First Privately Funded Manned Space Mission

Ragetech writes "CNN.com has a story about two Russian astronuts (yes, I say nuts) blasting off to dock with the Mir station to evaluate it, rescue and possibly operate it for profit. What I'm wondering, really, is why they don't pick up a few Iridum satellites while they're up there and really pick up the profits. I mean, that stuff is salvagable now, isn't it? "

Comments

Re:White Sun of the Desert.

[Alex Belits]

...Is apparently the story of a Red Army officer during the Russian Civil war (I presume they mean the early days of the revolution). The article said that watching this film is a pre-launch tradition.

First, Civil War happened after the revolution -- after taking the power in the capitals communists still fought for few years with various forces that opposed them to actually establish their power over the country.

Second, "White Sun of the Desert" is nowhere close to being about a glory.

Re:Mir + Iridium = Data Haven

[jandrese]

Yes, for the low low price of $50,000 US you too can own your very own e-copy of War and Piece (Iridium modem not included).

For merely $100,000 US/month you can have access to our huge pr0n library, circumvent any information restrictions your government might have! (check or money order only please, not responsible for government interception of your money at the border.)

Re:From Earth to Mir to the Moon

[Graymalkin]

You don't need an Earth-Moon refuel poit dude, it's not nearly far enough away that fuel is a problem. Going from an Earth orbit to the moon doesn't require a bunch of energy, just a few minutes of delta-v in the right direction (you do the calculus) and coast the rest of the way. What is needed is a more efficient mode of travel from the Earth's surface to orbit. Launching something on the shuttle costs about 10,000$/lb IIRC, that is a bit much to make lots of trips up to a space station. It'd be billions of dollars cheaper to build a space station if a Earth-to-orbit method was cheap and efficient, if there was such a system orbital platforms would abound overhead.

Re:DIE IRIDIUM, DIE

[Graymalkin]

Cold hydrogen emits 21cm not 21Mhz, I'm estimating but 21cm is somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3Ghz. Iridium used 1.8 and 2.1 Ghz, not Mhz by the way. SETI searches around 1.3-1.5Ghz so 1.8 and 2.1 don't interfer per se but they can feasibly interfer if a device isn't tuned correctly or the astronomers decide to up the frequency a little bit.

A nut by any other name...

[FPhlyer]

The major error here is that Russian space travelers are Cosmonauts and not Astronauts. That makes these gentlemen Cosmonuts and probably related in some strange way to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.

Of interesting note concerning Cosmonuts is the first Cosmoanimal. Many of us might remember that the Russians were the first to put an animal in space back in the 50's - Lieka the space dog. A few years ago I came to sudden realization... Lieka was put into space in a modified Sputnik! A spacecraft that had no means of reentering the Earth's atmosphere.

MY DOG! IT'S FULL OF STARS!

What the Hell happened to Lieka? How come nobody ever mentions what happened to that damn dog!?! Did he burn up in reentry, starve to death, or become one with the "Space Baby" from 2001? He can't possibly be in orbit can he? Or maybe he is still circling the earth at thousands of miles per second along with Gene Roddenbury and Timothy Leary.

Forget rescueing Mir! SAVE THE DOG!

Actually ...

[jetpack]

It's not quite as dumb as it sounds. I recently saw a History Channel show on the Russian space program. Apparently they were occasionally using Mir for filming TV comercials (you know, the kind where there's little balls of milk floating through the air, etc). So, when they talk about advertising deals, I don't think they are talking about slapping giant bumper stickers on Mir.

Umm, Hemos?

[tweder]

> CNN.com has a story about two Russian astronuts (yes, I say nuts)

Last time I checked, Russian astronauts were called cosmonauts.

Wouldn't that make them cosmonuts? (yes, I say nuts)

Ironic

[vanyel]

Isn't it ironic that the first private commercial manned launch is russian? It is very disappointing. We should have been doing this 20 years ago with skylab.

How in the world

[Pike]

How in the world are they going to do this for profit? I've thought about this over the course of the past few seconds, and have come to a conclusion. Without significant government subsidies, the only way would be: advertising revenue.

Or, it could just be the old "give the space station away, sell the transport shuttles" thing.

-JD

Re:how will you see the ads on mir exactly???

