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ISS Crew Returns in Soyuz Capsule
physicsnerd writes "According to CNN the Soyuz capsule from the International Space Station has landed in Kazakhstan. This is the first time US Astronauts have ever landed outside of the US."
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Before the shuttle program, as I recall, they always landed outside the US.
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and trinity dies at the end of the matrix reloaded develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
The astronauts were not the first Americans to land on foreign soil after a trip in space because U.S. tycoon Dennis Tito beat them to that distinction.
Because landing in a Soyuz is generally bumpier than in a shuttle, Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin were seated in the Soyuz on custom-built recliners designed to fit their bodies, NASA said.
This is fantastic. I bet the astronauts were complaining about everything.
My chair is too hard, The in flight meal is too dry, Nikolai kept kicking my seat. You wouldn't get this kind of service on a good old Shuttle.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
This is the first time US Astronauts have ever landed outside of the US.
I thought the moon people landed in the middle of the atlantic, does the US own that now ?.
Um, I think you'll find that most of the Pacific Ocean is outside the USA, and that's where most of the early US astronauts came down.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
With the increasing trend of corporate sponsorships for space travel, i wouldn't be surprised to see the ISS be remamed the "IIS".
What? Are US Astronauts not allowed outside the country?
Maybe they can report that there's a whole world outside of the US!
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
And Russians, with their space tourism program, proved that econom-class is ok not only for semi-military educated cosmonauts, but even also for space tourists (including US citizens!).
I hope Europians and Japaneese will cooperate with Russians more, heliping to keep their space program. I doubt NASA will keep cooperating with Russians as in US everything is related to politics and Russians joined to Germany and France club, it means US decline trade operations and cooperation with them after they denied to help with Iraq occupation.
Less is more !
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The Russian soyuz spacecraft has been the longest-lived, most adaptable, and most successful manned spacecraft design. In production for forty years, more than 230 have been built and flown on a wide range of missions.
The fundamental concept of the design can easily be summarised as obtaining minimum overall vehicle mass for the mission. This is accomplished by minimising the mass of the re-entry vehicle. This was achived by putting all the systems not needed for re-entry outside the re-entry vehicle in a jetisonable 'livingsection'*, and by having a re-entry vehicle with the highest possible volumetric efficency**.
Compare this to the US capsules of the sixties (in which almost everything that went up came down, and the volumetric efficency was poor) and todays twenty year old shuttle system. Basicly, by finding a good design, keeping things simple and not fixing that which isn't broken, the soviets and later the russians has keept what is basicly the same design flying for the better part of half a century. And in a way, it's a design more optimised to building large spacestations than the shuttle are - just leave your livingmodule on the station as you detach your capsule, and you have just increased the size of the station. The only thing the shuttle has going for it when it comes to stationbuilding is the canadarm (isn't there one mounted at the ISS already?) and the fact that the shuttle could, theoreticly, bring modules down for repair.
Oh well, anotehr victory for KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. While the shuttle has it's uses, for most everyday stuff in space a simple capsule is safer, simpler and possible cheaper.
*) As a rule of thumb, every gram saved this way saves two grams in overall spacecraft mass, as you don't have to support it with parachutes, protected by heatshields and braked on landing.
**) In theory this is a sphere, as the earlier vostok, but as the Soyuz was originaly planned to be used on lunar missions it was required to bank a little, generate lift and 'fly' a bit to reduce the G-loads on the crew - just like the Apollo was. The optimum shape was found to be the classic headlightshape the soyuz have had for it's entire life.
Most information in this post is taken from the linked websites, even if I've barely scraped the surface. I stronlge recomend following the links to learn more of this four decades old design.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
According to this report in German, the capsule came down almost 500km (300 Miles) outside it's planned target area, and it took two hours to locate it.
The astronauts climbed out of the capsule themselves and waved to the people looking for them when they finally turned up. That could have easily have gone very horribly wrong - imagine them coming down on the side of a steep mountain-face.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Russian: ~ 1 billion dollars per year.
American: ~ 15 billion dollars per year.
Of the 1 billion dollars a year, only 20% is paid by the Russian government, the rest is commercial enterprise. That's a fantastically tax efficient space programme for Russia. Can America get even a single shuttle launch for $200million?
