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Russia Unveils Space Shuttle for Tourists
joestump98 writes: "Yahoo! News is running a story about those crazy, cash strapped, Russians building a space shuttle for tourists. For under $100,000 you can take a one-hour flight that includes a mere 3 minutes of weightlessness. Apparently the flights are to start around 2004/2005." 21mhz adds a link to this press release from Russia's Myasishchev Design Bureau, writing: "On close examination, it turns out to be a downscaled version of Buran."
I'm not sure what the design is the article refers too, but if it's a vertical takeoff shuttle, I think the experience of lift-off alone would justify the expense (if I had that kinda money). I mean, you can be weightless in a vomit comet for less (I think), but you sure can't blast straight up into heaven.
For under $100,000 you can take a one-hour flight that includes a mere 3 minutes of weightlessness.
:D
Order today
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
If you'd like to see a picture of the craft, it's on the BBC.
For under $100,000 you can take a one-hour flight that includes a mere 3 minutes of weightlessness
If its weightlessnes you are after, wouldn't it be a damn sight cheeper just to put a plane into a dive and float arround for a bit..... as in an astronoughts training.
(The plane is in free-fall.... Exacly the same effect as being in orbit)
What do you get for your monney other than going on a plane that goes very high (tm) ?
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
To this now the russians are the crazy capitalists and it's us with the draconian anti-freedom laws (DMCA).
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
The makers of this new spaceship believe there is a huge untapped market of would-be space tourists - ordinary people willing to pay for the holiday of a lifetime.
I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't consider anyone able to pay $100,000 for 3 minutes of weightlessness normal.
But I must admit, it's a cool idea and brings us 1 step closer to a trip to the moon costing as much as a flight from New York to London. But hell, even the cost of that flight is out of my price range.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
OR however many miles high they will take us... but thats the important part!!
1 pilot.. and room for 2!!!
3 minute quickie in space for 100 grand.. 200 if yer payin for your partner... now that will be the new IN thing... hehe...
You get to ride on the inside :)
Tom Newton
..stepping in their plane if the quality of this project can be measured by means of their website: offline.
You do not exist. Go away.
Knowing the way some Russians do business, they will probably stop the ship once they're out there and ask for another $100,000 to get you back in one piece.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
A jump from the Golden Gate Bridge gives you a few seconds of weightlessness for free and may be no less safe than the Russian space shuttle.
If they run their shuttle the way they run their airline then I think I'll stick to earth bound holidays...
;> but the freedom of flying yourself is definetly worth it.
Also do you really want to pay enough money to go a world cruise that actually lasts a while?
OR for the same money how far could you go in learning to fly yourself and get a plane - okay you're limited to the sky
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
3 minutes, at nearly $600 per second. About half of that time will be spent vomiting, so now you're looking at more than $1000 per second.
Not since "Glitter" hit the theaters has so much money been made by causing people to barf.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
People,
:-
e r.shtml
If you READ the article then you can see that you actually get more than just a one hour flight, from the press release
"At the peak of its parabolic trajectory, passengers will experience several minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth from space. Four days of space flight orientation including centrifuge, zero-gravity and high-altitude jet flight training, as well as safety and onboard system lessons are expected to be required."
Not so sure about the complexity of the craft with ejection of the motor at burnout and deployable aerodynamic control surfaces with a 'chute for final landing, for a contrast in design for the same problem take a look at http://www.bristolspaceplanes.com/projects/ascend
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
heh, just thought somebody should say something...
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -Gandhi
Hmmm. Not so much Buran (AKA Shuttleski; the two vehicles look remarkably similar), but it is the spitting image of the X-20 Dynasoar (designed and almost-built in the '60s by the USAF). Pretty Pictures Here.
There's no reason to suppose copying. Both vehicles are built for approximately the same mission, so it's more concurrent evolution.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Okay, it's very expensive, and most ppl will just not be interested to do this.
But there are quite a number of people that dream to go to space, but for one or another reason, could never get there. After all, not all ppl have the inclination to join the military for X year in order to get a very small chance at chance to the training...
Let's not even talk about nationalities and politics...
At least those people now have a chance at making their dream come true and it's only a feather on the Russians cap that they are the ones implementing it first.
With the US, Russia, EU, India and Japan already out there (I must be forgetting some), others are bound to join too.
This can only be a good idea to make space interesting again (and let's hope they'll stop bombing each other to hell while humanity has a new challenge).:wq
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Seems that the C-21 is the Russian Entry to the X-Prize.
