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."

Comments

Whoa! Where did this come from?

[JessLeah]

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?)

Re:Whoa! Where did this come from?

[WegianWarrior]

How about the german WW2 era Saenger-Bredt antipodal bomber, that where the inspiration for pretty much every winged spacecraft that has been developed, planned and / or built? While the Wikipedia don't have much on the Silverbird, it has an article on Saenger himself. And as allways, Google is your friend in finding more.

Interesting fact; Saenger seems to have been the first to suggest the use of a regeneratively cooled engine, in which the nozzle are cooled with eitehr fuel or oxidizer which are then introdused to the burner itself.

not that impresive

[mirror_dude]

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.

Re:Quick NASA needs more funding

[Inigo Soto]

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.

Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ^^

Re:Ugh @ the photo

[rv8]

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?