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Rescue Mission For European Space Industry
metz2000 writes "The New Scientist reports that the European Space Agency (ESA) has pledged hundreds of millions of Euros to guarantee its independent access to space. Europe also looks set to co-operate with the Russian Space Agency. Looks like the space industry is hotting up again. How will NASA react to this news after being the dominant space agency over the past three decades? A lot of money is going into rocket technology also; with this and the 'European version' of GPS are we heading towards a future conflict across the Atlantic?"
... then surely it would be an advantage for the stricken space-program to have the other party to fall back on?
I'm thinking particularly of in-space rescues where the other program may have the resources ready to launch a rescue-mission, but there are probably other scenarios from which both NASA and ESA would benefit.
Plus, competition will mean that the science thrives, particularly in the current political climate (don't kid yourself - the US and Europe are *not* friends right now).
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I say more power to 'em. Something has to get the US off it's fat ass, and if it won't, someone else needs to carry the torch of science and progress into space.
I say this as a US citizen BTW.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The ESA and NASA already have a history of working together. The Saturn-bound Cassini, for instance, has the ESA-designed Huygens aboard. A little competition is healthy (see the current Mars missions), but international cooperation is the only way we'll see big projects like Cassini in the future.
.. ? Its not very effective to compete in a field like shooting stuff to mars .. if they could work together, theyll have more advantages, than disadvantages .. look @ the ISS -
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of course I know its mainly driven by the U.S. - but I think it works out fine if they combine their knowhow and money.
And at leat it would be a bad idea if just the U.S. would settle at the mars
Um, so what you're saying is that when America does space stuff, it's good for the world, but when Europe does space stuff, that's "conflict across the Atlantic?" How's that work then?
Not intending to troll but that "conflict" thing does seem like an odd conclusion. Are Europeans now terrorists? How about a bit more reasoning, rather than just saying "Europe? Space? WAR!!!!!"
As in any market competition encourages the other competitors to step up the pace to beat out the latest and greatest from their foes. This is really the birth of the space race, as privatized sectors will probably get more funding than NASA these days. Lots of rich people are ignorant and very interested towards space (NSYNC Member Lance Bass) and they have the money to power their dreams. These companies will open more gateways into space and will further technology on planet Earth, Luna (The moon) and Mars (To get to Mars).
:)
It's hard to find a negative side other than NASA will have to be more of a space agency than a satellite monitoring system.
I look forward to new technology that will allow me to drink Tang all day, and that chalky hard ice cream! But seriously, I look forward to new innovations in space ship design as well as thrusters that will get us out of the atmosphere with some kind of renewable fuel source and enough power to move around outside of orbit.
(Maybe in 22nd century)
Dont flame me I have bad karma as it is
[cx]
Yes and no. The idea behind the shuttle was to save on having to build an entirely new launch vehicle every time you wanted to put a payload into orbit.
Unfortuanately, the shuttle program was based on some incorrect assumptions. First, it was assumed that their cost predictions for the shuttle would be accurate (they weren't, it costs far more per launch than predicted) and secondly, the increase in payloads wanting taking to orbit wasn't predicted (there was a massive increase, IIRC)
In theory, reusables are cheaper, but in the short term the throw away option works better.
What would make throw away rockets even cheaper is a dual use philosophy of design, allowing the entire rocket (or a lot of it at least) to reach orbit, where it could be reused to form parts for orbiting storage or some such (after all, these are generally allready presurized tanks, so they will be airtight in orbit)
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
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ESA and the russians aren't much competition right now... On the other hand neither is NASA, what with the Columbia debacle which will probably lead to a permanent moth-balling of the remaing orbiters.
The russians will just keep cranking out 1960's era craft until the factories break down. Nothing wrong with 60's rockets, but we need to have modern designs and materials if we're going to lower the cost of space access.
