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European Space Shuttle Prototype Lands Safely In Sweden
This Nick Is Taken writes "Yahoo! News reports the successful test of a German designed prototype of the European space shuttle, Phoenix , taking place in the north of Sweden, moving the first all European mission into space one step closer."
If you look carefully :
1) the flag is along the pist, not on Phoenix
2) don't recognize it. certainly not US (no blue at the top). Probably just to see the wind.
This isn't the first European spaceplane, back in the 70's/80's/90's we had a project called Hermes running, but there were a lot of re-designs and eventually the project was closed down due to bloat and ever changing requirements.
Check out the Hermes space plane at Astronautix
The flag is attached to pheonix (see this picture), but it isn't the US flag.
Decode these
It's the flag of bremen.
It's the flag of Bremen, a city in north Germany.
(nice place, actually)
8 stripes,red and white, with checkers on the short end closest to the pole.
Some Lower-Saxony patriot probably stuck it on there.
"moving the first all European mission into space one step closer."
Should read as "All European manned mission".
The ESA's been doing space missions for what, over 10 years now? Satellites, probes, etc.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
IIRC (from a magazine article), the Russians built and test flew one flight item, and had two more under construction. The two under construction were disassembled, and the flight item is sitting in a hangar at Baikonour Cosmodrome. The article I read said that the hanger was in very poor condition, and was in risk of a roof collapse that would destroy the one remaining Buran.
/on the roof/ during the callapse, but were uninjured. They probably had to buy new underwear, tho.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/buran.html
Just Googled and found that site, with a timeline of the project. The one Buran that flew unmanned was destroyed in a roof collapse on May 12 2002. Apparently a roof repair team was actually
Actually, ESA has a roadmap and a program already in place for the manned exploration of mars - and did long before it was announced NASA might be going. I applied to a well known UK university to work on the program for my PhD.
You can find out about the Aurora project here.
The good thing with this one is that there is actually a prototype, and I hear ESA will include it in its launch programme. Space.com also says that it will, together with Ariane 5 be part of ESA's manned space programme. I certainly hope so.
As far as I know, there has only been one shuttle project, named Hermes, but that has been abandonned at least 10 years ago.
Wonder where that comes from.
According to the roadmap, ESA wants to land on the moon in 2024 and on mars around 2030. If they're going to pull that off we have to manage manned spaceflight at all, first. I hope the Phoenix will be part of that.
Actually, the Buran was fully automated from launch to landing. From the link you gave: The autopilot that landed the shuttle was able to overcome a 34 mph crosswind to land within 5 feet of the runway center line. Also, of the 38,000 heat shield tiles that covered Buran, only 5 were missing.
While being more technologically advanced, it was also just as expensive as the American shuttle, and the post Soviet government cancelled the project, having decided to upgrade the much cheaper Soyuz capsules. The energia booster flew once more and was also shelved, but only because no buyers could be found who needed that much capacity in a booster.
Its interesting to note that the Russians scrapped Buran because it was too expensive, and focused on upgrading its capsule fleet, and this is almost exactly what Bush announced he was going to fund, a cancellation of shuttle flights and development of a Crew Exploration Vehicle, which will be a bigger and more versatile version of the Apollo capsule type, unknown yet if it is to be reusable.
The reason the shuttle was necessary was because the US military demanded that it have the capability to glide to a precise landing point when on classified missions, and this is one ofthe main reasons that the shuttles budget exploded. Once you remove this feature requirement, the need for a reentry vehicle to have wings is pretty much gone, and a reusable capsule with a disposable cargo pod is a much better solution.
Take a look at other mud piles before you start throwing mud at the EU. unlike a certain modern american figher aircraft (F22), the Eurofighter is actualy being built and is not about to get axed any time soon.
And to my knowledge, it is arguably the most advanced plane in production.
It is still the flag of Bremen, a city and state in the north of Germany, where probably the EADS facility is located which built the prototype.
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Considering they're already 20 years behind our shuttle
And considering our shuttle was obsolete before the Enterprise even had it's test landing, that will mean this thing will be obsolete by 40 years or more when it launches in 11 to 16 years.
Why can't they just work on a 100% completely reusable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Verticle Takeoff and Landing (VTOL)? It could land anywhere that is flat enough and take off again if it still had sufficient fuel. No need for long specialized runways that are longer and more costly than an airport. Hell, with the right setup, you could land it in the Sahara desert. Or even a helicopter pad, assuming the asphalt doesn't melt too much.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Take a looksee at good 'ol Enterprise sometime. That glider demonstration featured a needlenose as well.
Presumably it was for measuring air speeds, etc, or at least gave the test pilot a reference point for lining up the runway (since the nose drops off a touch from the cockpit windows, you need a solid reference point to guide yourself in by).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
The Swedish fighter aircraft JAS 39 Gripen is currently the world's most advanced system. It's the world's first fourth-generation swing-role fighter and is operational in a number of countries also within Nato.
Totally offtopic, but when it comes to mythology I just can't help it.
The phoenix bird did not burst into flames. It was a bird which was considered immortal. As its end approached, it set fire to its nest, was consumed by the flames and was reborn from the ashes.
