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."
This prototype space shuttle (named Phoenix), is expected to replace the current shuttles in use in two years time.
*time passes*
The prototype space shuttle expected to replace the current fleet owned by ESA will no longer be realeased under the name Phoenix, but instead will be released under the name Firebird. The recent name change was due to another project already underway by the Russian Space Agency. Both decided the name change would be best to avoid confusion between the two projects.
*time passes*
ESA's new prototype shuttle was again recently re-dubbed Firefox (formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix) to avoid confusion with a NASA program that had started up some months earlier...
*time passes*
ESA's prototype shuttle program is being braced for yet another name change. This time a Linux web browser project made claim to the name Firefox. The development team for the new shuttle is beginning to wonder weather a name for the project is nessesary.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
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!
"... but project managers concede a full-size version won't be ready for more than a decade."
Considering they're already 20 years behind our shuttle,
why copy from our old tech? Personally, I'd think they'd be better to look at Burt Rutans X-prize project and asking themselves if their old school Arian/Shuttle vehicle approach is really the right way to go, especially if it's going to be a 30 year old solution by the time it launches (if ever).
Seems to me the ESA is missing a great opportunity to innovate and relying on "tried and proven" rather than pushing the envelope of space exploration.
I dunno if this is so much as a prototype as a test bed or demonstrator...I mean, if it was a prototype it would be something near the real thing...and this certainly isn't anywhere near their final product. Good that somebody's aiming high though...
Yes, the Buran. Afaik, it only flew once, by remote control, to simply prove they could do it. After that, they just didn't have the money to keep it going.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
"...of a German designed prototype of the European space shuttle, Phoenix"
Ooo neat! How long before warp drive is tested?
"Derp de derp."
Get that flag off it now..... what is with the red and white stripes I thought that it was EU?
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.
Holy f**k, we have a space shuttle (well ok program).
:)
When the fluff did that happen
Tomorrow I'll be waking up & finding out we are on Mars!
Anybody see the photo of that thing? Check out the needle on the front of it. Does it land like a lawn dart?
"Derp de derp."
Call me a sceptic but...
The Phoenix will probably never happen.
Remember the Eurofighter plane that was supposed to be the most advanced plane ever but is now...how shall I put this...kind of old?
By the time the phoenix gets near to completion it will be cancelled due to lack of interest and funding.
sig not found. please replace sig.
and i thought the first all european space program was the russian space program....
"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
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.
Talk to me when Nasa gets a shuttle back from an orbital flight (in one piece).
They've gotten over a hundred back, as far as I recall.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
From the article:
The next step likely will be to drop the prototype from higher altitudes, with the help of a high-altitude balloon
And the next step after that should be to send one of those Opportunity rovers to explore the surface of Sweden and see if they can find any water
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
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.
Is it really a good idea to name your new Space Shuttle after a Mythical Bird which is well know for bursting into flame?
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
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
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.
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 ^^
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Looks like my post didn't attach to the correct parent. I didn't know who's flag it was, but I knew it wasn't the USA one that had been stated.
There are still countries in the EU with good relations to the USA. Seems like your intense attempts at alienating the entire world hasn't worked to 100% yet. But who cares about facts, right? Also, why do you think we're trying to be like the US, just by trying to achieve manned space flight? As I recall, the Soviet Union were the first once to accomplish this. Were you trying to be like them? By your creative logic, apparently. Why not be happy about more space agencies trying to develop shuttles? Why are you so angry? It makes absolutely no sense. It's not like we're a threat or anything (unlike some people, we don't aim to be a threat.)
Unless this thing can leave Earth orbit, what's the point? I don't wanna turn 33 and hear about the newest space technology that will now allow us to fly circles around the Earth.
Don't worry, us Europeans will probably never master beginning a sentence with lower-case letters. That's an intellectual achievement that you folks will still be able to be proud of a hundred years from now.
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.
They've gotten over a hundred back, as far as I recall.
