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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."
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
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!
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.
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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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
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.