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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."
first post before a 503
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
Wouldn't they have to get there in the first place to go "back"?
...so long as it helps fund their space program. The more the merrier.
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my first slashism:
in soviet russia, the moon circumnavigates you!
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 you didn't get it, google for "the honeymooners" and "to the moon".
Classic stuff
Loan me 20 mio. $ I wanna go.
Abouth a month back in some German tv channel, there was a report about this.
A bit pricey if you ask me...
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
I'll post as a logged in subscriber, I'm not going to renew the subscription after the 503s....
Watch the karma burn!
According to the artcile, they're sort of recycling Soyuz that is already launched and attached to the ISS. They just launch additional modules (and passengers) up later.
At first I thought they're launching a Soyuz directly towards the moon and cleverly navigates its way around the moon (to see the dark side too), and back to earth.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
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!
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!
Oh great, Tourists in Space.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You:
Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo in... National Lampoon's Lunar Vacation!!
"Look kids! It's the Sea of Tranquility!"
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
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.
If it wasn't economical to fund the Russian ships(now the only resupply to ISS), this would not be happening. I'm the type to see the unintended consequences, but if this makes money for the Russians, it might be a good thing. As for exploration of space, I think we are already there-BUT! we lost a shuttle and crew due to old systems breaking down. I think it is time to upgrade the shuttle fleet. Years ago NASA spoke of a tile repair kit, and a 'space rescue ball'. (National Geographic had those, too lazy to look up) I think WE should be doing better, not letting the Russians paste us into a corner. And I will give Soyuz program Kudos.
Anyone else want to take a poke at NASA? Are they even fogging a mirror, letting the Hubble, the most successful program they ever had, croak.
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
The Americans won the first race
Which first race?
Do you mean: (from Wikipedia's space race page)
The first artificial satellite?
The first animal in space?
The first fly by moon?
The first spacecraft on moon?
The first human in space?
They were the earliest space achievements - and all 'won' by the USSR.
The American's won the race to get the first man on the moon - no more, no less.
America did not win the space race.
America did not win the 'first' race.
My pics.
...for the ISS astronauts. Seeing people return to the moon should have a profound effect, since it hasn't been done in so long.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Bring Back our Flag...
And you've won. I'll be waiting.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
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.
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...
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.
Thankfully the Soviets got Sputnik up there, though, huh? Otherwise, no Internet for us!
In Soviet Russia,...uh, what were we talking about again?
"The Americans won the first race"
First satellite in space: USSR Sputnik
First Dog in space: USSR Laika
First Man in space: USSR Yuri Gagarin
First Woman in space: USSR Valentina Tereshkova
First Space Station: USSR Salyut
First Earth Orbit by a human: USSR Yuri Gagarin
First Space Walk: USSR Alexei Leonov
First Woman Space Walk: USSR Svetlana Savitskaya
Who won?
Didn't the U.S.A. have more than one mission to the moon. Also while it is true that they would be second, it would be second by over 30 years. That's probably longer than quite a few slashdot readers out there.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I listened to some guy on a radio show a few years ago touting this idea. He wanted to have hilton hotels be the sponsor, and reuse the shuttle boosters as building blocks. I googled this now and found this about the hilton hotels, and this on reusing the shuttle tanks I think the latter is the guy I listened to on the radio. His idea makes a lot of sense, the shuttle booster tanks are pretty clean after expending the fuel, and are there for the using with a little attitude and altitude adjustment. Big ole nice structures going to waste.
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
"honey, lets have out honey moon taking a trip around the moon, even though we have a crappy take off, 4 days in empty space, 20 minutes around the moon, 4 days back, and a really crappy landing."
well worth the 100 million this will probably cost.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This is another sign that America, a strong research-and-development nation, needs to get with the times: NASA needs more funding. We need to channel more money from Kerry and Bush's campaign accounts into space travel and propulsion research. I really hope this stirs up the US space program, and if not, China's space program. The steps that China has taken in space travel prove that more than just the Russians can cobble something together. The next step is an International Base on the moon, with the ISS a staging area.
Colonization of outer space objects will be noticed worldwide. It will suck mindshare, for a good reason. And given the current geopolitical climate, it can't be done a president too soon.
its called stealth, pretend to die, to sting back covertly. (jk)
Seriously, the old spanish empire was evil too, infact all large empires are evil, as MASSIVE POWER, brings in massive insantiy leading to total utter control and paranoia.
The elite families of earth and the govts learned that total utter control is a waste of time, an pure control/wealth is in controlling wolrd resources or access to resources, so if you wake in 80% profit of all resources, youve got it made no matter whos in so called 'real power'.
Control money + oil = control of what happens and where and who you hurt.
I think its not USSR that was evil, its HUMANS that behave in evil ways, on both sides of the pacific/arctic.