I could have sworn we only had five to begin with. Columbia, Discovery, Challenger, Atlantis, Endeavour and (if you count it) the Prototype Enterprise. Seeing as how we only had five to begin with (now three, unfortunataley) how could be have gotten over a hundred back?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I could have sworn we only had five to begin with. Columbia, Discovery, Challenger, Atlantis, Endeavour and (if you count it) the Prototype Enterprise. Seeing as how we only had five to begin with (now three, unfortunataley) how could be have gotten over a hundred back?
Becuase they each flew more than once is why.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Since Russia is not entirely located in Europe, but also in Asia, the Russian space program was euro-asian.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
What are the mods smoking? How is my parent post a troll, or flamebait?
/. story about any technological advance outside the US always seems to bring out -- and didn't bother to read the rest of the post carefully.
;)
I was wondering that myself. My best guess is that they read the first sentence and assumed it was anti-European trash-talking -- you know, the stereotypical (and unfortunately, all too common) Ugly American "Europe can't do anything right U5 0wNz0Rz j00 if it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German" crap that any
Next time I have mod points I'll mod you up.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
all this is, is the european union trying to say "hey look america! we can be like you too!"
Yeah, it does remind me of the USA space program which so clearly said "hey look Russia! we can be like you too!"
...it's only a model.
One-sixth scale.
It has to burn before it can rise from the ashes.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
But when the hell did Bill Gates get a job at ESA? :-)
As much as everyone likes to dis the US shuttle as being expensive, it's the most affordable reusable VTHL SSTO vehicle in the world. Obviously it's also the ONLY such vehicle, but IMHO that's a bad side-effect of Star Trek and Star Wars, where we begin to think the task of getting into orbit is *easy* and any unfettered entrepreneur could do it, and it's obviously NASA's jealousy stopping them through regulatory means.
Ain't so. Getting into orbit is HARD. From a kinetic energy standpoint, it's 25X harder than the X-Prize, which probably will finally get awarded this year. That 25X is over an order of magnitude, and by the time you take compounding difficulties, it's probably more like 2 orders of magnitude harder than the X-Prize.
After all, this IS rocket science.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We figured this out in the 60's.
Begun in Germany and currently under development in Europe by EADS the Phoenix will be, together with the Ariane 5, the European vehicle for space conquest."
Space conquest? Germany?
Erm, hello?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The primary aim of the test was to assess the glider potential of the craft. The final version of the vehicle must be able to glide from an altitude of 80000000000000 miles.
Is it just me, or does 80 trillion miles seem to be a bit far to be termed 'gliding'. As well, when you're that far away I don't believe you're talking about 'altitude' any longer either. I mean, Pluto is only 3.6 Billion miles away, I guess gliding from a distance of 20,000 times further than pluto for a landing on earth's surface isn't too much to ask.
This is not a sig.
One of the more contriversial aspects of the US space shuttle is if there's really a proper justification for the manned spaceflight that it provides. (Very expensive, arguably most of what it does could be done without people, etc.)
I guess one of the differences is that NASA already has a lot of sunk costs in it's space shuttle programme. Whether it makes economic sense or not, part of the reason that NASA maintains it's manned space programme is probably because it already has one and doesn't want to lose it.
The ESA doesn't have one at the moment, which (to me) makes it very interesting that they're trying to start one. Is there a big economic justification that the ESA has for putting people in space?
Or alternatively, is it for the same contriversial and possibly political reasons that the US keeps people there? I'm not trying to imply that it's good or bad to have people in space, but I'm curious if it for some reason makes a lot of economic sense for the ESA to have a manned space programme moreso than NASA.
Can anyone comment?
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.
They're aiming to build something safe and modern, buying from a backward country like US is not an option.
Both the US and Soviet space programmes were bootstrapped on rocket science captured from Nazi Germany after WW2. German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun became one of the pioneers of the US space programme.
One could say that rocketry was a pan-European endeavour, having been developed in Germany and tested in England.
AFAIK, Gripen has a better track record than most fighters. However, irony had it that when it, for once, failed, it was near large crowds of people. Not very good PR. :-P
Hasn't the idea of a space plane type shuttle been proven/assessed as an inefficient way to handle payloads compared to just a rocket and a capsule
style re-entry module?