Also, they have built two of the M-55 carrier craft. They are a updated 'research' version of the M-17, which was the Russian version of America's U2 spy plane.
This page on HTOL TSTO (Horizontal take off & landing, two stage to orbit) has a few pictures of various launch systems. There is a nice picture of the M-17 in flight at the end of that page. (The M-55 in this picutre seems to have additional wing mounted engines.
According to the cutaway model, the cabin is relativly roomy, but there dosn't seem much room for fuel. Most of the equipment at the rear of the craft seems to be life support and other equipment, not presurised fuel tanks. Perhaps they are using solid rocket motors (aka Big Firework), but russians tend to prefer, and endeed excell, at liquid fueled rockets. Besides, this schematic seems to show a rather different type of spacecraft. (note the wings, and overall length) Therefore, I suspect that this is a plywood mockup, for the benifit of potential investors, in the tradition of most space enterprises over the past 5 years.
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
Flight into Space -- $100,000
Not burning up on re-entry -- Priceless
So am I the only one whos shocked at the fact that the Russians (the former USSR!) are going to be the first ones to approach a capitalist space program?! Come on, get your act together USA! Our entire country is based on the ideal that if you come up with something cool to do/sell you should do it and get rich, and the Russians are beating us to the punch? Please NASA, do something similar so you can fund a fucking Mars mission when the gov cuts your funding! Just think, we have the shuttles, its the only way we are going to go to mars any time soon and not have johnny taxpayer pay about a zillion dollars for it.
Making a cheap-ass joke: $0
/.: -1 Karma
Posting it on
Getting it fundamentally wrong: Priceless
;-) - sorry man.
Having designed, built and flown a lot of conventional and unorthodox model aircraft (including flying wings, flying disks, canards, lifting-body craft, a flying lawnmower and a flying dog-house) in my time, I have to say that the craft looks decidedly unstable to me.
All that vertical surface at the wing-tips will produce a very significant dutch-rolling tendency.
While I'm sure that such instability could be compensated for using a fly-by-wire computer system, I can't see any aerodynamic benefit to having such a large amount of tip-fin area.
Tip-fins are usually used to reduce the size of vorticies produced when the high pressure air below the wing meets the low pressure air above it.
At high angles of attack, these vorticies create huge amounts of drag and reduce the wing's efficiency quite substantially.
You'll notice that some modern passenger jets use tip-fins as a method of reducing tip vorticies and they show quite significant improvements in fuel-efficiency as a result -- however, I believe that the 747 required extra vertical stabilizer area to compensate for the destabilizing effect of the tip-fins when they were added.
However, the fins on the Russian craft are much larger than would be necessary to obtain the required vortex-reducing effect and smack of being the work of a cartoonist rather than an aerodynamic engineer.
This mock-up looks more like just a marketing tool than a genuine attempt to produce an accurate facsimile of a workable design.
It makes sense really -- don't waste any money on design or testing until you've built a shuttle-like plywood mock-up to gauge the level of interest and maybe even collect a few booking deposits from wannabe travellers.
For those that visit Moscow, in Gorky Park, by the river is the shell of a Buran Shuttle. Entry is only a few US dollars - and it includes a rather dodgy multimedia presentation on space flight. The intersting thing for me when visiting was that, even when you get to Gorky Park, the thing isn't really advertised. I ended up taking the ferris wheel so I could look over the park layout to find this shuttle that I'd read about in my Lonely Planet guide. Russia apparently built 5 Burans, only one of which did an unmanned orbital flight. I'm not sure if the one in Gorky Park is that one. Makes you wonder where the others are and if anything will be done with them besides stripping them down and turning them into a rotting tourist attraction in Moscow.
r an2.jpg
Here is a picture I found on the web:
http://aeroweb.lucia.it/~agretch/Buran/gpk94ag_bu
It will be interesting to see where this Space Tourist venture goes. If it can pay for itself (and one would assume it could as it is hard to believe that anybody could afford to run it at a loss) it might turn out that the Russian space industry will get a good head start in the space tourism industry.
Considering how much that rich US guy paid to go up to the Space station, $100,000 is a snap!
However you may moan and groan, they probably have a reasonable market for this kind of thing. I remember my ex boss, for example, who said things like $1,000,000 for a house, cheap don't you think? When of course my house was costing me the earth (for me) at a mere $100,000....
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Your frequent flier miles take you into space? /. story about the above, it was posted a few days ago.