[Field Marshall Stack]

Certainly you won't be able to make out details (like advertisements), but you can see mir; according to Visual Satellite Observer's Home Page mir is normally about magnitude -0.7, and if you're at just the right angle, you'll get a reflection reaching magnitude -3 off of the solar panels.

That aside, sometimes the purpose of an advertisement isn't to be seen, but just to be known about. I for one would greatly respect anyone who'd pay money to help keep Mir in space. Anyone. Microsoft, McDonald's, anyone (okay, maybe not Phillip-Morris, but anyone short of that). All of those wannabe-geeks who think it'd be a "tragedy" if those silly Iridium satellites came down need to get their priorities straight. Satellites, no matter how much money was blown on them, are a dime a dozen, but space stations are something different altogther. If I were to make a list of reasons why the human race isn't a complete waste of time, keeping Mir manned and in orbit for over 14 years now would probably be near the top of the list. Look! There! *points up*. People!

It's a pity we haven't gone further ..we SO need to go back to the moon, if just to check Tycho for magnetic anomalies :) ...but at the very least there's Mir.

*whine*I wanna be a cosmonaut! *whine* *whine*
--
"HORSE."

Anyone got clothes pin?

[romco]

"The space station has been empty since it was placed on autopilot seven months
ago."

I feel sorry for those guys... You know it's got to
smell real funny in there.

Re:Real or TV Show

[technos]

Sorry.. New webhost policy, I guess..

Here

I gotta start checking my links again.

Fleabag hotel in space.

[Tau Zero]

There have been some near disasters, a crash and a fire

Plus the failure of the attitude-control computer which nearly left the whole station without power, plus chronic leaks in coolant lines, plus...

I know of no problems associated with either it's design or age.

This is a joke, right? (04:13 PM April 4th... definitely a bit late for that sort of thing.) Let me put it this way: your ignorance isn't shared by either the Russians or NASA.

Could it be the sour memories of Skylab? That was a failure due to defective design and technology.

Actually, Skylab was a phenomenal success and was only allowed to crash because the Shuttle program had so many delays (there were no Saturn boosters due to cancellation of the Saturn program to make way for Shuttle). Skylab's crash was due to the inability to send up a reboost mission, and had nothing to do with Skylab itself.

It may well be a "fixer upper" but that would be much more economically feasable than for a company to build one from scratch.

I had to quote that. It was the only sensible thing in the entire post.
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Re:Nah, doesn't work.

[Tau Zero]

Hey, why so nasty? Having a bad day?

Sometimes I forget how easy it is to mis-read the tone of a posting. I guess you forgot too. ;-)

And the concept of a tranfer point for to change vehicles is valid - vehicles that are designed for takeoff, rentry and landing at 1G (with all the added equipment/mass) are simply not efficient for deep space and low-G landings. And fuel/consumables can be delivered to the transfer point with cheaper unmanned vehicles (like the Progress does for supplies for the Mir) this too is more efficient.

That's true to a point. However, to support a system like that takes a minimum level of traffic. Further, for separate delivery of vehicles and fuel, fuel must generally be storable for considerable periods of time, and the most mass-efficient fuel mixture (LH2/LOX) isn't considered storable by the people in the know. If your vehicle's LEO departure mass is mostly fuel anyway, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to fuel it on the ground and launch it full; it doesn't start making sense to launch the fuel separately until the cost of new vehicles outweighs the cost of running a fuel depot, plus losses, plus the opportunity costs of having to schedule your launches around orbital rendezvous requirements, etc. We're nowhere near that.

(Though I am not so clear about all the tradeoffs between LEO and a higher orbit. How much higher would be good?)

For the transfer vehicle and the ground-to-LEO vehicle, lower is generally better for a number of reasons:

1. The ground-to-LEO vehicle can carry considerably more mass to lower orbits than higher ones. This is especially true when the vehicle is burdened with wings and landing wheels.
2. Lower orbits move faster, so the transfer vehicle can burn its fuel from a higher starting speed. Energy is proportional to speed squared, so this actually gains you performance when you factor in the larger fuel deliveries.

If it were worthwhile to have such a fuel depot, Mir would be in a reasonably good spot... for traffic from Baikonur. For Canaveral launches, it's at far too high an inclination and limits the payload of the vehicles sent to it. However, Mir is a maintenance nightmare, leaky, and has no fuel-storage facilities worth talking about. It makes no sense to try using Mir for any purpose, and if the Russians were serious about this they'd have launched a new Mir core years ago.
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Re:Nah, doesn't work.