ESA is at least trying to develop new technology. Witness the Ariadne 5 a.k.a. "worlds most expensive fire cracker". Last thing I heard ESA needed 500.000.000 to redesign it from scratch. That kind of expense will cripple ESA for decades. *Sigh*. I guess I'll have to hold my thumbs for the Chinese.
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Well, since I dare say China probably has no intention of providing positioning information to anyone outside of China, three satellites is almost certainly sufficient to provide GPS-like functionality within Chinese borders.
well, its really funny that some ppl might think that a space mission to mars will trigger a new cold war + even a real war. hmmm ... as far as im informed the ESA and NASA have been working together in numerous missions before with everyone depending on each other. the problem was that sometimes the europeans were only allowed to play the passengers and didnt get the science information first hand. some also mentioned the european gps system. it was started because the normal gps could be turned off at any place by the US military. so the european one is more like consumer-orientated (and not wobbling :). and the russians and chinese also have their gps system.
but on the whole i think that a little competition is never bad. but why does this sort of thing upset some ppl? afraid of a multipolar world (that some governor doesnt want). oh man!
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> "...are we heading towards a future conflict across the Atlantic?"
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What kind of conflict do you mean, and what might cause it because Europe develops some tehcnological abilities of it's own?
Does the US feel somehow threatened when it doesn't have a monopoly on many kinds of stuff anymore? Does it have a reason to be afraid in that case?
"Hey, i'm growing potatoes, you must not research the hoe technology (because then i would lose the monopoly on producing and selling these artificially degraded and overpriced potatoes to whom i wish, whenever it might suit my needs).."
Their paranoia?
You haven't been following politics lately, have you? The EU (in general) aren't going to trust the US again in the near future. Most Europeans are fed up with their arrogance, and scared by their military superiority. Also, the US "democracy" is converging to a plutocracy, or in the best case a corporate police state. Not something you would like to be dependant on.
The EU doesn't trust the US, and have good reasons not to. Would you like to tell me how it's a waste for the EU to have a military too? The US already got that part covered, don't they?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
If I remember correcty, the ESA are the only ones actually making money from space with their Ariane program. If you ask me, the dominant agency has been ESA for a long time. And before that it was Russia.
I'd like to remind you of the fact that even though NASA is very glad to have won the race to the moon, there was no such thing. Instead of going there and back, the Russians put Mir in orbit, which is a more useful and lasting feat than putting a flag on the moon.
>btw, I find it so very amusing that whenever western sources refer to the chinese space program, they just HAVE to add phrase like "secret, military linked," as if NASA is completely independent of the military, or something...
That is similar to certain presidents always mentioning "weapons of mass destruction" linked to certain countries, while having stockpiles of those in their own yard...
(even more amusing when they fail to come up with evidence about them)
On an economic basis there is no justification for reusable vehicles. Launch costs today are dominated by the cost of the ground crew (thousands of people are needed to maintain and launch the shuttle). The best way to reduce costs is to simplify ground operations as much as possible. Reusable vehicles don't do this, in fact they do the opposite.
If the world were run by rational people, there would be two primary vehicles: (1) A heavy-lifting, single-use, less reliable unmanned system for cargo, and (2) a small, but highly safe/redundant system for people. Combining these in the manner of the shuttle forces human reliability standards throughout, which is a bad way to get stuff into space cheaply.
So why do people persist in thinking that rockets should be reusable? It's just one of those persistent cultural myths, probably borne out of the American fascination with the automobile. Blame the Jetsons. Or maybe Star Wars. Who knows.
If I remember correctly ESA is already both marketleader launching commercial sattelites AND making money while doing it. The biggest threat to ESA's position right now is not NASA but country's like China and India.
That's what happens when you keep launching something that was designed over 30 years ago and never reached it's design goals, like for example being a reusable vehicle(!). The current space "shuttle" is more like a pod sitting on top a big rocket that can land by itself. Almost everything else needs to be build again.
"I don't think so, Europeans are quite pacifists (If we remove the uk, of course) they are not oriented to conflict aspects and try to avoid violence as much as possible."