If anyone wants another
Much like with technology (computers in the mid-1980's for example), it's thought that as they sell more trips it'll become less expensive.
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As this craft lacks a vertical stabaliser I would suggest it is for yaw stablility. For a comparison take a look at http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm.
The X20 Dynasoar was a very similar shape.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I think this is probably the best news for manned spaceflight since the construction of ISS began. Why? Simple: It brings manned spaceflight to the market. There's a huge demand for space tourism, and that should bring down prices quickly.
The better our launch capabilities become, the sooner we will become a truely space faring civilization.
And that is something I want to see in my life time.
$100,000 for yourself
$50 for a hooker
$100,000 for her ticket
3 minute sex in space with a hooker? Priceless.
Somethings money can't buy.
God spoke to me
The US awards astronaught wings to people flying above 50 miles. There is no fixed point that you go above to be in space as the atmosphere just gets thinner the higher you go. 50 miles is a boundry defined by humans as space.
So it is a space flight in the same sense that Alan Sheppard's flight was a space flight.
You are correct in that a normal airplane flying a ballistic trajectory will give you microgravity however.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Indeed? I must have missed the news stories about the planes capable of achieving > 300,000 feet being used to shoot movies.
This is every bit as much a 'space flight' as the first Mercury effort made by the US.
The microgravity scenes for Apollo 13 were filmed in microgravity aboard a set built in a plane flying ballistic trajectories.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
If five millionaires can fund the entire Russian space program and turn it into a going commercial concern, then more power to them. NASA has done a good job of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer's money and to what avail? Pure research is in my opinion very justifiable and definitely in the realm of government funding.
But in their zeal to "own" space - a typical beaurocratic tendency - NASA has attempted to control what really is now applied engineering; the shuttle program is now NOT research, it's the things they do with it that are. Building a Space Station is NOT research, it's the experiments that are.
Therefore, the Russians have done a marvellous job of opening the awareness of the entire world to a tectonic shift in thinking; that the flights should now be commercial.
Government can still do research aboard specially constructed craft and by contracting for fares aboard commercial ships.
It's now time to stop the whining by the people on this board who believe the crap they are being fed by NASA about "safety" and other garbage. If ageing John Glenn can fly as a publicity stunt, so can a fit engineer as a tourist who is funding a significant part of an entire country's space effort and good on him.
Safety is relative. You can white-water raft down the Colorado river and die pretty easily, there are risks in many sports. There's risk in flying spaceships too, but that will not deter someone who really wants to go. If the tourist endangers the mission, then either the mission or the ship were badly designed.
All the negative posts are clearly, in the eyes of onlookers, just sour grapes and ignorance.
And congratulations to the Russians who deserve tremendous credit for taking this bold step - just like they did as first to put up a satellite, a man in space, and a woman in space.
What do you think those huge vertical surfaces on the wing tips act as? Sorry Mr Wind Tunnel but this thing looks plenty stable.
Am I the only person that sees a striking resemblance to this thing and John Crichton's ship on Farscape?
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
I think it is extremely rude and impolite to call an entire nation "crazy", especially on the front page of one's web site. An apology from the news maker would be appropriate.
It is not the altitude that simulates zero gravity on these flights, it is the parabolic flight arc of the aircraft, basically the aircraft starts off heading up and arcs downwards to simulate zero gravity, basically it free falls so from the inside it seems like you are weightless. In a strange way orbiting spacecraft do the same thing, except when they fall they miss the Earth. 65 miles altitude is extremely high and not as easily attainable as you think, some modern commercial aircraft can reach 40,000 feet on a good day (NASA use a modified 707 KC-135 airframe for the vomit comet, commercial companies use a modified 727). 40,000 feet is about 7.5 miles, that's WAY below the 65 miles you claim.
Step 1: Offer orbital flights for $100,000
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
How can they lose?
~ now you know
Thats what I was saying, the wing tips were instead of a conventional vertical stabaliser on a plane.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I never called you a troll. This type of design has been tried before you, but even these stabilizers are massive by comparrison to earlier designs. You have seen the X-24 haven't you?
l an esx24a.jpg
http://homepages.tesco.net/~xplanesx/xplanes/xp
On close examination, it turns out to be a downscaled version of Buran.
No it doesn't. There are plenty of good pictures of the Buran Orbiter, as well as the experimental and prototype vehicles that preceeded it, at the NPO Molniya web page.