[Tau Zero]

(2nd:I realized this after you mentioned the Van Allen Belts...you don't put people up there for long amounts of time. So i changed my idea:Mir could be mostly unmanned except for ocassional maintnence crews who would only stay for a week or so,and the station's critical electronics could be shielded...

Okay, you're talking about re-engineering all of the critical electronics for radiation resistance, and incurring all the costs of installing these new electronics on-orbit. On top of this, you want to have a station which already consumes most of the crew's time doing critical maintenance, and leave it almost entirely unmanned? Plus, you want to put it far, far beyond the range of the Progress freighters used to resupply it. Sooner or later you're going to have a "<SMACK> WHAT was I thinking!" moment. The sooner this happens, the quicker you can move on to something more useful. ;-)

3rd:Ok,push it up to the Earth-Moon liberation point."

It's a "libration" point, no "e" in the word. Since you haven't mentioned which libration point you mean (there are 5 in the Earth-Moon system) I'll assume you mean L4 or L5. If I recall correctly, getting to either one of them requires more fuel than going directly to the Moon; on top of this, you'd have a trip of considerable distance (roughly equal to the Earth-Moon distance) from either L4 or L5 to Luna, and unless you were going to burn a lot of fuel it would be a lot slower than the trip from Earth. This isn't good for your radiation exposure.

As for fuel,this project would be delayed until a light,fairly effecient fuel to be created or discovered...again,as I stated before,this whole project would take time to come to fruitition...,then you could stick it on any boster and send it to Mir.)and one could plot an orbit that was arc like,similar to what Voyager 1&2 did.from there,take the most fuel efficient path to Luna.Future moon missions would need to be timed as accurately as Apollo missions.

The Voyagers used gravity-assist maneuvers at Jupiter, and they are on one-way trajectories out of the Solar System; the required heavy body is lacking in the Earth-Moon system, and you want to come back in any event. If you want some data for calculating Hohman ellipse trajectories, you can derive them from conservation of angular momentum r1*v1 = r2*v2 (for the apogee and perigee conditions) and conservation of energy (v^2 - 2GM/r = constant, G = gravitational constant, M = mass of the primary body, Earth in this case). A little bit of algebra applied to this lets you plug in r1 and v1 and get r2:
r2 = v1^2 * r1 / ((2GM/r1) - v1^2) (plug r2 into the angular momentum equation and solve for v2)

From differences in velocities you can calculate the fuel-mass required at each burn from the rocket equation, Mfinal/Minitial = exp(-Vdelta/Vexhaust). Even for H2/O2, Vexhaust is only about 4500 m/sec; the mass required to push something around quickly becomes a frighteningly large (and expensive-looking) value.

You'd be much better off to crunch numbers for things that don't involve expending large amounts of reaction mass. For instance, if you're going to the Moon, there are possibilities for moving stuff with massive rotating tethers; as long as you move about the same amount of mass in both directions, they operate more or less for "free". This is a field that is far more worthy of study than keeping a creaky, leaky, flaky old space station in service for emotional reasons. Maybe slapping an ion engine on a Progress and boosting Mir up to a safe parking orbit, deactivated and emptied of atmosphere and fluids, would be attractive to somebody who wants to preserve it for some far-off museum display. Trying to bend other missions to fit Mir just so you can say it's being used doesn't make much sense.
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Re:Harrrr Maties!

[MicroBerto]

WAIT! This corporation is perfect to try out the big SEX IN SPACE experiment.

Shoot, they're sending two Russian men this time.... uhhm.....

Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

Re:Luxury hotel in space.

[KeithT]

Skylab was a hack, made from Apollo components (I believe, the upper stage of a Saturn rocket) after the last three scheduled moon missions were canceled.

Re:Oh and by the way ...

[Crixus]

Iridium satellites are in polar orbits; Mir orbits at an inclination of around 55 degrees or so. And at a different altitude. The change of orbit would be really expensive.

I thought Iridium's orbital inclination was 86.4 degrees. Not quite a polar orbit.

And let's not forget that all of those satellites are in different orbital planes than Mir.

Perhaps when he have massive energy reserves available (like on Start Trek) we would be able to change orbital plane and inclinations and perform such a salvage. But not yet.

Re:Profit?

