Thanks for coverage Chris and Steven, I was having trouble getting good feeds for some reason.
Quote from: northenarc on 06/08/2017 04:12 amThanks for coverage Chris and Steven, I was having trouble getting good feeds for some reason.Thanks. Youtube was smooth, but the Russian feed was stop and go for me as well. Would be nice if Roscosmos set up a Youtube live channel like NASA.
It appears this is a Phase IV Proton variant according to posts up thread. Does anyone know what improvements were made? I've always been impressed at how the Proton just looks so grunty. The article doesn't mention the upgrades. I was wondering with the shear mass of this payload and the fact the launch is using the latest Proton upgrades, perhaps the fixes that came out of the accident investigation may have incurred a slight performance loss which could have contributed to the delay? Happy to be shot down on this
The Phase IV Proton uses a composite second stage forward bay, new five-axis milling techniques to reduce tolerances on the second stage and decrease the overall mass of the launcher. The third stage switched the metal alloy from which its tanks are manufactured and also features a composite instrument bay. Modifications of the Briz-M include weight reduction on the Telemetry System and an improved composite overwrapped pressure vessel tank design in the high-pressure section of the propulsion system. The Phase IV payload fairing uses optimized composite shell technology.