They have a nice set of web pages there, BTW. Some are in English, but most are in Cyrillic. I particularly like the Buran/Shuttle comparison and the clicking diagram of the full Buran/Energia stack.
Growing up in the 70s, I had a poster almost exactly like this on my bedroom wall, 'cept it was of the Shuttle, but Buran.
Having travelled in the eastern block I can tell you honestly that there is a different sense of public safety there. People really don't get sued for negligence, and caveat emptor means so much more than be careful or your new jeans might rip-It means buyer beware for your life!
People drive drunk on mountain roads with their headlights off in the middle of the night.
We could never get a passenger flight off, the liability insurance would be way to huge.
We "won" the space race, the arms race and the cold war... We're the richest country in the world, and the most successful space program... Now Russia's doing commercial space tourism, and the best we can do is keep sending probes, cutting NASA's budget and reducing manned spaceflights. It's just sad...
It is not a copy of X-20. The Soviets already designed AND flew a small space plane called the BOR-4 as a test vehicle for the Buran project. It made sub-orbital flights in 1982 and 1984. It seems that the new Russian "space plane" is based on the BOR-4, or at least the experience gained in the BOR-4 project.
Photoshere
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
BTW: You are exactly as much weightless during a parabol flight as you are on a spacestation in orbit around the earth. There's no need to write "weightless" since it really is weightless (!=massless).
I've read that slashdot AC's all like goat sex.
:-)
I read it, so it must be true.
[sigh]* 2002-03-14 23:15:39 Russian tourist mini-shuttle (articles,space) (rejected)[/sigh]
...
Well, anyway. What I mentioned in my story submission, and what's most fascinating to me about this, is what it might mean for the future. This is the way the Shuttle was originally supposed to be built, remember: a fully reusable booster stage, basically a really big plane, that would carry the orbiter up ~50 miles, at which point the orbiter's engines would kick in and take it the rest of the way, with the booster flying back to Earth and loaded up for the next launch. It was classic penny-wise, pound-foolish budget cuts that saddled us with the current hybrid mess.
So this could act as proof-of-concept for such a thing -- if they can build it cheaply enough for the tourist trade, they can build a bigger, orbital model to do the sorts of things the Shuttle does now at a much lower cost. Also, a bigger version of the current sub-orbital craft, if turned out assembly-line style, might achieve the economies of scale necessary for commercial travel. London to Tokyo in a couple of hours
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I never called you a troll.
:)
Indeed you didn't, and he never said you did. That is his signature. I suggest turning off signatures or turning on the seperator.
proton != antielectron
some modern commercial aircraft can reach 40,000 feet on a good day (NASA use a modified 707 KC-135 airframe for the vomit comet, commercial companies use a modified 727)
It'd seriously question either of these aircraft being called "modern"... Anyway the Russians don't use aircraft from Boeing and ESA use an Airbus.
According to the article, the tourist-shuttle will take 3 crew (1 pilot, 2 passengers) and suspend them for 3 minutes. If you added a pair of boosters, stripped out the crew compartment and associated life-support, would it be possible to boost light cargo into orbit? I mean, hell, at $100k, even LEO would be good.
That brings up the other question, why the hell doesn't NASA fund the Buran program instead of the shuttle program? No crew compartment = more cargo capacity, less cost/turnaround time (since we don't have to certify the craft for human occupants.) Not to mention Russian scientists/technicians are cheap these days.
Astronaut wings.
The only way to get them is by going to a high enough altitude; 100 km is high enough. Incidently, it will also get the X-prize for the company if it is the first to pull this off (think of the monetary incentives for early aviation; the X-prize is the equivalent for putting regular people in space).
science is a religion
Good joke, but it was Mastercard (who sued Ralf Nader for using their ad format during the last prez election), check the attrition.org Mastercard spoof gallery for more.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
You've kind of answered your own question.
The reason why the Russians are able to run rings around us is that their efforts are bweing run by private companies, while NASA is a huge stupid and typically inefficient beaurocracy.
NASA spent 2 billion dollars on their next shuttle vehicle, X33, and got nowhere. By the time the money ran out, they were basically back at square one, because their design was based on like eight different new and unproven technologies.
The Russian company is spending a total of 60 million to develop this.
It'll be beautiful if it works.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Buran had 1 successful flight that was unmanned. Manned flights were planned but canceled because the Soviet economy fell apart.
Those Russian engineers have a lot more experience in manned space flight than the US. They hold ALL the records for duration, ALL records related to space stations and have flown many more cosmonauts than the US has flown astronauts.
