Japanese Shuttle has Successful Test Flight

spacecomputer writes "First test flight of scaled-down version of Hope-X is a success! They have additional test flights in the coming week, but have no funding to proceed beyond the test stage."

Comments

Re:what use?

[david.given]

what exactly are the usages of all these space shuttles, including the most successful of all, the US space shuttle program?

The space shuttle is not successful. The space shuttle is an utter disaster. In fact, the space shuttle is, arguably, the worst thing that ever happened to the American space programme.

The problem is that the shuttle is trying to be both a man-rated lifter, a reusable lifter, and a heavy lifter, and as a result it does all three incredibly badly. It's a massive money pit that swallowed the American space station, SSTOs, the moon base, and any manned Mars missions...

Put it like this:

Space shuttle capacity: 6 people, 15 tonnes cargo; cost: $600M.

Soyuz capacity: 3 people, no cargo; cost: $60M.

Proton capacity: no people, 20 tonnes cargo; cost: $70M.

This means that you could replace a single shuttle launch with the Russian alternative, launch three seperate vehicles, and have over four hundred million dollars in change! With a single shuttle launch budget, you could put nearly two hundred tonnes into LEO --- or sixteen tonnes into GEO, and the shuttle can't do that at all.

Unfortunately, the shuttle is now become political, so noone's going to be able to get rid of it. It's going to hang around consuming more and more of NASA's budget, until eventually another one will blow up, and then NASA will be reorganised out of existence. Meanwhile, the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Pakistani, and basically anyone else with a clue (and alas, I don't live in such a country) will be using disposable launchers to maintain their space presence. The ISS will probably be kept up until the shuttle explosion, and then it'll be quietly evacuated and deorbited; but by then, there'll be other space stations, at least some of them privately funded.

Re:The ISS's lifeboat

[Lars T.]

Well, Nasa has stopped their ISS crew rescue vehicle program last year for cost reasons. See here.

Re:The ISS's lifeboat

[geoswan]

Well, Nasa has stopped their ISS crew rescue vehicle program last year for cost reasons. See here .

Thanks for the info. I found some additional information . There was some talk of using this gold-plated mini-shuttle as the rescue vehicle. Then this design was being worked on. Even though its budget was, as Lars pointed out, cut for 2002, they still test launched it as recently as December 2001. This link has some info on the use of the Soyuz as the rescue vehicle.

I hadn't realized that US budget decisions had cut the ISS back to a skeleton crew. Here is a press release from a US Senator commenting on a recently released independent review of the Space Station's Science programs.