[molog]

Of course I'm the guy who thinks NASA should have a Lottery, drawn yearly, for a free 7 day trip into space. Providing the winner can meet minimum training requirments. If they can't, just give them 10% of the 'pot'. Also give people the option to choose between space and the cash. A 20 min space walk would be a nice touch as well

Hell yah! I never play the lottery becuase I see it as a waist of money and time, but this is something worth buying a few tickets for! Who doesn't want to go into orbit?
Molog

So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

Re:First reasonable post!

[YIAAL]

All correct. Also, there is no salvage law in space. There should be, but there isn't -- in fact, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes it almost impossible. For more see Glenn Reynolds & Robert Merges, "Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy" (Westview, 1998). As far as I know, it's not on the web but there are some good space law resources at

http://www.permanent.com/archimedes for those who are interested.

Iridium really isn't that useful

[oozer]

OK, I know you are joking, but (a) the Iridium statlites aren't that useful anywhere other than right where they are now and (b) they weren't that useful anyway.

Why do you think Iridium went out of business? I took too long to get going, cost to much to run and hence too much to attract any customers. Reading all this stuff about re-using the satalite network for something else makes me laugh too. Do you know that there was no data call facility on Iridium? The thing was designed in the '80s before anyone considered mobile datacoms.

I did read a story about a guy that was going to fly his airplane to the north pole and make an internet connection from there, but since Iridium had no data mode he was going to have to use an accoustic coupler! 300 baud here we go!
--

I wasn't sure, but he wasn't fat.

[www.sorehands.com]

I was thinking it was Andy Griffith. I knew it was one of them, but the guy was thin. Matlock is not thin.

Is this life imitating art, or art just being thought of first.

Real or TV Show

[www.sorehands.com]

Is this a real news story? It sounds more like a '80s (1980s, not 2080s) TV Show.

It was Salvage One with Dick VanDike. Their base was a junk yard. In one episode, they picked up some satelite (irridium?) that was about to fall from orbit. It was on the way back from saving some people from a Space station (Mir?).

Re:how will you see the ads on mir exactly???

[Pathwalker]

I hate to tell everyone, but ummm you really can't see mir I mean even with a telescope ..
Actually it's pretty easy to see, looks like a fast moving, bright dot.

Every couple of weeks I grab the latest Orbital Elements, run some pass predictions, and see how it is doing. When it was manned, it was always cool to think how there were people living on that little dot in the sky. It gives me a thrill to think about it!

Nasa has a java applet which will do tracking and pass prediction, but you can find some normal software to do it as well.

Where they'll make their money

[Signal 11]

Incase you were wondering how they plan on making a profit off this, I have a solution for them - we should buy it. Yes, and put a bunch of servers in Mir. Think about it - if you mount a few satellites up there and put some linux and solaris boxen up there and give it an internet feed, you've got yourself an untouchable censor-proof project.. just build a little transmitter and you can download anything any government ever censored.

Screw Iridium, BUY MIR!

A bit late, guys...

[chazR]

The BBC has been covering this story for a few days. There's a good story here

The cosmonauts have almost no idea what they're going to find. The station has been unmanned for about six months. They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything. Mir also needs to be *flown* by using it's gyros to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun. How well this is working now is anybody's idea. Rather them than me.

Bill G's new hideout - Mir

[WillAffleck]

What's not mentioned in the CNN story is that MSFt has a majority interest in the corporation that's funding the space mission. They plan to retrofit Mir for Bill G to live in, move MSFT's corporate HQ there (to avoid the DOJ reprisals) since it's extra-national, and use all the satellites to bombard their enemies with.

Harrrr Maties!

[Dr Caleb]

That's the way it should be!

Space, and rural roads should be governed by the salvage laws of the sea!

You abandon it, it reverts back to the chapter of law defined under "Finders Keepers caveat emptor".

Wanna leave that nice new Expedition stuck in a ditch by the side of the road? No prob! Me and the boys have some winches!

Wanna leave that space station unlocked? Well we'll just move in and squat!

Wanna leave a few satellites unattended? Fine! We need the Sci-Fi channel up here too!

damn, just broke my irony meter...

[kevin lyda]

a former communist country which has switched to the much touted capitalist sytem and is now mired in economic misery is the first nation to take a major step towards privatizing their space program.

er...

Wooden ships and iron men

[hey!]

