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Domain: energia.ru
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Comments · 64
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Re:Where to go from here
If you were seriously going to make a booster to put 660 tons into LEO, this sounds about like the ticket for the first stage; they would be too dumb to fail easily and cheap enough that you could afford to lose (or discard) them regularly.
Interesting. Googling further for different articles and then looking at Energia's own plan, they want to launch components separately and assemble them in LEO. They figure it will take approximately 6-7 Energia launches to be able to assemble/dock everything in space. This makes a lot of sense if you consider that the main craft would not be landing on Mars but only staying in the LMO. Only a lander/ascent vehicle needs to go down and re-dock on the way back.
Another earlier article (not so good English translation) I read however, contradicted the idea that either Energia or Saturn V were going to be used. Go figure. Mind you, I still think they are bluffing. -
Re:Where to go from here
If you were seriously going to make a booster to put 660 tons into LEO, this sounds about like the ticket for the first stage; they would be too dumb to fail easily and cheap enough that you could afford to lose (or discard) them regularly.
Interesting. Googling further for different articles and then looking at Energia's own plan, they want to launch components separately and assemble them in LEO. They figure it will take approximately 6-7 Energia launches to be able to assemble/dock everything in space. This makes a lot of sense if you consider that the main craft would not be landing on Mars but only staying in the LMO. Only a lander/ascent vehicle needs to go down and re-dock on the way back.
Another earlier article (not so good English translation) I read however, contradicted the idea that either Energia or Saturn V were going to be used. Go figure. Mind you, I still think they are bluffing. -
Re:Forget the clipper. What's up with the Mars shiEnergia, like Boeing and Lockmart, always has plenty of plans in the wings. It's part of getting more of that sweet government $$$. Sometimes, a proposed project is just viewgraph, others it is for real, backed by good tech and engineering.
That aside, I've looked over their Mars plan recently (Clipper/Mars stuff rolled through sci.space.policy weeks ago), and it looks pretty good conceptually. 660 tons would be Low Earth Orbit departure mass. It is assembled onorbit, like all Russian stations. The system would be built around a GIANT version of the FGB/Baseblock/Zarya line of craft - 70 tons and probably 20-25m for the new baseblock.
The beauty of their plan is that most of it is demonstrated technology. The life support, engines, hull and docking ports are already in use on ISS, formerly Mir and Salyut/Almaz. It would use solar-electric propulsion, demonstrated in numerous com sats, and something based around Soyuz for Mars ascent. The plan is to put a space station of Grand Soviet Style in orbit around Mars - it looks longterm like Mir. Instead of concentrating on something really hard - landing & surviving on Mars - the Energia plan focuses on demonstrated capabilities in a new environment. The craft is to mostly do remote-ops with surface robots (in realtime) with one or two surface excursions (per 2-year crew-mission?). They say the craft would be able to return to Earth if necessary.
IMHO, it actually makes sense to accelerate such a plan - put AresStation1 into construction NOW and worry about the lander on a later flight. Imagine what 10 people working in Mars orbit could accomplish with a fleet of balloons and robot rovers - again, in realtime. Establish the new station, get as much robot horsepower their, then work on reasonable Mars capsules. Basing from Mars orbit instead of the surface has advantages: Phobos and Diemos are nearby, global perspective for science and colony/base site selection, known working environment. Gonna need a personell centrifuge, though.
Their plan can be viewed at Energia Mars Plan. It may look like vaporware, but remember that Energia, of all companies on the planet, has the hardware heritage to actually do it.
-josh
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Re:Race for Mars?
Competition is good, and I don't think Americans will sit around while the Russians start testing a Mars spacecraft..
I think that there's a good chance Energia is bluffing about the 660 ton Mars spacecraft. That's not another satellite launch - who's going to pay for that?
But assuming for a second that Energia is not bluffing, NASA would have to either play catch-up or compete on a different level. IANARS (rocket scientist) but as far as I know, Energia lifters are one of, if not the best of the breed. Unlike Buran, the launch vehicle that was going to lift it into the orbit (and did so once) - LV Energia - has not been lost or forgotten. When it was designed and built, it could carry up to 100-120 tons into orbit, over 200 tons if fully expanded. The main difference from the STS being that the shuttle has its main engine on the spacecraft, while Buran was lifted entirely by Energia rocket and attached liquid rocket boosters (i.e. spacecraft did not do any lifting of its own).
Now, as far as I know, nobody else including NASA has anything like this. While Energia design could be relatively easily used for lifting cargo other than Buran, I'm not sure the Shuttle main engine could be that easily ported or even comparable in power. If there's indeed a renewed competition in space and considering that there's still a lot to be said about lifting 660 pound spacecraft into LEO (not even about going to Mars and back), I am wondering what would NASA's plans be - play catch-up, or do something entirely different?