Though someone learned that mathamatically, theres no ROI in killing millions of people, rather theres better ROI in keeping them barely alive and happy and working to pay taxes and not cause too much trouble.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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
If I remember correctly, the Chinese moon shot has been put on ice, simply due to the massive financial costs involved. I read about it in the French newspaper Libération: http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=207147. The article is now subscription only, but the headline says it all: Espace. L'exploration du satellite de la Terre est abandonnée pour raisons financières. (The exploration of the earth's satellite is abdandoned due to financial reasons.)
;)
Personally, I think it's a shame that the Chinese are not interested at the moment. I would like to relive the drama of a Moon attempt in my lifetime. Plus all the tinfoil hat moon conspiracists can check to see if the Chinese find an American flag on the moon
The first manned Space Station was Salyut in 1971, sent up by the Soviets.
Blame the funders for the Space Shuttle? Are you kidding? As Lincoln said "Don't waste your time arguing with and idiot." Idiot.
As long as its not return-free!
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
First non-military communication satellite - Canada.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
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.
If you have no sense of adventure fine, don't stop the people who want more than back yard barbaques and NASCAR. Greatest. Post. Ever.
Well, somewhere in that neighborhood, I seem to remember that such a feat would have been possible with a Gemini capsule and a Titan 3M booster. The project was canned, along with the MOL and DynaSoar for reasons I will leave to the reader.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Mod parent up. Parent post got modded down for correcting a mistake in another user's post? WTF.
Ti sovietskiy? Ya ni sovietskiy. Ti znayesh', chto eto Rossiskaya Federatsia, ni SSSR, nyet?
Devai dumat'!
... 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.
n/txt
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Don't know if it's just a fluke, but anytime I got a 503 with a direct connection, I just tried through a proxy service and I always got through...
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.
US soldiers (god bless everyone of them) dye all the time for people they don't even know
No, that was 50 years ago, when the USA wasn't bent over by corrupt politicians and corporations and repeatedly fucked up the arse. Nowadays, US soldiers invade other countries in senseless acts of agression, bomb wedding parties and torture people in prisons. I'm not going to forget any of that in a hurry, matey.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
great now we will have a new 419 letter going around about how the russians left a nigarian astronaut on te moon.
The reason it's not useful as a lunar stop-over base is the same reason that Columbia could not have docked at ISS. Changing from one orbit to another is extremely costly (in terms of fuel), and any lunar mission has to be essentially on the equatorial plane.
Of course, the idea could still work, but the Soyuz would have to be launched to an equatorial orbit from a suitable launchsite.
whats the deal so they put panties on their heads and deprived them of sleep they did not cut their heads off. and yes our troops die for people all the timelook at bosnia, look at the humanitarian missions we run and get killed on in africa. the worlds a bunch of damn ingrates and the US gets blamed for everything when you people in other countries are more than likely just jeolous. I aint saying that a good portion of the politicians don't have their own agendas (same as in ever country out there)and that america is not hippocritical at times. at least we don't cower when we get pissed on like some European countries do, and we have enough restraint to not purposely attack civilian populations like some asian countries, it happens I know, but it gets blown out of proportion in foreign media, here it gets brushed under the rug, I gaurantee that if some of your nations troops did this the same would happen in the media.
US funding or your own countries funding? I hope it is your own cause if not it shows you what a hippocrite you are cause who do you think is paying for you to be here me
Oh man, its late, I'm tired, and for a second there I thought you said Oh great, Tortoise in Space. And I was thinking to myself, hey thats not a bad idea. Then I realized the shell probably wouldn't protect them from radiation. The image of those poor tortoises boiling in a vaccum after the Russians tried to send them to the moon got me pretty depressed. Then I realized you said Tourists, and well, now I'm really depressed.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
*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.
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
Libration point mission are hard. Manned libration point missions - if we ever do one - would be harder, since they tend to be much more susceptible to last-minute changes in trajectory. Then add the complications of trying to do proximity maneuvers, let alone rendezvous-and-docking, in such a complex dynamic environment (the cutting edge in L-point research right now is formation flying - not close maneuvers, but just trying to maintain any kind of coordinated trajectory between multiple spacecraft). Finally, throw in the fact that the Earth-Moon libration points are tenuous at best, with dynamics that are seriously warped by the Sun's gravity (libration "points" are an artifact of three-body dynamics, such as Earth-Moon-Spacecraft), and you have a recipe for a severe difficulties or a serious cost explosion. Not to mention the propellant costs incurred by attempting to station-keep for any appreciable period of time in the vicinity of their "depot". As I said, it makes me wonder about the quality and/or depth of their analysis...
This is from an old one...circa late 80's but it basically admitted that the Russians were whooping us when it came to space. At the time the statistics were like 5 times the successful launches that we had, and over 7 times the man hours in space, there space station had been up for over twice as long as skylab had....it was just mind boggling. They also mentioned that they had 3 major spaceports in russia, each of them many times the size or kennedy, and edwards combined. -mikey p
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.
