Slashdot Mirror
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."
The article says that they'll be charging an "unspecified fee." I'm curious how much that will be. Also, I wonder whether they'll have trouble with liability/insurance issues.
Maybe this will kickstart a new space race to the moon. Of course, they said the same thing when when the Chinese talked about a moonshot as well (though I havn't heard anything sense). Perhaps the Russians will force a new market on space travel, and (hopefully) it'll get cheap enough in the future to be affordable. After all, who hasn't dreamed of going to the moon at some point?
I'll post as a logged in subscriber, I'm not going to renew the subscription after the 503s....
Watch the karma burn!
Being 25 now I've been thinking what I consider likely things that I'll get the opportunity to do in life and i'm semi-sure that space tourism (in orbit) becoming affordable within my lifetime is likely and possibly trips to the moon as well. I'm not that sure about Mars - if a manned mission is likely within 25 years, a huge leap in technology might make it possible for the masses within 50. - I remember reading a (funny) prediction how Mars will be the favorite resort for senior citizens in 2050 because the lower gravity will be so much more pleasant. Who knows!
Before the site /.'s
Unlike one-man Vostok spacecraft, the three-seat Soyuz would be able to conduct active maneuvering, orbital rendezvous and docking. These features were all necessary for a flight around the Moon and for lunar expedition itself. In the early scenario of "circumlunar" flight, the Soyuz would be actually a three-part spacecraft assembled in the low-Earth orbit from elements launched onboard individual launch vehicles. This plan was later abandoned in favor of two-launch and later one-launch scenario.I couldn't think of a sig.
I love the idea of recycling the Progress crafts by sending them to the L1 point and docking them together there in order to form a supply-silo instead of letting them disintegrate in the atmosphere.
Which brings up a question that has been bugging me for ages: why isn't this done with other spacecraft?
e.g. I guess the spaceshuttle's main tank (the big brown thing) is designed to resist immense pressures, and is mainly hollow after the fuel as been burned. why not fill it up with air, water or whatever (after cleaning), and use it as some form of emergency spacestation? or at least as a scrapyard in space?
Of course there would be problems like the delta-v to escape velocity, etc. but with those immense costs of getting stuff into space, i'd suppose i'd still pay off, and it might spark of a "dirtier" kind of space-industry, (now that we are at the verge of being able to go to space completly privately), where companies recycle stuff in space for whatever...
Thankfully the Soviets got Sputnik up there, though, huh? Otherwise, no Internet for us!
As anyone who works/lives in a tourist area knows, tourism isn't the same as the real thing.
I hope with every fiber of my being that space tourism will ignite a new interest in space exploration, but it's more likely to fuel a new interest in space 'development'. There's a big difference.
What we need are leaders and entrepreneurs who are interested in exploring space for its own sake...just because it is there.
I would love to be an astronaut, but who wants to be a tour guide?
~j
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yeah, we'll be helping them fund their program - again. Um, somewhat "unofficially". Not a bad thing, mind you.
Not to disparage the Sovs, they have their own problems. But the irony, both ways, is getting pretty thick at this point, and I'm not just talking about the cold war, either.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The first race to the moon:
The sentence is clearly referring particularly to the effort to send a manned mission to the moon, since it is predicated on the thing that the Americans did first.
It's interesting to note that the US also nearly lost the race to be the first to circle the moon, as revealed here. Evidence suggests that the Soviets tried to beat Apollo 8 by mere days by launching a mission profile similar to this current tourist scheme. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the new Proton booster required to launch the unmanned half of the mission was still problem-prone at that time:
This is basically the whole story of the "space race". The Soviets were first with everything that they could achieve with their outstanding R-7 booster (which was used to launch Sputnik, and evolved into the Soyuz booster still in use today). However, they had problems scaling past that in either size or complexity, and the Americans were first to do most things outside of low earth orbit (with the exception of their moon probes and their way-cool Venus landers).
Pointing out that the US is not always the shit is a no brainer. Super powers tend to fuck up because they are run by humans. Until we get rid of pesky humans, you can expect the US (and all other nations for that matter) to fuck it up and do bad things. Because the US is that last remaining super power, you can expect that when the US fucks up, it fucks up big.
All of that said, the world is better off because of the existence of the US. People accuse Americans of having a short memory, but that seems to be a human condition, not just an American condition.