Yeah right. The Germans asked, "How can we avoid violence at all costs? I know," they said, "Let's invade Poland."
Cynicism is the natural defence of the romantic.
I think you should get off your Island more often, monetory union is hardly an unpleasent symptom as we experience it. Most Europeans in the Euro zone, that are not confined to their 20 square kilometers around their homes, would not want to go back to the pre-Euro aera.
Most of the ppl I know, just shop around in different contries (e.g. for electronics), because prices are easily compared...
Next to the fact that the UK is never considered as an integral part of the EU by most other member countries, you can hardly call the UK a team player... As it turns out, they'll most likely back NASA when Washington orders them to do so.
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Its amazing that the leadership of space has finally returned to Europe. Seeing the Germans started in all. As we all know the Americans and Russians all had German scientists at the beginning of their programs. Maybe the Germans should get heavily involved, then we would get to Mars and where ever else we want. They do generally have the best technology. Get BMW/Mercedes to build the rockets.
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It's not true that ESA is primarily a French project with some British involvement. The ESA funding comes from most of the primary participants, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark etc. The French contribute a large chunk of the funding but they also have a large role with their government funded labs working on research which compliments the ESA work which enhances their role in european space science. The British on the other hand pay propotionally much less than the other european partners (do you see a pattern here). British institutions will bid for research areas much like other european institutes but they don't contribute as much to the centralised european fund (ESA).
The lander on the current mars mission is British built - but not really as a ESA project. It was cobbled together from research funding from various british university and research labs for an obscenly small sum of money. (relative to the other lander projects) - an will be a real coupe if the scientific payload pays off.
A single Ariane 5 launch costs around $150 M which is roughly $140 MEuros, so this is good for around ten launches. Proton and Soyuz are cheaper - $80M and $40M respectively. (a table of launch vehicles costs). But of course this money won't be spent directly on launches, you have to have something to launch first.
ESA have just announced that they intend to offer Soyuz launch vehicals from the european launch site in south america. This is partly intended to bring the cost of launch down and partly to provide a small load, reliable launch vehical which fills a gap for payloads smaller than the Ariane lifters. Ariane is designed for much larger payloads - taking 2 or 3 instruments up at a time. The newest Ariane (before it's recent suspension) could lift nearly 10 tons - making the largest active lifter.
I don't think that europe is or will want a european space race. Europe should be able instigate and push some interesting projects in the next 10 years (venus express, rossetta etc) but most of these missions (if not all) are hugely collaborative and involve US, Canadian, European, Japanese, Russian and Chinese participants. The time when any individual agency wanted to go it alone are long gone.
When you have capsules, you do not need to to launch wings, control mechanisms, and all the other bits that make up an airplane into orbit. That saves a huge amount of weight. The saved weight can be "spent" in two ways: cheaper rockets and larger payloads.
The cost advantage of cheaper rockets (i.e. Soyuz) over a shuttle is obvious (something like a factor 20 or so).
The cost advantage of larger payloads is also obvious: all of your energy is used lifting stuff that actually needs to be in space, rather than used to return safely to Earth. A shuttle launch assembly minus the shuttle (instead imagine a huge cargo container in its place) would have phenomenal lifting power; in fact, the Russian equivalent of this, Energia, could have launched the entire weight of ISS in just three launches! That would have saved a few hundred billion dollars.
So stop thinking of the shuttle as a "cool space plane", and instead consider it to be a highly over-engineered, *heavy* method of returning to Earth.
So what is the problem with this? I guess it has to do with NASA being afraid to lose face, which seems inevitable when they give up on the shuttle and return to expendable launchers.
Here's what I believe the various space agencies should do to replace the shuttle:
- Develop an expendable launcher that can lift *really heavy* items into a useful orbit (which can be ISS orbit, geostationary, or some escape orbit). Russia's Energia would be a good starting point, as would the shuttle launch stack (they are related anyway). This would be the heavy workhorse for orbital construction.