Perhaps the US government should outsource the management of their space programme to the Russians. They have a better heavy lift capability more reliable launch vehicles and are many many times cheaper.
They actually missed their landing point and landed in the Kazakhstan desert: over 400km from their intended destination!!
BBC News: story
http://blog.grcm.net/
Above post = troll (matrix spoiler in 2nd last paragraph)
NASA spends almost $470 million dollars just on one launch ! Just think about what of research you could do with that money !
NASA needs to learn how to manage their money and build a new economical reusable space craft before they start wasting ridiculous amounts of money on a floating money waster.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
since this set of ISS crewmen went up in the shuttle...
and since when they went up they assumed that they were going back down in the shuttle...
and since there was a different set up people in that soyuz capsule when it was launched...
and since that soyuz capsule was originally going to be the return trip for the people who brought up the *next* soyuz...
how did this trio get custom-built seats?
jf
Did they have a visa? "Papers, please..."
Sorry, I was tired when I submitted the article. What I should have said was that this is the first time that US Astronauts have ever landed in a foriegn country. Tito doesn't really count because he was a paid Tourist, not an astronaut.
You should perhaps check out some these websites more closely yourself.
The only US manned spacecraft "in which almost everything that went up came down" was the tiny one-man Mercury capsule. And unlike the first Soviet Vostoks, all US manned capsules have had some aerodynamic steering capability, even the Mercury capsule. Ironically, the steerable blunt-body design was actually originally researched and developed for use on ICBM warheads.
The fundamental design charcteristic of ANY spacecraft launched with a chemically-fueled rocket is "minimizing the overall vehicle mass", I'd hardly say that was a great satori of the Russians. Read anything about the Apollo lunar module and you will see the immense lengths gone through to limit the mass of the lander, including having a skin so thin you could stick a pencil through it.
Both the Gemini and Apollo spececraft had jettisonable service modules.
Apollo:
Command Module Total mass: 5,806 kg
Service Module Total mass: 24,523 kg
Lunar Module Total mass: 14,696 kg
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 13%
Gemini:
Reentry module Total mass: 1,982 kg (2-person)
Retro module Total mass: 591 kg
Equipment module Total mass: 1,278 kg
(Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 1,869 kg)
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 51%
Soyuz (original design):
Orbital Module Total mass: 1,200 kg
Descent Module Total mass: 2,850 kg
Service Module Total mass: 2,700 kg
(Total jettisoned mass prior to entry: 5,550 kg)
Reentry mass % of total orbital assembly: 18%
The fact is that the vehicles are all optimized for different mission profiles and constraints, so it's really incorrect to generalize based on any one characteristic. The Shuttle for example, is a massive re-rentry object, but it can launch and return a crew of seven and a 14,000 kg Spacelab module. It's all based on what you want to do and how you want to do it.
All that said, I think that the Soyuz is an excellent design, and obeys one of the most fundamental tenets of engineering - refine a basic design. The Soyuz incorporates all of those years of operational experience and the Soyuz is definitely the most proven manned space vehicle design available.
But was it a successful design? According to its original mission, it's hard to say. It never carried a Hero of Socialist Labor to the lunar surface and back because the Soviets couldn't get the N-1 to work, so it never attempted its design mission.
from reading this and other articles about the Russian re-entry:
1. The subtle undercurrent of U.S. space program elitism, that is, the Russians run a barebones operation and the U.S. astronauts were incredibly lucky to return alive in such a piece of junk space capsule. Numerous posts have spoken to the incredibly reliable and effective Russian space program, so I won't belabor the point.
2. The absurd notion, much inferred, that since the space shuttle disintigrated on re-entry that a similar disaster will befall the Russian Soyuz. Somewhere out there someone was waiting to say, "Look, I told you so! Space is dangerous!", as if they had divined the second coming. Space is dangerous, expensive and in the opinion of many, not worth the effort.
There is a benefit to mankind in exploration that often does not come without planning, foresight and much trial and error.
Just my thoughts.
Budarin says that one of the americans botched the descent. "He pressed a wrong button and control systems have gone crazy" - this is a rough translation of his words. I doubt this will ever show up in "free" American press. He didn't clarify which one, though.