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Soyuz To The Moon?
colonist writes "The Americans won the first race, but the Russians might beat them back to the moon. The reliable Soyuz, currently the only means of transport to the International Space Station, may send tourists on a voyage around the moon (gallery of illustrations). Constellation Services International's plans call for the Soyuz spacecraft to dock with a logistics module and an upper stage. The upper stage fires to send the Soyuz on a free-return circumlunar trajectory."
...so long as it helps fund their space program. The more the merrier.
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The illustrations in the gallery show the side of the moon away from the sun fading from light through gray to dark. This won't happen on an atmosphere-less body like the moon. There will be a sharp cutoff from bright to dark.
Any point on the moon's surface can either see the sun, or not. There's no atmosphere to provide a gradient.
if i had the money... i'd do it in a heart beat... talk about ridiculously cool. what besides going to Mars (which won't happen for 20 more years atleast) would top it?
some people spend ten - twenty years training and going to school for just the chance to go to space.
fuck buying a big ass yacht or a stupid jet, you can fky to the goddammn moon!
I'd be concerned about radiation doses... I would imagine the Soyuz is only shielded for flight being more-or-less within Earth's magneosphere, but the moon is another story.
:-)
How many chest x-rays in a moon trip?
--Rob
The Soviets planned on launching a Soyuz atop a Proton launcher (currently used as a heavy cargo launcher, roughly equivalent payload to the Space Shuttle) to put a Soyuz into a free-return trajectory around the moon.
The Proton was soviet man-rated in the 1960s, and the design has been extraordinarily succesful over the past 30+ years, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that this process could be completed again.
The economical way to do this would probably be to man-rate it as part of a commercial launch. It wouldn't be free, but it would certainly be cheaper then developing a new heavy lift rocket or buying Titan IVB, the only other rocket in use with equivalent throw. Of course, this is complicated by the Titan IVB assembly line shut down, so you'd probably want to look at the EELV, but that's not flying yet.
The Soyuz is built for the high-g reentry that a lunar return entails, they just need to pull their old heatshield design out of mothballs and modernize it.
Finally someone has the balls to stop crying about a few lost astronauts and get off their ass and get back to work.
Not to discredit or disrespect the dead but Jesus Christ, get on with it!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If a trip into orbit costs hundreds of millions for space tourists, I imagine that a trip around the moon would cost billions. I might be nieve but for an individual to spend that amount of money on a tourist trip is obscene with the amount of world povery. We all bitch about Bill Gates and his amount of money but at least he uses his billions for some good via the Gates foundation.
You're missing the point, there was no "Race to the moon", that was merely an invented fiction to make the US public feel good about themselves.
The Russians at one point considered proposing to JFK that they share resources with the Americans regarding a moonshot to help spread the expenses a bit, this obviously failed when JFK got the bullet. The Soviets didn't want to send a manned mission to the moon, it was too much expense for far too little return, they were content to let the US go there and plant a silly little flag instead. The Soviets were smarter than that, they spent their money on multiple unmanned missions to the moon, to mars, to Venus etc..(they had rovers on the moon in the 60's remember) and got back reams more hard data than they would have if they'd blown it all on mega expensive PR stunts like the moon landings. make no mistake, the USA made a huge technological achievment with the landings and I think they were fantastic acomplishments but you have to remember, it was a one horse race, no matter what FOX tells you, the Soviets had better things to do so they didn't even bother trying.
Winning is such a relitive term. You are correct in that the only real American victory in the space race was the first man on the moon. However, all that matters is that the entire world saw men wearing American flags walking on the moon. This was more than enough to give the world the perception that America was the stronger country. In the end, thats all that really mattered about the space 'race'.
You know that things are really going to hell (facing possible improvement? * ) at slashdot when complaints about the service get modded UP - and consistently!
ruh roh, raggy LOL
SB
* maybe we need a permanent slashdot bitch forum, with moderation, and I'm NOT talking about email or IRC.
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I'm tired of them.
But then again I'm not a subscriber, so it's not like slashdot owes me anything.
In fact, quite the opposite.
Still:
Worst... Slashdot week... ever!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The main reason for actually sending people to the moon was political: to fulfil Kennedy's "vision". Unless, of course, you want to admit that American engineering was so backward that you had to send a person to do a probe's job.
... Or even India. Because, to be blunt, those countries can handle the loss of life much better than the Americans. Every setback we have shuts down the our missions for years... Can you really see Russia or China doing the same if a manned spacecraft came to some sort of tragedy?
Hell, the Russians had the stomach to abandon a dog in space. No way Americans would've stood for that.