- Develop an expendable launcher that can lift people to that same orbit. Put a capsule on it in which people can travel comfortably and safely during the entire trip - i.e. it is fine to overengineer a bit, since it will one day safe lives. Use that just for people.
- Want to do something in orbit? Put your equipment on a big launcher (together with a lot of other stuff), and put your people on a small, safe launcher. The big launcher delivers to ISS (or some other orbital facility - constructing them will be cheap with this model), where the resident astronauts can install and operate it.
I'm getting quite tired of hearing the term '[US] military superiority'.
The United Kingdom, for example, has enough nuclear missiles and sufficient delivery systems to level the US at the touch of a button. So does Russia. So does China. So does France. Give it a few years, and so will India and North Korea.
In a situation like this, 'superiority' is not really applicable.
Score:-1, Funny
This is a rare 'carrot' for UK residents, more used the threat of monetory union and other unpleasent symptoms of a united Europe.
Unpleasent? You obviously don't travel or trade between European countries often.
Here's a hint. 75% of the press in the UK is owned by three men. Those three men are anti-europe, and are using their control over the UK press to sway public opinion away from Europe. If you read The Sun, The Telegraph, The Times or The Daily Mirror (amongst others) then be aware that they have an agenda to feed you with negative propaganda about Europe. As a UK citizen who now spends most of his time "in Europe" I must say that my previous (and in retrospect naive) view of England as having an quality, open and honest press has changed considerably over the last five years. It is dishonest and manipulative. Don't fall for it.
Not intending to troll but that "conflict" thing does seem like an odd conclusion. Are Europeans now terrorists?
I think the problem is that Americans like to think of themselves as the most powerful nation on earth and have gotten used to being first in everything. But, objectively, the US is a mid-size nation with an economy that is in deep trouble ($3 trillion in foreign debt and growing rapidly), that depends on skilled immigration for its competitiveness, and that faces enormous inequalities and social problems. The preeminent role of the US was an artifact of the aftermath of WWII. Now that Europe is pretty close to a federation and that China and India have caught up technologically, America becomes merely one among several large players, and not the biggest or most important one.
The only area where the US is clearly first is in military spending. But that really worries foreign nations. What is the US going to do when (and it's "when", not "if") foreign investments slow down, the dollar crumbles, skilled workers stay away, and the economy falters? Is it going to dismantle its military and quietly accept being a second-rate player on the world stage? Or is the US going to try to get by force what it won't be able to get by other means? Using the US military for economic reasons has happened before.
It is completely natural for European and Asian space programs, which represent larger populations and economies, to surpass the US programs. This is only the beginning of many changes. The question is whether Americans can get used to it.
And later the art of exterminating "Indians" was very much advanced by the US ingeniously using econmic warfare by sponsoring the killing of buffalos (Paragraph E).
I wonder if US paranoia can in part be attributed to the fact that the US never came to grips with its violent past.
Quite contrary to Germany. Could you imagine a US president kneeling in front of North Vietnamese monument to honor the Vietcong who died in the war with the US? Well, a German chancellor fell to his knees when visiting Poland in 1960s honoring the Polish soldiers that died in WWII.
WWII is the reason why Europeans loath war so much. Fortunately at this point in time the meaning of war seems to be clearly embedded in the European collective memory.
That's because you can spend it on hospitals. While 15% of the US GDP goes to the military, only three percent of the EU GDP goes to the military. The result is that, right or wrong, defense is something that trumps social programs. Europe has social programs as a higher *spending* priority than defense. Spending is the key word because European governments know that US bases are all over the place to protect them. While you may be delighted if the US leaves Europe (and I would be delighted also), it would cause massive budget priority changes across the continent. You might have to ask the private sector for that hospital or that upgraded public transit system. Basically, saying that Europe is better because they build hospitals instead of tanks is a demonstration of ignorance and a troll at best.
Laws are for people with no friends.