There are Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Egyptian, and Native American versions of the phoenix bird
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
Apparently, it's the flag of Bremen the area of Germany where the design team is based.
Also the Eurofighter is the first multirole combat aircraft designed with Supercruise in mind, although the F22 had it back ported on when they upgraded the engine specification, and will be the first aircraft in active duty with it. Its also the first fighter aircraft to be able to use the targeting computer of its wingman aircraft to select, paint and shoot at targets. It may be several years overdue, but they kept tacking on extras like the project was never going to end.
They cancelled the F22? Man, somebody needs to tell the people at the AFB near my house since they are eagerly awaiting the first shipment to replace some of their F-15's
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
The USAF was sort of conned into using the Shuttle as a rationale to get it funded. President Nixon could not get Congress to pass a purely civilian shuttle,and the USAF didn't really want the shuttle as rockets were doing a fine job. But in order to get a few other things the USAF wanted they agreed to try to use the Shuttle as part of the spy sattelite program. Now of course since they were now paying part of the tab they had unique requirements that had to be imposed on the shuttle designs, which of course added complexity and cost. The orignal shuttle did not have a lot of things like crosswind requirements, higher payload weight requirements or polar orbit requirements (those launches were to be from the West coast site at Vandenburg) etc. that were added by the USAF. This is all detailed in the Columbia Accident Report if anyone cares to read it. I have and was part of the team that complied a report on what changes the report should cause at a major NASA Center. The Shuttle program is full of politics and the associated compromises that overcame good engineering. I strongly suspect the EU version will eventually suffer the same problems. Buran was ditched as too expensive which was partly due to the fact that the Russians did not have the computing capability to make it 100% automated to orbit and back. There was a massive difference in costs between an unmanned fly-by-wire prototype and a man-rate re-usable launch vehicle. Hindsight being 20/20 the US Shuttle program should have been scrapped too, and I hope it is soon. The Return to orbit proejct is not going to fix the inherent systems problems of a 30 yr old space plane. Something else will go wrong and we'll lose another crew.
My boss used to work on Lockheed's end of the X-33 development process. He told me that SSTO is pretty much a pipe dream at this point because of difficulties in maintaining such large fuel tanks for launch and reentry. Any fuel tank will have several hundred pounds of residual propellant that have to be dealt with. The propellant will cyclically boil and condense inside the tank during orbits, inducing thermal stresses on the tank as well as constantly varying its pressure; same with any residual heat from reentry. Maintaining control over such issues is difficult. Extra insulation, for example, creates a weight penalty that could be more usefully put toward payload.
I see a lot of people on here complaining that the shuttle is inefficient because it takes up extra equipment (in the form of flight control surfaces) that it doesn't need for the majority of the flight. The same logic follows with fuel tanks for a SSTO scheme. This is why anymore, most follow-on vehicle schemes require at least two stages to reach orbit.
"unlike a certain modern american figher aircraft (F22), the Eurofighter is actualy being built and is not about to get axed any time soon."
"The first test flight of the Raptor occurred on September 7, 1997. The first production F/A-22 was delivered to the Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, on January 14, 2003."
So, it appears that the F-22 has been in production for over a year.
Moreover, Britin's DERA conducted a study using simulators which found the F/A-22 Raptor to be twice as effective at shooting down Sukhoi Su-35's as the Typhoon.
It also gives the size and range in a more universally palpable fashion:
* Well, that should be 6000 million sq. ft, but they probably should've said 2000 square miles.
Check out: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/europe_phoeni x_020621.html
Quote:
As a miniature RLV, Phoenix is to prove out technologies needed for Europe's HOPPER - a much larger autonomous space transportation system.
HOPPER would be launched horizontally on a skid sled running on miles of track. Plans call for HOPPER to be launched from the European Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.
The unpiloted HOPPER is designed to carry payloads up to 7.5 tons, deploying spacecraft affixed to an upper stage booster from its tail at over 80 miles (130 kilometers) altitude. The RLV then automatically returns to Earth.
According to Astrium, should the European Space Agency decide to pursue the HOPPER concept, the vehicle could be ready for use by the year 2015.
"on a test runway north of Stockholm". :-)
Yeah, 770 MILES north of Stockholm
This is being done by a division of EADS and is funded by sources from the German government. The concept is very similar to that of the Sanger Silverbird from WW2 IMO. I mean, it is rail launched HTHL and the vehicle is meant to skip in the atmosphere. Hence the name Hopper I guess. The Germans have been fascinated with similar winged RLVs for quite some time.
Anyway, the French are working on their own RLV as well. The designs I have seen are of a VTHL TSTO, some are biamese, others not quite, but both stages are supposed to fly back to an airstrip. Design work on reusable engines is being done now between the French and the Russians. Search for information about Volga rocket engine.
Things are still in a state of flux. Depending on how the respective demonstrator vehicles prove themselves, political will and financial resources, either the Hopper, some other TSTO RLV or even a simpler TSTO VTVL with a reusable 1st stage could win. Or several of these. Or the whole thing could go sour, the experimental vehicles are abject failures for e.g., and an Ariane 5 derived expendable could be *the* vehicle selected for 2020.
Time will tell.
Here is a good article about Phoenix and Hopper.