Slashdot Mirror
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."
Then what's this flag in this picture?!
I've never even heard of a European space shuttle. The American one, yes. The old Soviet one (Buran), yes. But European? Hot damn, this is great news!
Background info please? (Other than that Wikipedia article)
(On second thought-- wow, does this mean Zefram Cochrane is going to be the first pilot?)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
They flew the dam thing up in a helicopter and it managed to navigate its way back using GPS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, the only new thing they did was add the word "space" in front of allready existing technology (not that I have anything against that, marketing is very important for success); but I dont think this really deserves front page slashdot treatment.
Then again I could be completely of base.
Note to Mods: When I post mirrors, it's a best guess. I don't know for certain whether or not the site will go down!
Come on Dubya, you can't let those smelly europeans beat us in space travel! on another note, I believe russia actaully had a functioning space shuttle in the 80's, but the scraped it when the cold war ended.
Actually, shuttle Buran, as it was called, was technologically more advanced than contemporary American Space Shuttles. It sported, among other things, remote controlled landings. Shuttle Phoenix seems to go one step further and allow for automatic landings.
There aren't enough stripes on the flag.
The american flag has 13 stripes (one for every state in the origional union) with red at the top and bottom.
It might be some company flag
OK guys now this is getting funny... Since the last attempt in the 80's by the Russians there was no success, neither by Russians nor by Americans to replace the ancient Space Shuttle, still it was used since last year (remember that little 'incident' that happened at that time?). Now the ESA comes up with an alternative to that old scrap metal which is furthermore compatible to the next-generation Ariane-5 and everything I read up to now were negative comments? Start thinking optimistic! Maybe this really is the first step to the next generation of manned space flights, as the Phoenix need much less resources to be taken into orbit as everything before! Only very few tons of things can be transported with one flight into space because even rocket + shuttle alone are much to heavy... so what's the point in being conservative? Trust german engineers, maybe they know what they're doing, without their rockets even the NASA would probably still simulate their Apollo-Missions on earth instead of having a nice little flag up there ^^
And don't forget the classic among people over there: Writing "should of" and "would of" even though it makes no sense at all. How about "would've" and "should've"? (Considering English isn't even my native language, while it is theirs, it's a bit embarassing.) ;)
Yup, that would definitely be a boom for the air data system and angle of attack and sideslip probes. It is a very standard thing to see on flight test vehicles. You need to get that stuff well away from the rest of the aircraft so they are not affected by the flow field around the vehicle. After a bunch of flight testing you figure out how the flow field affects the accuracy of the production air data and angle of attack probes, which are mounted on the vehicle itself. So the production vehicle doesn't need the nose boom. But it is needed until they have enough data to calibrate the production probes.
Clear as mud?
Kevin Horton
Buran is not used because nobody wants it today. Buran was a prototype, and it did its job, the technology was evaluated and seen as too expensive. Rockets are cheaper, and they do the job just fine. However, the technology and materials that went into Buran are still there, available for the next project.
it better be, considering that the F-22 is over twice times as expensive as the Eurofighter is (62 million euros vs. 152 million dollars). And the typhoon can be used in other roles besides airsuperiority. Of course F-22 can be used in other roles as well, but not as well as the Typhoon, which has been designed as multirole-fighter from the start.
So, for less money you get a multirole-fighter that is also the second-best air-superiority-fighter in the world. Not bad at all. Of course you could build the ultimate air-superiority fighter no matter what's the cost. And that's what USA is doing with F-22. Sure it's a kick-ass plane, but at what cost?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Phoenix is one of the upstream projects for the Aurora programme, which is ESAs manned space exploration effort and envisages manned Moon landings in the late '20s and a Mars mission in the '30s.
Clearly if human missions to the Moon and Mars are part of the roadmap 25 years down the line, ESA needs to be working on the orbital stepping stones now and Phoenix is one of those. Its still very early days however and there are no guarantees that the final system will look anything like what was tested in Sweden last week - at the moment various concepts and technologies are being put through their paces, but the final design won't be finalised for three of four years yet.
Personally I'm a little concerned that they seem to be creating a replica of Shuttle - the dimensions of full-scale Phoenix seem awfully close to Shuttle, so presumably this is intended to be a man-rated launcher that can also lift heavy cargo - but ESA is also looking at other concepts such as Hopper, so perhaps they're working towards a more modular fleet of vehicles that can be configured according to mission requirements rather than being stuck with a one-size-fits-all hybrid monster like Shuttle.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h