Sputnik was put up by the Soviets. Yuri Gagarin was put up by the Soviets. The first space station was launched by the Soviets. They run far more supply missions to the ISS than the Americans.
And no, I am not a Russian; I am a fifth generation American who is deeply frustrated by the US space program.
science is a religion
This basic layout has been proposed before.
The X-20 Dynasoar looked similar, as did a mini-shuttle the Europeans were developing back in the '80's.
The Farscape people were probably influenced by those designs.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
The flight envelopes still don't extend to 60 miles altitude. Nothing I wrote is incorrect, the 727 is used for this stuff. Infact you don't directly contradict anything I wrote, go play pedant on someone elses thread, or do you have something substantive to offer?
If the "downrange" - horizontal distance travelled - is reasonable, there may be much better money-making opportunities. London (or Moscow) to New York or LA to Tokoyo express package deliveries - see The Suborbital Road to Space and this by Rick Kolker
Kolker suggests at $500 a pound, transplant organs are about the only thing with the economics, but at $50, legal documents will pay the freight.
If we assume the $100,000 a seat means a payload of 500 pounds, then they're starting around $200 a pound. But if you can rip the life support system out and have 2500 pounds payload, then we're talking high-end document delivery. And documents don't need to breathe.
Russian *people* in general always thought that way. It's USSR goverment that *officially* didn't, but privately, they have been as capitalistic as it gets. I know it, I lived under Soviet goverment.
From the pics at the BBC, this is a slightly different design than Buran - note the vertical control surfaces are on the wingtips instead of a single tailfin. Interestingly, this looks a lot like some of the early Shuttle designs - the current Shuttle, which was designed to service a space station, was redesigned to replace a station, and now services a station.
I wonder if this might be used as an alternative to the Soyuz capsules the Russians currently use for unmanned resupply of the ISS - it could conceivably be flown entirely from the ground, a capability demonstrated by Buran (a capability the Shuttle doesn't have).
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
this is what it's gonna take to get the planet's space programs out of the shitter and headed towards a bright bold future as a space faring species. Defense r&d has taken it as far as it can go we need the private sector to take part if I will be able to someday enroll in star fleet academy or at least my grand kid.
Hmmm. Not so much Buran (AKA Shuttleski; the two vehicles look remarkably similar), but it is the spitting image of the X-20 Dynasoar
The X-20 is *not* a dinosaur! It can't be that old, I haven't even seen any SPECIAL OFFERS for it yet! And why would you need an X-20, when the X-10 has the all *NEW* Pan & Tilt feature? For crying out loud, didn't you see the girl in the bikini on the popunder window? If I understand correctly, she comes with it!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
some modern commercial aircraft can reach 40,000 feet on a good day
SOME commercial aircraft? Try most. Any decent aircraft can climb to 40,000 feet. The Cessna Citation X can climb to 51k. You make it sound like 40k feet is a really big deal, but the truth is that any business jet worth it's weight can climb to that height.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
The plane you refer to is called the Vomit Comet a modified KC-135A modified for microgravity experiments. There's an article about it here.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
No, it's not using vertical take off. Because the shutttle is so 'small', it is carried by a high-altitude plane.
Unlike other great nations that have to import the brain, Russians have been always great engineers. too bad that they were living in a wrong system.
I am glad they are doing this for a multitude of reasons. Besides the role reversal that's going on.
When we had competition there was a space race. To the moon at that time. These days China is catching up with thier space program and plans for a Chinese Mars mission is not beyond their vision. The Russians are surpassing the space tourist milestone and everyone should be happy. This will open up a lot of other doors to the future.
And where have we 'evolved' our program to? Oh yeah, if your not perfect in every conceivable way or make the mistake of criticizing NASA you will never get to be a US space tourist. That is of course IF we ever take a step in that direction with our program or allow US businesses to compete for space.
Anyway... glad to see the Russians are doing this. It will make them the first commercially successful manned space program and really put our noses to the grindstone for a bit. A little humility lesson as the result of competition in an open market goes a very long way.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
A russian company is already offering a few minutes of weighlessness on an aeroplane for a decent price.
Umm, I wouldn't run to far with that... these are the same "always great engineers" who designed a highly flamable nuclear reactor. (and built a lot of them) Graphite is a great heat conductor and ok neutron barrier, however, it also burns really well. (Carbon arc lamps were used in movie projectors and light houses.)
(Ok, so we weren't thinking to far ahead either -- See also: Apollo 11)