US citizens thinks they are better than the rest of the world.
USA creates fear in the world, starting wars only for their interests with a stupid monkey-like-guy with the powers.
USA are conivent with cheat like M$ only because make money with then.
USA are trying to put the bulshit of patents in Europe now because they are patenting everything before everyone.
USA thinks that only they can have biologic weapons, only they can have the nuclear tecnolhogy with argments such as "you are doing nuclear research to made nuclear weapons, only we can do that" when a country is only trying to make eletricity to suply their people and grow to an aceptable life-level.
The comercial fly is a nice thing, but USA can't see with good eyes because they think they are superior and they whant to be ahead in every comercial model.
Stupid US citizens, you make the world a piece of cheat, ___every US citizens___ are guilt with the modern model of fear, destruction, dictatoriarism(YOU ARE NOT A FREEDOM COUNTRY), war, intelectual-repression and every other bulshit.
You can say this is a flame, but you can't say that is not true!
If you consider other exploration groups that have been put forward by Americans, I think you are greatly mistaken. The opening up of the American West was filled with thousands of deaths, including little children that happened to be in the wrong place, like under a wagon axle or in the front of a stampeding herd of buffalo.
The problem with NASA is it isn't being done the American way. The future of the American space program/space industry will be with groups like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites, not with "government" run projects like NASA. Americans can stomache deaths and accidents (look at the deaths of people who do base jumping in the USA). The problem is that it is very difficult to convince American taxpayers to foot the bill to allow people to do that kind of silly stuff.
This is not to say that I think that India or China isn't welcome in space... far from it. Indeed, I see an Indian presence in space to be much more like the new American approach over time, if for nothing else than the fact that it will be the only way that India can afford a space program.
China will be more like the traditional government run programs, but China has a tendancy of being even more cautious than the USA for doing things of that nature. This is not because they value life more or less, but the Chinese government will not want to appear to be a failure and it will affect the Chinese political heirarchy harder when failures do occur.
BTW, the Americans used chimpanzees instead of dogs for the early spaceflights, precisely because they felt that the American people could stomache losing a chimp. Also, by using a chimp they could "test" response situations more accurately than could be done with a dog. If you want to see what Americans will support with tax dollars, just go to any animal shelter to see what is done when they get overcrowded. One method of euthenasia is death by suffication in a vacuum, no different than leaving a dog in space. Yes, I do know other methods are used like injection of lethal substances.
*sigh* No. You sound like the Apollo-fakers that try to pin all sorts of claimed "oddities" in the moon photos on the lack of atmosphere. Ever notice that here on Earth that shadows from the sun don't have a penumbra either? (at least, not big enough to notice)
Go read up on "soft shadows" in any CG text. Soft shadows, or penumbras, are not due to atmosphere. Soft shadows are due to the light source being an area and that some points on a surface only "see" part of the light. These areas form a gradient on the surface from fully-lit to full-shadow.
Presumebly you are referring to picture 6? That fade-off doesn't even have anything to do with soft shadows. That's simple diffuse lighting. As the surface turns away from the light source, it emits less light.
It would be nice if the site admins posted some kind of explanation of why it's happening.
First men around the moon, first men *on* the moon: America (Apollos 8 and 11) - if anyone thinks that wasn't a win, you don't know what you are talking about - the Soviets simply couldn't match our determination and engineering)
Of course we could, a year or two later. But coming there second was pointless in a purely political contest.
And as much as I admire american achievements in space, I don't think your supercilious tone is proper. It's not like Gagarin got up there by pushing a cart.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Few politicians look to the long term. In the long term, they are out of office. Sink money from today's unpopular taxes into something that will pay off for someone else? No thanks!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
My apologies, I was indeed talking about Skylab the spacestation. Don't know how I got Spacelab in there.
But my point remains. you are just arbitaruly changing the definition of "spacestation" so that Salyut would not qualify whereas Skylab would. Couldn't I then just as well say "Mir was alot more than what Skylab was, therefore Mir was the first spacestation."?
Again: Why is Skylab a spacestation whereas Salyut is not? If it's "Salyut wasn't inhabited long enough!", then I have to ask: how long do you have to live there in order for the construction to qualify as a "spacestation"? If it's "It's just a capsule!". Well, where is the line between a capsule and a spacestation? Of course Salyut was less than impressive then compared to those which came after it. Hell, the first satellites in orbit were nothing more than beebing soccer-balls when compared to modern-day satellites, but they were still satellites nonetheless. By same logic: Skylab was more advanced than Saluyt was. But that doesn't change the fact that Salyut was a spacestation.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.