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.
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.
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
Well, this in a very early state. I can remember that EADS has been planning on a reentry vehicle for years so this will turn into a shuttle sometime, it's a really big company and the project is funded by european governments. This test might not look too spectacular in itself but it shows that they are finally making reallife tests of their concept and probably they were just testing a small part of the shuttles tech. Most of the stuff you need for a shuttle can be tried and approved on the ground I assume. But the landing system should need some testflights and this is what you were seeing.
Now just to estimate the airspeed velocity of an unladen European space shuttle. It's just a simple question of weight ratios.
"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!
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 ^^
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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.
The thing they did that was new was to meet a milestone in the quest to have the first reusable space vehicle of the twenty-first century.
How cool is that?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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!"
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.