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Energiya Pushes For A 6-Person Space Capsule
voss writes "Apparently the Russians want to build their own reusable capsule called the Clipper that can be used up to 25 times and can fit 6 people. They also say they can build their ship in 5 years. The key here is if they can get the funding. The shuttle will be retired in 2010 and with no credible replacement on the horizon...why doesn't NASA give the Russians a chance?"
Maybe now NASA will stop dilly-dallying around and get some new technology other than the outdated space shuttle. We've really been slacking ever since we stopped going to the moon, and maybe international involvement will help us get back on track.
Accepting someone elses design is almost admitting that a under funded agency can bring up better plans than NASA.
And what makes you think NASA does not have a better one on their plans.
http://almostsmart.com
Zelenshchikov said Energiya engineers were also working on a huge spaceship for a flight to Mars, set to weigh 660 tons, the Interfax news agency reporte
660 tons? Wow. That's a lot of hard currency at work there. You think maybe the Chinese have put a back-order in for a ship to beat the US to the red planet?
First off, I was really pissed off at NASA and the media outlets for the scant coverage of the mission results concerning water on mars. All we got was a 4 minute introduction and one panelist into the release and it was back to the CNN/FOX 30 minute cycle of endless Pro-Bush news bits and Iraq coverage. Luckily, I have the NASA TV channel on satellite, so I was able to flip over -- but for the >95% of americans without NASA tv, they missed out on an hour's worth of enlightening details of Mars, straight from scientists and not tabloid writers with no understanding of science.
Now, this release isn't even going to be televised. The only initial outlet is a conference call for reporters only.
I'm ashamed of NASA and I am ashamed of our media coverage of science. When I was a kid, every space shuttle launch was televised. Taking 10-30 minutes of time out of my day to watch the occasional launch helped inspire me to think above the quagmire I was born into, to know there was something greater. Kids today get MTV and 24 hour news spin channels in 30 minute loops.
But hey, at least they get a nice, fast Internet and ~225 national channels of garbage via satellite.
"Out of the 14 people who have been killed inflight in Spacecraft, all 14 died in Shuttle accidents"
Sorry, wrong. In 1971 a Soyuz crew was lost when it depressurized too early, asphyxiating the astronauts inside. Soyuz 1 also killed it's occupant when it's main and reserve parachutes failed.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
A nice picture and more information on the plan are in astronautix.com.
The 14.5 tonne reusable lifting body would be used as a space station ferry and lifeboat, or could operate independently to shuttle tourists to space.
This is mainly based on proven technology, so there is a chance it may actually be built. Space tourism is also getting quite hot lately. They are planning to use another Russian designed spacecraft.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Shamelessly ripping off the Wikipedia Space Race page:
- first artificial satellite - Sputnik 1 (1957, USSR)
- first animal in orbit - Laika - Sputnik 2 (1957, USSR)
- first spacecraft on moon - Luna 2 (1959, USSR)
- first human in space - Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1 (1961, USSR)
- first orbital flight - Vostok 1 (as above)
- first dual flight (1962, USSR)
- first woman in space - Valentina Tereshkova (1963, USSR)
- first flight with more than one crew member - Voskhod 1 (1964, USSR)
- first spacewalk - Aleksei Leonov on Voskhod 2 (1965, USSR)
- first space rendezvous - Gemini 6/Gemini 7 (1965, USA)
- first space docking - Gemini 8 (1966, USA)
- first human orbital flight of moon - Apollo 8 (1968, USA)
- first human landing on moon - Apollo 11 (1969, USA)
- first space station - Salyut 1 (1971, USSR)
Depends what you mean by space and race.
The Russians are a smart people, they are the only country that are flying( Yeah China are flying but 1 flight ) and have contuined no matter what the public think of them or what weather condictions are like.. -40oC and a snow storms had not stop the Soyuz from being launched in to orbit. The country has always lacked the funding for its space program, they have beaten all other countrys in a number of races ( frist satellite, animal, man and woman. ) also they are the only country to have a long term presence in space, the Mir space station comes to mind. I beleave that they have proved themselves over the years. I am not saying they should revice full funding from NASA or anyother country.. but certnely a few bucks in the right direction would help, even to a design stage.
Regarding the generalizations for strength/weaknesses in Russian and American aerospace products, particularly aircraft:
Russian airframes, landing gear, gearboxes... built tought to work in shitty conditions.
Russian turbojets, great while they work, but need to be rebuilt every few hundred flight hours.
Russian avionics/radar: relatively primitive and prone to crapping out.