The relations were shown to be not as convivial as as some had hoped in the Iraq war. But to think it started there is naive. The idea of a European military initiative has been a thorn in the side of US military for some years now, and the US was opposed to the Gallileo system as well. While the US might try to increase other countries dependance on the US, a lot of countries have seen that this is not necessarily in their own best interests.
The EU is not alone in this kind of thinking, India also tries to minimise it's dependance on the US, as does China.
Yeah, because the UK being killed 100x over by the US would be so much more degrading than for the US, who would just be killed once by the UK...?
...
Does *nobody* remember the 1980s?? Jeez, you'd think *someone* would have learned something
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Sadly, the Russian Space Agency has encouraged private enterprise more in the last decade than has it's cold-war capitalist rival, NASA.
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To effectively stimulate the commercial launch industry NASA must stop competing with private start-ups. The most important first step it could take would be to competitively bid resupply for the Internation Space Station. In this transport sector, the space shuttle is hogging potential commercial business that NASA could otherwise outsource.
"The government should seek to cultivate a commercial launch industry in the same way that postal airmail did with civil aviation in the early 20th century."
Letter to Senators from NY on NASA's future
http://stellarlink.com/blog/archives/0000
since I dare say China probably has no intention of providing positioning information to anyone outside of China, three satellites is almost certainly sufficient to provide GPS-like functionality within Chinese borders.
Positioning information within your borders is only useful for peaceful purposes, such as tracking the movements of dissidents.
Positioning information outside of your borders is useful for diplomatic purposes, such as ensuring that your bombs hit their targets.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
NASA won't react. The sad truth is that right now American society is leaning far more towards guns than butter. The reality for NASA is that American pride no longer sores on NASA wings. (Note: I'm not endorsing this view, just expressing popular culture). The reality is that the drive in congress is just not there for supporting NASA, as it's far easier to woo voters with bribes and fears on TV, than with pictures of engineers behind control stations.
There will be speeches at NASA HQ, but no money from congress.
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The economic problems (which there are many of, as in the U.S.) aside, Arianespace and ESA are two rather successful operations.
:)
A single ariane is a) cheaper in total than a shuttle launch and b) able of lifting more cargo into space than any other space craft. About 40% of all satellite launches are done by Arianespace. That's hardly unsuccessful.
About Galileo. Did you ever hear the word 'competition'. GPS is the only vendor in the global positioning market. Monopolies are, however, from an economical point of view highly unwanted for they tend to provide inferior products for higher prices. And, while the concept is the same, Galileo is hardly anymore a rip-off GPS than a Mercedes is off a Ford
I followed one of your links and found this: Our space assets now are probably more important to warfighters and more important to our ability to win this global war on terrorism than they ever have been historically.
Here's what amazes me. America learned one lesson with 9/11: there are people who want to destroy it. But America seems to be oblivious to another lesson: they do not need high-tech weapons, weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles etc. They can use commercial airlines. They can use fertilizer. They can use off-the-shelf explosives. They can use box cutters. The Military/Industrial complex wants to fight Al Queada as if it were the Soviet Union: "we'll have bigger guns than them and then we'll win." "Iraq is developing big guns so we better invade them." But that shows a complete misunderstanding of the tactics of the real enemy. They shocked the world by using innovation rather than big guns.
A couple for you:
The constant banging on about how America is the home of democracy, freedom, blah, blah, blah.
The constant re-writing of world history by Hollywood to show how America saved the day, was the best, is the best - usually at the expense of Britain, e.g. U575 (British ship captures German sub, rewritten as Yank sub capturing German sub) and The Patriot.
The constant harping on by the Americans on talk boards about how they can kick anyone's arse.
If you are facing an enemy who uses trucks full of fertilizer, are you supposed to fight them by driving your own fertilizer trucks at them? No, you spy on them from your Electric Eye in the sky, and then drop a GPS-guided bomb on 'em.
Ok, maybe it's not really that simple, but high-tech weapons will always be useful and have advantages over not having high-tech weapons.
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