Just wondering...
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.
Nothing about this on French radio this morning or yesterday night.
It's a shame to have to surf on American sites to discover that the space program of my continent is not stalled or limited to Ariane and a few probes to Mars.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
You'd think that ONE pair of airplanes dumped in your faces would be sufficient to point out that this insular mindset makes America rather unloved by the rest of humanity. Get over it, you're humans, just like the rest of us. (only slightly heavier and less adept at mastering your own language.)
Thought you knew!
The ESA is developing the Intergalactique Conquistador class battle cruiser!!!
No place in the galaxy will be safe from Le Crux de Hegemonique European!
Now where are the keys to my Precursor vessel?
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.
Yeah, the last one is what counts
So hurry up and get the remaining shuttles flying again, they're needed for now at least!
"on a test runway north of Stockholm". :-)
Yeah, 770 MILES north of Stockholm
I disagree,
...
We don't have the same political BS u have to put up with. it may not be as capable as NASA's space shuttle in that it's quite small and could carry limited payload, but actually, its probably a good bet that satellites payload will continue to shrink.. I suspect its primary use will be as a stepping stone to manned space missions..
I like to think of it as something akin to the X project - only more serious and professional. I should be a versatiile craft at just 7 metres ( whats that - about 10 feet in your language). It seems to look pretty sleek and should not be rigged with big cimbersome computer tech. like the shuttle thanks to great advances in (primarily) American semiconductor technology
Based on 1970s technology and is almost stone age
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
as i posted earlier, ISRO is currently working on the same kind of space-craft.
Seems the slashdotters think a rocket-launch is the wrong approach. They might or might not be onto something.
How about having a huge, high-flying airplane carry the space shuttle as far up into the atmosphere as possible, and have the space shuttle do the rest for itself with its built-in propulsion?
Stop the brainwash
I chose your post for a reply, because though cheapest flamebait, it shows so neatly that you're no better than the Europeans when it comes to stupid stereotyping.
Let's begin by saying that virtually all you stated is downright bogus.
all this is, is the european union trying to say "hey look america! we can be like you too!"
No. All this is, is you showing off an incredibly narrow, US-centric view and naive extrapolation from your own motives. Try and find any European who seriously thinks like that. Believe it or not, we occasionally do things without looking overseas what the US did.
in all honesty, it is, they unite together to make their economy like the US', they try to make copyright laws like the US, and now they're trying to make us feel less superior by making a space program that will prolly never reach orbit.
Uniting economies is downright necessary in a world of global markets (and YES, there are others beside the US, and no small ones too!) and a natural process atop. Why this is anywhere 'like the US' remains your mystery. Copyright laws, well you certainly didn't bother to look at facts and details, probably because it would exceed your capacity. The biggest stunt however is this 'trying to make us feel less superior'. That is very ridiculous. Stupid EU, how dare we make even small technological steps? Can't we see how poor USA will feel slightly less superior! We really have to drop that at once. Would you feel OK if we deliberately went back to stone age, hm?
honestly, as much as europe hates the US, they sure like to become like us in a lot of ways.
Yeah, we all hate you 24/7. European life is all about hating the US.
Maybe the poster meant "first manned all-European mission"?
Congratulations Europe! Best of luck! Be careful of letting French guys on board, they may surrender the space craft to someone.
mod parent down
The key shown on the tail of the shuttle is also a symbol that has been associated with the city of Bremen since the Middle Ages.
Once upon a time, the USA managed to get to the moon in less than a decade. Less than 30 years from the flight of the first large liquid-fueled rocket, that was.
So why have we reached the point where a new vehicle takes in excess of a decade to develop? Are we (not just the US, everyone) getting too timid to take a chance on something that isn't a sure thing?
If so, that's just sad....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I was not aware that the EU didn't have political BS...
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
The German jets were so experimental that they could barely stay in the air in the first place. They didn't require a crop duster buzzing around to help them crash. :)