American airframes: finely engineered and can take a licking. Landing gear: engineered for whatever a particular design's expected environment, pick one: candy-ass smooth USAF tarmac, a carrier deck, dirt strip.
American engines: reliable, last long time, 1000's hours between rebuilds.
American avionics/radar: used to crap out regularly, even if not as often as Russian... until Hughes and Westinghouse got their digital h/w worked out in the 80's, now tough as nuts and runs for weeks w/o swapping out.
Just as an example, ask the Royal Malaysian Air Force. They fly F-18 and MiG-29. Sure, the 29's were about a quarter the price of the 18's, but it's the 18's that are flight-ready almost 24x7.
Luke, help me take this mask off
A U.S. law known as the Iran Nonproliferation Act prohibits NASA from making cash payments to the Russians unless the president certifies to Congress that Russia is not providing missile or other sensitive technology to other countries(=Iran).
Yes, 3 persons killed in soyuz 11 and 3 persons killed in the soyuz 1.
There have been more than 800 soyuz flights (source: http://www.starsem.com/soyuz/introduction.htm).
If we assume on average ~2 (I believe its higher) cosmonauts for each soyuz, that means that ~ 1600 has travelled in a soyuz. Out of these 1600, 6 have died. => death ratio on: 6/1600 = 0.00375.
The space shuttle has had a total of 111 missions:
Challenger: 10
Columbia: 28
Atlantis: 26
Discovery: 30
Endeavour: 17
In these missions we assume an average of 6. (I believe its lower though). This makes the total of shuttle-astronauts: 666. With 14 dead this makes a death-ratio on: 14/666 = 0.0210.
(or about 5.6 times higher).
Now these figures are on "per traveller". But the risks are more associated with launches. On this front the soyuz has 2 failed missions in 800 and the shuttle has 2 failed missions in 111.
Then, of course, we have the costs. A soyuz-launch cost about 20 million dollars. A shuttle launch, on the other hand, cost about 500 million dollars (source: wikipedia).
BUT! What everyone is forgetting is that these 2 ships are not compareable. The soyuz is a human-crew only capsule and the space shuttle is a reusable crew & equipment lifter. However, the conclusions one can draw is that it might be more efficient and safer to launch humans in human capsules (reusable or not) and launch the equipment on a separate booster earlier. (This is how the russians have constructed their space stations in the past - which has worked). There is very little need in sending up the equipment and humans at the same time - unless you are in a hurry.
If the Russians say it's designed for 25 flights, I'd start to worry around flight 78 :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
while Russia is now a democracy, they are still communist
That's a good one; they're actually neither. They're rapidly morphing into the same kind of post-capitalist information oligarchy that everybody else is heading towards, wherein a veneer of democracy and free markets thinly disguises the fact that whoever controls the mass media has all the power.
Consider: China is heading towards free markets and (local) elections but keeps a tight grip on its media. In Italy the media czar is also the president, and brazenly changes laws so as to evade corruption charges. Across the Anglo-Saxon world, virtually all the mass media are in the hands of only a half-dozen moguls, and religiously toe the government line.
This new game is played by smart people, they've all read the sign of the times. It's the post-capitalist feedback loop of money and power: the media shape public opinion, public opinion elects politicians, the politicians decide where the money goes, the money buys control of the media. Welcome to the information society.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
When I started writing this post, I was going to show how the Russian approach care less about the lives of the astronauts, treating them like expendable components, and thus wasn't suitable for a country like the US that puts more of premium on human life.
Then I did the math.
They've done about twice as many manned launches as we have, but lost only 4 people, while we've lost 14 so far. (Not counting Apollo 1.)
Maybe we should be looking more closely at their approach.
First, in 1965 the national budget did not include much money for certain programs which have exploded since then (for example, most of the Great Society stuff like Medicare). Comparing fractions of the budget without adjusting for huge changes in the portion of GNP which goes through the government makes any comparison suspect.
Second, the economy is several times as big now as it was then. Is something less important if you allocate 1% of 4*x to it instead of 4% of x?
Third, we have already solved many of the technical and engineering problems required to do the things we want to do in space (I think we should put a permanent population on Mars, others may differ). For instance, we already know how to maintain people in space for months at a time. We know how to handle ultra-cryogens such as liquid hydrogen; we now use them routinely in rocket boosters and other applications. We don't need to spend money to re-invent these wheels.
What NASA really needs is a mission and a reform of its bureaucratic mentality so that it can pursue it properly. It doesn't need more money, it needs to shed the albatross of the enormously expensive and obsolete Shuttle program so that the money can do something more useful than paying for an army of government contractors.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.