spy, weather, and communication satellites are definitely hugely important and a strong reason to push the space program.
AFAIK currently the US space program is being run by the military, not a civilian agency like NASA. I don't think we know if it's been consolidated into one branch or split between them though.
Luckily I don't think we'll be running into many issues with trying to find uses for the RLA. Even if it never gets launched in it's moonshot configuration, we can probably get more than enough use out of it's single core version, with maybe the occasional triple core for a heavy payload that we don't want to split between multiple launches.
As for how unpopular space is, while it's not about our program I think it was brought up that Apollo OTL may have reached 50% approval around the time of the actual moon landing. It's just that lighting a significant portion of the government budget on fire to put a handful of people on a rock in the sky is never going to be that popular with people who have different ideas on how that money could be spent.
It's not all bad though? There's probably going to be plenty of other knock-on effects from space development that could benefit us elsewhere, especially as the ministry of everything I don't thing we're as likely to try to hold back advancements and new tech from all our sub-ministries when it could benefit us. Any computer advancements that were necessary for a feasible moonshot may find their way into the rest of the economy for an example.
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What notgreat said, you can see the crisis in the exports bit. We are making a whopping 10 RpT from our massive agricultural industry. And we will never be able to really change it due to repealing the subsidies being political suicide.
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basically this, yeah. the discord sometimes expands a bit on details, though usually everything really important is either part of the following update, or otherwise someone will post it here.
by the way
this was mentioned to be a viable choice, actually, though an unpopular one with people in the chat.
We COULD stop to orbiting the moon instead of going for full moon landing. It would be cheaper, it would likely still be a win, and there's a decent chance the USA would give up there as well.
by the way
this was mentioned to be a viable choice, actually, though an unpopular one with people in the chat.
We COULD stop to orbiting the moon instead of going for full moon landing. It would be cheaper, it would likely still be a win, and there's a decent chance the USA would give up there as well.
Considering the space budget - since moonshot likely would mean RLA being more or less done, what would be left is just providing payload (since R7M & RLA provide quite enough lift for the next half century or more - so long as they're used often enough).
And we can either pull on other people for payloads (btw, where is Germany vis-a-vis space ITTL? And nukes?) or go for SOI ourselves (so military is paying for payloads). Or both.
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Also, can we acquire some other cosmodromes? In Indonesia, maybe?
And we can either pull on other people for payloads (btw, where is Germany vis-a-vis space ITTL? And nukes?) or go for SOI ourselves (so military is paying for payloads). Or both.
Edit:
Also, can we acquire some other cosmodromes? In Indonesia, maybe?
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Well, the diversification program helps a bit there; we can go from subsidizing wheat farming to subsidizing other farming just a little bit less.