A few years back, I read an autobiographical book called "Two Years Before the Mast". The author was an 1830s Harvard student who dropped out for a few years to become a sailor -- not an officer but a regular tar. It really opened my eyes to how different our attitudes towards safety are than our relatively near ancestors.

When they sailed around the tip of South America in July, they knew they'd have to make men climb up into rigging during a raging gale to wrestle bare handed with frozen rigging -- you simply can't control the ship without sending men aloft. It was no unusual thing to lose one or two sailors overboard during a voyage.

And this was routine travel. Exploration was an order of magnitude more dangerous.

In a sense, the "comsonuts" really have a more normal view of risk and safety than our own, when viewed against the backdrop of human history. I'm not saying they're right, but it's something to think about.

Mir + Iridium = Data Haven

[Rantage]

Pipe dream? Of course. Humor me.

Refit Mir to be an orbiting data library, free of any national jurisdiction. Utilize the abandoned Iridium satellites so users worldwide can access it. Charge for Iridium-based net access, use profits to pay Mir operating expenses.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.

Various Issues

[Captn Pepe]

As far as I know, MirCorp (the Holland-based consortium backing the mission) is mainly planning to make money by selling advertising space and by taking people up for a few days. The figure I've heard bandied about is around $600K/day. Although, they're being very tight-lipped about who, if anybody, is signed up to go ... which I tend to suspect means that they don't have any committed clients. That is why the RSA is being circumspect about the role of the cosmonauts up there right now - they might just fix some things and come home having prepared the Mir to go swimming in the Pacific, or they might stay up to get the place ready for guests.

Another thing that troubles me is that Energya is one of the largest members of MirCorp. As we all know, Energya (which has very tight connections to the Russian government) has significant motives other than profit to see the Mir stay in orbit, i.e. national/corporate pride, plus the possibility of revenue from a continuing stream of resupply missions to the station. In short, it's worth a lot to them for political and economic reasons, regardless of whether MirCorp ever succeeds in getting people up there.

I've seem lots of complaints about the safety of Mir, here and elsewhere. I might point out that, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with Mir that a good fixing-up and a regularly changed crew wouldn't solve. Yes, it leaks air, but not as fast as the Shuttle; plus, it doesn't leak corrosive volatiles like hydrazine, which the shuttle does. I heard that Energya, in fact, had considerable safety concerns with docking the shuttle to Mir for just these reasons, out of worry that the assorted stuff the Shuttle puts out might damage the station. As for the fire, etc, this mostly had to do with ancient equipment up there, which should certainly be replaced - and will be, if MirCorp can come up with the kind of money it seems to believe it can.

URL for MirCorp

[rogerbo]

havne't seen this here yet.

MirCorp is at www.mirstation.com

They do confirm backing by the eerily named Gold and Appel Transfers Fnord. I really wonder if that is a complete coincidence or just a very rich baby boomer with a sense of humor.

They also have some info on the the crazed fools (or visionarys) backing Mir Corp. Why does everything about this remind me of Heinleins 'Man who sold the moon'?

Good luck to em, personally if it gets things happening in space sooner I don't mind even if mir ends up plastered in golden arches and windows logos.

Oh and by the way ...

[Captn Pepe]

Yes, I'm sure Hemos is aware of the fact that "picking up some Iridium satellites while they're up there" is a silly idea. But for the humor impaired, here's why -

• Iridium satellites are in polar orbits; Mir orbits at an inclination of around 55 degrees or so. And at a different altitude. The change of orbit would be really expensive.
• Iridium satellites are big. The mass of a craft capable of carrying "a few" of these things back to Earth would be substantial. We're talking a Shuttle-class mission, at best. You could change their orbits with some kind of tug, I suppose ... but why?
• In fact, but, why describes most of this hypothetical undertaking. The things are next to useless on the ground, unless somebody wants one for a museum. After all, I could build a ground-based device with pretty much the same capabilities as an Iridium satellite would have on the ground (i.e. a solar-powered microwave relay). And in space, they're not any more useful than they already are if you move them (arguably, they'd be less useful due to reduced coverage).

Conclusion: why bother? It would be a very expensive, very silly operation. Though now that I think about it, Red Hat might be interested. Rearrange their orbits just right, and they'd flash "LINUX" in the evening and morning sky every 90 minutes around the world. I envision Redmond being the first target. :-)