Europe Heads for the Moon in July

Orlando writes "The BBC are reporting that Arianespace are all set for sending Smart1 to the Moon in July. The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies. This is particularly good news after the recent Arianne rocket explosion." China's also planning a moon mission. The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.

Comments

BTDT

[IvyMike]

Hey, America's already Been There, Done That.

Here's what we discovered.

Re:BTDT

[mas]

Deep Space 1 used an ion thruster.

Ion Thruster Used to Propel the Deep Space 1 Spacecraft to Comet Encounters

Re:BTDT

[stinky wizzleteats]

It's hard to pin the "down on space" tail on Bush. Especially when he's talking about building nuclear powered interplanetary exploration craft that will use ion impulse engines and magnetic shielding for ultra-high energy transfer flights to Mars taking weeks rather than months.

I did some testing, and found that if we are successful in building a ship that can sustain 1 g of acceleration over six days (Prometheus calls for constant thrust to keep astronauts under 1 g of gravity to maintain bone and muscle mass, so it could go a hell of a lot faster), I can send a manned mission to Neptune that will take 40 days to get there. This trip would take 14 years on a Hohmann transfer.

Re:BTDT

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Rough numbers: An ion engine with an exhaust velocity of 30km/sec would have to use up 327g of propellant per second to push a 1000kg vehicle at 1g. At 100% efficiency, this engine would require about 147MW of input power.

To push this vehicle for 1 hour at 1g, it would need an initial propellant load of 2245kg, and an initial power input of 477MW. For 2 hours, it would need 9531kg of propellant and 1.54GW initial input power. The initial propellant load goes up exponentially with the amount of time you want to accelerate at 1g.

Disclaimer: These numbers might be wrong; I'm a bit rusty on my differential equations. And, of course, all these calculations go out the window if someone (other than sci-fi writers) comes up with propellantless propulsion. But I'm not holding my breath for that one.

no mention

[lingqi]

That SMART-1 is a solar-plasma-hall-effect propelled... thing? (I don't know what to call it. "technology demo" would be most fitting)

Anyway, with US short a shuttle, I'd think there should be more of europe stepping up to support the ISS; you know, the *international* space station? of which they are also a part of?

Granted, it'd be the day when you see muslim (like, say, from Saudi) or chinese (as in, from Beijing) flying to the ISS on a regular basis, so maybe it's not that international...

Just what the US needs.

[bluyonder]

A little competition to get us back on track. We need to take NASA away from the politicians and give it back to the engineers.

Plans for the USA

[DarkHelmet]

The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.

Nope, the US is planning sabotage. We can't have all those euro-socialist scumbags find out that we didn't really go there in the 60's. Of course not!

I hear they're planning to send Buzz Aldrin by himself to Europe to personally pummel the ESA's people.

And I hope they get it on tape again!

We saw this coming....

[Lord_Slepnir]

Europe Heads for the Moon in July

Damn, they never told me continental drift was that bad.

Re:american moon missions

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, honestly, this is starting to get on my nerves.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that Russia had:

• The first rocket in space
• The first animal in space
• The first man in space
• The first woman in space
• 
  and
• The first probe on the moon

And probably some other stuff I can't remember

Then a US president decided that having a man on the moon was important... So the US won an arbitary race they contrived.

I have often heard that Americans won the Space Race. It was not the "Space Race", the Russians won that. It was not the "Moon Race", the Russians won that too. It was the "Man on the Moon Race". So well done, have a gold star.

It reminds me of the claim that Americans built the first computer... It depends on what properties are necessary for a device to be classed as a computer: That it's electronic? That it has Randomly Acessable Memory? That it operates on a stored program? (This last one seems most plausible to me.) I am tempted to suggest that one of the requirements implicit in some people's lists is that it was built in America.

The history books

[rjamestaylor]

One day the history books will read,

• "While the conquest of space began with the colonization of the Moon by the joint Eurasian Space Agency, a little known fact is that the United States of America actually was the first government to land a man on the Moon in the latter part of the 20th century. Although the USA was first to visit the Moon, it did not have the resources or the vision to stay and make a enduring presence there (Moon jeeps notwithstanding)."

This is basically what the history books say about the Vikings and North America--technically first, but who cares. Columbus and the English (and French, Spanish Germans, Dutch in descending order) get the recognition.

That, of course, begs the question as to what indeginous Moon people Eurasia will replace when they do colonize the Moon, but let's not go there, shall we?

Re:american moon missions

[DavidBrown]

"In all honesty, a manned mission to the moon by another country would be great. It would finally shut up all of these conspiracy theories about how the manned missions to the moon by the U.S. were elaborate hoaxes."

What do you mean by "another country"? You're making that up. There are no other countries, and any "moon" missions that they accomplish are as made up as they are.

"those darned Chinese"? There you go again...

Re:Why So slow?

[jpmorgan]

Ion engines don't have the impressive flames of chemical rockets, or the raw thrust, but they have much better specific impulse which is all that counts once you get out of Earth orbit.

But, since the moon is in orbit, thrust is an issue. But the question is, why waste a lot of money getting their fast when you're just sending a robot? It sounds like the ESA is going to get valuable ion engine experience out of this, and at the same time get to the moon cheap. And that's what going to the moon should be; cheap.

If going to the moon isn't cheap, how can we reasonably expect to go to Mars?

Re:First?

[mysticgoat]

We know what's up there, we know how to get there, we know how to get back.

Well, to get snide about it, we don't know what's up there (but we do know that a golf club can be used in a space suit, and that funny wheels make an effective lunar go-cart, and we collected enough rocks that I think a strong man would have a problem lifting them all at once-- but I'm not sure). We knew how to get there, but like Goldie Hawn frequently said at the time, "I used to know all that stuff." Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back. We threw all that technology away.

Yes, I mean that. The Apollo program was based on technology that used (get ready for it) sliderules. The total amount of computer power that was used in the entire Apollo program is dwarfed by the desktop machine that you turn off without giving it a second thought, when your done with your evening's slashdot entertainment. You couldn't muster up enough people in the workforce today who know how to use a sliderule to repeat what was then done, or even understand the notes that were written about it. The technology of the Apollo program was never carried across into computers. To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch. We orphaned the whole thing as we moved on to better technology.

Terribly shortsighted, that was.

In response to another of your comments: I did not discredit what you call the "residual accomplishments". Re-read my post.

As to Christopher Columbus-- he made several repeat voyages to the New World. He stuck to his program, even though it failed in the long run. His program was designed to return spices and gold-- the keys of that age. Our space adventure had no pragmatic purpose, and so was shut down before it accomplished anything of lasting significance. It was truly just a "First Post" effort.

Re:Why So slow?

[DarenN]

Interestingly enough, after the second last ESA launch "problem", the artemis satellite which was on board was brought from low ellipitical orbit to geo-stationary orbit using the only system available, its ion thrusters. Pretty impressive achievement, especially when 20% of the satellites command and control software had to be rewritten to allow the fine control of the engines required.

This is valuable experience for the ESA. They also did some other pretty nifty stuff, like image transfer using an optical link

Story here

Re:First?

[PissedOffGuy]

To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch.

that doesnt make any sense. i went to the kennedy space center and they have a saturn V just sitting there.

in fact, who cares? if we were to remake ENIAC right now it'd probably cost millions and require infrastructure to make vacuum tubes that we might not have nowadays, but nobody would say we can't match the feats of ENIAC, or that we're behind where we were in the 40s.

if we really had a reason to go to the moon (and hence a budget to do so), then we'd go. to say otherwise is ridiculous, "Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back." give me a break.