Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jun 17, 2024 26 tweets 9 min read Read on X
Rocket Science

As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation

So let me show you some
There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris. Image
But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains

Whatever there is behind, is a total mysteryImage
Now we come to the neat part. "Most people" includes almost the entire governing class of the West. Recruited from the service economy, it was never introduced to the back end. It has never been behind the curtains.

The governing class has no idea. Image
Seeing facade only means seeing only the final product. In this case the Angara rocket launch. We see it, we register it, we base our conclusions upon it. What we don't see, however, is the back end infrastructure supporting it all, hardware & software included.
Roscosmos is the Russian corporation responsible both for civilian space launches and for the ICBM production. In theory, civilian and military sectors are separated.

In reality, there is a certain overlap. Space rocket is not that different from an intercontinental missile.Image
The structure of Roscomos is typical for a Russian megacorporation. On the very lowest level, there are production facilities, manufacturing plants. They belong to the R&D facilities, Design Bureaus. So, these Design Bureaus form the vertically integrated companies of their own Image
One of these vertically integrated companies within the Roscosmos structure is Khrunichev Space Center. A smaller doll within Roscosmos, it has even smaller dolls (= manufacturing plants) inside. Again, visualising it all as a sort of of matryoshka can be very helpful. Image
Now let's go even further down the Roscosmos, structure. The manufacturing plant Polet. You can frame this production facility as the smallest doll within the gargantuan matryoshka. Producing the Angara space rockets, it also makes parts for other rockets & aircrafts.Image
Let's have a look at the Polet's 80th anniversary video. Published in 2021, it is very much available on youtube. Short as it is, it gives some glimpse into the back end infrastructure standing behind the space rocket production.

See a relevant fragment:
So, let's zoom in into some hardware & software we can register in this 3 minutes long video above. Image
Siemens 🇩🇪 CNC controller on what is very possibly a Dufleux 🇫🇷 milling machine.

(I believe MMS on the screen may refer to the Milling Mirror System)Image
FPT Industrie 🇮🇹 Image
FPT Industrie 🇮🇹

(You may not see it very well, but this is a very large Dinomax machine ) fptindustrie.com/eng/products/v…
Image
LK Metrology 🇬🇧

We think of the UK as of a deindustrialised country. And there is certainly lots of truth in that. Still, it has some sophisticated, high end machinery production, for example of measuring equipment. We just don't see it, because it's all in the back end. Image
DMG Mori AG 🇩🇪 This seems to be an entire workshop equipped with DMG machines. Image
So what do wee see on this limited, 3 minutes long sample giving a glimpse to the Polet production facilities? We see German, Italian and French precision cutting machines. We see German CNC control systems. We even see the British metrological equipment.

Damn, it's all Europe. Image
What we see, is that the space rocket production relies on the computerised, software dependent machinery, 100% of our sample being recent European production.

Nothing Asian. Nothing American. And more interestingly, nothing old. All new stuff.Image
This is a very recent development. Until basically yesterday, the very same plant relied on manual, conventional methods. Extremely laborious, extremely difficult. Effectively semi artisanal. You do it all with your fingers, literally. Requires extreme eye to hand coordination.
Not that all people who could do that are dead (though most are). It's that these skills have never been passed to the younger generation. Younger workers do not know how to do precision machining by hand and not going to learn. They rely on modern, user friendly CAM & CNC. Image
Still, hardware makes for only part of the picture. Software is at least equally important. What you see here is instrumental for understanding the organisation of knowledge either on this specific plant, or in the aerospace industry in general.

See the red circle Image
How it used to work before? You draw the designs by hand. You make the calculations by hand. After many and many and many adjustments you send it to the workshop, only to make new adjustments after. It was the enormous investment of time and effort.
Much of this investment was inefficient. What one person did could be indecipherable to another (esp. the unfinished work). Much of the work done was lost or forgotten. So you would redo the same again, and again, while the 100% perfect design is lying in a dusty box somewhere. Image
Perhaps, no single factor has revolutionised the aerospace industry (aircraft & rockets included) as much as the implementation of fully integrated solutions by Siemens. You can see Teamcenter as an operating system, not of a plant, but of an entire production chain, top-down. Image
By this point, the Siemens integration turned into the key for the normal functioning of a modern aerospace plant. Being non-alternative, it is the foundation everything else is built upon. Any other CAD, CAE, ERP whatever else is tested for compatibility, and must be compatibleImage
I will cover in more detail later. For now you need to believe

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More from @kamilkazani

Mar 16
The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better
This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.
When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 1
Three years of the war have passed

So, let’s recall what has happened so far

The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today Image
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.

Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia

(Operation Danube style) Image
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable Image
Read 32 tweets
Feb 8
Why does Russia attack?

In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them. Image
Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.

The question is - why. Image
Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.

Let's see why Image
Read 24 tweets
Feb 2
On the origins of Napoleon

The single most important thing to understand regarding the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, in the words of Braudel, is a sea ringed round by mountains Image
We like to slice the space horizontally, in our imagination. But what we also need to do is to slice it vertically. Until very recently, projection of power (of culture, of institutions) up had been incomparably more difficult than in literally any horizontal direction. Image
Mountains were harsh, impenetrable. They formed a sort of “internal Siberia” in this mild region. Just a few miles away, in the coastal lowland, you had olives and vineyards. Up in the highland, you could have blizzards, and many feet of snow blocking connections with the world. Image
Read 7 tweets
Jan 4
Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
Read 4 tweets
Dec 16, 2024
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left.
2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it. Image
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works.
4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago.
6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum
Read 10 tweets

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