Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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."
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
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
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.
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."
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.
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
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