If you recall 60 or so years ago there was World War II. Now it can be easily argued that the US stirred the pot for that war in its own way, though, if you are talking about Germany (Japan being a much different story), you can place the blame pretty squarely on Europe, and give the US credit for trying to prevent World War II. The US was one of the few countries not to demand 'reparation' payments from Germany over World War I, and in fact the US even made an attempt to pay off some of Germany's debt. A large hunk of the rest of the world did not take this approach and led Germany to complete and utter economic ruin, giving rise to fascism.
We could talk a long time about World War II, but I think it can be summed up by saying that Russia would have fallen without a second front, and the second front would not have existed unless the US hadn't pumped resources to those brave Brits and eventually joined the fight themselves.
On to the an interesting piece of history, the Cold War. First, the US saved West Berlin. Without the massive airlift effort in the face of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin would have had the option of starving to death or surrendering to the Soviets. Zooming back a little further, it should be realized that the US spent the entire Cold War acting in the defense of democracy. It is naïve to think that the rest of Europe could have held back the Soviet Union on its own. Hell, half of Europe was already taken, and you can be certain they at least wanted the rest of Germany.
The US spent countless trillions of dollars fighting the Soviet Union on every front. I don't think people understand what a large fraction of the US productivity and wealth was sacrificed in the Cold War simply to hold the Soviet Union back. That doesn't even begin to touch on the thousands of lives that were given up in places like Korea and Vietnam to fight them directly with guns and bullets. The world IS a better place because South Korea is not the festering pit of despair that North Korea is. The world IS a better place because West German remained free of Soviet oppression.
The US fought the Soviets with a level of fanaticism that makes your average terrorist look mild mannered. The US had a finger leveled over the button to wipe out both the USSR and the US if it came down to that. The US was fully prepared to wipe itself out if that was the only way to hold the Soviets back. During the Cuban missile crisis, many Americans expected the end of the world. That moment where Kennedy brought the US to near nuclear oblivion over a stupid symbolic stand against the Soviets is revered in American history and made Kennedy a hero. Threatening to utterly wipe out the Soviet Union, and thus commit to having the Soviet Union wipe out the US is one of the prouder moments in American history.
Love or hate it, the US has been fanatical for democracy and freedom since World War II. They have been fanatical enough to wipe themselves off the face of the earth in nuclear oblivion if it meant protecting the rest of the world from the Soviet Union. In that fanaticism more then a few horrible mistakes were made. The US has help more then its fair share of lesser evils to keep the greater evil at bay. Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden come to mind as people the US backed simply because they looked to be the lesser of two evils at the time. To say the US has never made a mistake would be silly. The
The russian soyuz seemes more reliable and much more cheaper than the american space shuttle. USA won the space race to the moon, but I guess that in the end the Russians won in terms of safe and cheap access to space.
Each shuttle has a flight cost in the order of 500 million dollars (source) and each soyuz launch has a cost of 20-25 million dollars (cant find a source, however the spacetourists that paid 20 million dollars paid covered the launch costs IRC). So when the soyuz is 25 times cheaper than the space shuttle (ok, if you want to launch humans and payload, you need 2 soyuz launches, but its still cheaper) - why dont Nasa simply buy human/payload launch services from the russian agency, that would be much cheaper for Nasa.
Indeed, Soyuz would have been the Soviets' moon spacecraft, if things had gone a little differently. What worries me is this:
Soyuz has gone into Earth orbit a bazillion times and has had two lethal failures, both in the early days of the programme. As a space tourist, I'd accept those odds. But Soyuz has never been to the Moon, except IIRC as an unmanned Zond test flight... Apollo went nine times, one of which was very, very nearly a lethal failure. I'm not so sure of those odds, especially since an Apollo XIII failure would be very, very likely to become lethal due to the presence of an incompetent, untrained and panicking tourist in the capsule!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The Soviets were first with everything that they could achieve with their outstanding R-7 booster (which was used to launch Sputnik, and evolved into the Soyuz booster still in use today). However, they had problems scaling past that in either size or complexity, and the Americans were first to do most things outside of low earth orbit
The real problem was that Korolev, the Soviet chief designer has died in 1966, and his exceptional skills and willpower that drove the early Soviet space program were gone.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
I've recently finished reading "Last Man on the Moon", which is an autobiographical account of Gene's life.
Gene, in my mind, is perhaps the best astronaut the US ever had. He made the hardest spacewalk in US history on Gemini 9, flew (and nearly landed) on the moon on Apollo 10, and was the last man to walk on the moon when he commanded Apollo 17.
In his book, he points out that the Russians did land (Luna 9 in 1966) on the moon before the US, and up to Apollo 8 (the first Apollo to fly around the moon, included Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 fame) there were serious fears that the USSR would land a manned mission to the moon first.
-Markvs
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."