Again, IANARS, so feel free to correct. -
Re:High inclinationObviously you cannot read. Obviously you can't even be bothered to type "www.nasa.gov" in your browser. Perhaps this is out of disdain for NASA. If so, perhaps you might look at what Energia thinks is going on up there:
http://www.energia.ru/english/energia/iss/researc
h es/medic.shtmlIf you still think the astronauts are simply up there performing a multi-billion dollar "mile-high club," go ahead. If and when anyone reaches Mars and you happen to be alive, I'm sure you will base you assessments of their work on the political party represented in the White House instead of on the facts. Bah.
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Re:Hello, radiation poisoning?
While I am not aeronautical engineer, I have a hard time believing that shielding for space is harder than shielding a nuclear reactor. Did you mean that we have a problem making the shielding light enough for flight? Do you have any references that illustrate this? As for human emotions you are absolutely correct in that can be a problem. However, its a problem that we have already overcome, at least to a great extent. Submariners are a good example and more telling are some of the Mir cosmonauts:
Click here for details
Are things prefectly safe, of course not, but it wasn't perfectly safe to go to the moon, or to America, or to sail around the world. In fact its still not perfectly safe to do any of those things. We do need to do more work on keeping people in good shape in micro-gravity situations, but we have learned a great deal already. 437 days in orbiting Earth in 1995 by Valery Polyakov is a remarkable achievement, but we have to remember that he had already been up once before for 241 days in 1988 and he isn't even the record holder! Sergey Avdeev spent a total of 747 days in orbit over 3 flights, dealing with all of the problems you point to, except radiation. -
booster modelsI would be interested in a working 1:60 (~1/60^3 in weight) model of the most powerful launch vehicle in the world . Imagine:
Standing ~40 inches (1.0 meters) tall and weighing about 10 kilograms (quite chubby) at launch...
If the scale doesnt matter in laws of physics one can expect a useful payload to be ~ 100t/60^3 ~ 460grams ~ 1 pound to be launched to low orbits, and about 100 grams to the geostationary orbit, and about 150 grams to be sent on the lunar mission trajectory. -
NASA didn't have a choice
Besides the prime crew (M. Foale, A.Yu. Kaleri, P. Duque) there was a backup crew (W. McArthur, V.I. Tokarev, A. Kuipers) of the Soyuz TMA-3 ship. If, for any reason, NASA backed out, but Russians (and probably ESA) did not share the same concerns, they would have sent Tokarev instead of Foale. For the first time ever, the ISS team would have been %100 Russians, thanks to whistle-blowers in NASA. Then the American Public asked NASA "Ahem, did you just spend some $30bln+, and then backed out, giving the way to Russians?" And then what? Will NASA just write off ISS, and let other nations use it? Or NASA will sabotage any such use, possibly by disassembling or destroying american parts of ISS or making them uninhabitable or otherwise offlimit to visitors? I know that is ridiculous, but so are any demands to abandon the project.
For your information. Russians can build Energias, which is a monstrous rocket booster capable to lift huge fully automated cargo vessels. In contrast to american shuttles, Buran, the russian shuttle, did not have to use engines for the lift off, all the heavylifting work was done by Energia. Buran's engines were used primarily for maneuvering on orbit and deorbiting. Its only flight has been fully automated. That would have been an ideal tool to bring pieces of ISS up there. In fact Russians proposed use of Energia/Buran for ISS construction, but NASA, of course rejected the plan. Russians did not have enough money, and NASA wanted to sponsor its own technologies, and use american labor. It cost a lot more, but helped Boeing, other NASA's contractors, and, probably, american economy in general. More was spent, but more was spent in US, not in Russia.
Of course, despite evident capabilities of Russians, they are not able to build or to use ISS without NASA, even with cooperation with Europeans and Japanese and Chinese. Not yet anyway.
Russian Space Corporation Energia -
Energia.ru Mars data
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Energia.ru Mars data
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bad starting point
First, the section of the flight from low earth orbit to mars most probably won't be on the same fuel as that used for launching from the ground, for the simple reason that it's not the most efficient way to do it.
Second, the most cost-effective method of hauling heavy equipment into low earth orbit from the ground is not the space shuttle. Even the ISS gets resupplies in soyuz pods.
If they launch to the ISS, then they don't always need to send a crew with it, becuase the ISS crew has a robotarm and can to spacewalks to assemble things in space.
this company already launches commercially in both ksc in florida and in baikonur in russia. With the Proton K rocket and also with the largest version of the Atlas V, they can launch over 45000 pounds into orbit, that's more than what the shuttle can, and I'm sure a protonk launch from baikonur is a lot cheaper than a shuttle launch from jfk. Maybe energia can make bigger rockets for this, but I don't speak russian to the website is all 'chinese to me'.
(of course this all assumes they're launching spaceship parts and fuel to the ISS and assemble there).
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How far the Russkies have gone...
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How far the Russkies have gone...
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more information about module
