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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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
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.
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
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.)
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.
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!"
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!"
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.
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.
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.