Over 30 years ago, Roger Waters knew what was coming.
Cosmic ! Or merely Brain Damage...
Ask and you shall receive:s hdot
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sla
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
way back when (when apollo was being fixed after the apollo 1 fire but before apollo 7) the soviets fired an unmanned "zond" craft around the moon in exactly this free-return path.
The US govt (CIA etc) got wind of this and told NASA. This news was what caused the change in plans that led to the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission.
Do you have any idea how widely pirated Doom and Doom 2 were? Back in the Elder Days of passing stacks of floppies about at school EVERYONE had a (virus-riddled) copy.
Did it stop Doom being massive? Not really. It probably helped: if everyone has Doom, even a pirate Doom, then the value of Doom to a prospective customer rises because there are more possible Deathmatch opponents.
So people are pirating Doom 3. Big deal. People are spending hundreds of dollars on new kit just to play this game, so I doubt they'll blink at the cost of it. Meanwhile, kiddies pirating it are probably getting about 10fps...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The USA was basically earlier in docking spacestuff, landing men on moon, and in deep space exploration.
The USSR was quick in bringing things and people to orbit for the first time. They also did the first succesfull landings on the moon, later even the first automatic rover!
Check out the wikipedia article.
As shown with the second "accident" NASA hasn't learned and I very much doubt they have learned this time.
The shuttle itself is an extremely bad design. The engineers wanted to fit an escape mechanism. Kinda like the ejection cockpit the F-111 bomber has. Funny thing is that such an thing exist on the russian rockets, there has at least been one case of a crew succesfully ejecting from an exploding rockter, but was rejected for the shuttle. The first "accident" would have been a perfect use of an escape pod. The cockpit survived the blast and the crew was not killed by the exploding rocket but by hitting the ground several minutes later. Plenty of time for to pull the eject handle.
Old or new something is only reliable if you use it properly. Start letting the suits decide and you are just waiting for them to screw up.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Most poverty results becauses of abuses of the local governments. Go do research into how much aid is spent on Africa that acutally reaches those who need it.
//you// or anyone else would do it for the benefit of others but those people don't exist, or if they do they only appeared after they made too much for themselves to handle.
Do not begrudge people for how they spend THEIR money. To deny people the right to spend their money as they see fit would rob these these same poor of even more. Success and profit from that success drives people to new heights and opens many doors that no one may have ever dreamed of looking at. Yes some people may spend their money on themselves but it does pass through the economy and may be applied better by someone down the chain.
To sum it up, if application of money had to pass a "fairness" test then what would drive people to earn more? Nothing. It feels "good" to say that
Besides, this keeps the Russians busy in the space industry and who knows, one of them might one day invent something with funds derived from these ventures that solves a major world problem. Far better than sending 20million to some rat hole in the third world to have it spent by a dictator on a palace.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Tell men when you have last looked at a half moon and seen a gradient that seems to stretch about 1/8 of the total circomference?
The moon is a lot smaller than earth, so the twilight zone will also be a lot smaller. On earth I'd guess it stretches some 100 KM, thus a really rough guess would be that it stretches no more than 10 KM on the moon. It's also a give that it's shorter on the moon due to no athmosphere and no refraction of light rays.
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.
The Soyuz is a fine spacecraft and can probably be modified for the mission, but do the Russians have a launcher to get it to the moon? The Soyuz launcher is only suitable for LEO missions. The Proton is only slightly more powerful. The Energia no longer exists. What other options are there?
an ill wind that blows no good
First game of golf played on another planet or moon: USA, Alan Sheppard, 1971
First wheeled vehicle to be kicked because it wasn't working on another planet or moon: USA, Apollo 15, 1971
First mutant space fungus to be grown entirely in orbit: Russia, Mir, 2000. Bonus points to the USA for bringing the original strain up with them on the space shuttle.
First zero-gee sex in orbit: Still waiting for confirmation on this. Suspect a government cover-up of some kind.
Man you guys got the worst inferiority complexes I've ever seen. Chill out this is about space and not some damned pissing contest.
Oh yeah, the US rules j00r country!
I feel I have to make a somewhat geek retort to this...
A while ago, scientists doing genetic research for the Israeli Government (IG) found hard proof that Jews and Arabs are basically the same people at the genetic level. The IG suppressed the findings, which were some time later published in Europe.
So, uh, who's out killing "Jews/Arabs" again? Bet you could draw parallels between the current situation in the Middle East and the Dead Kennedys song "Kill the Poor".
I'll give five bucks to put Darl McBride on the first flight.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
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."
Everytime I look at particularly moon shots but all space vehicles two thirds of the construction materials get jettisoned at some point. To bad there isn't a way to engineer some of those components to be useful for something else after their primary use has been accomplished. Have the booster shells be recoverable in space by the shuttle or something and towed to the space station to be retrofitted as an extra component. It costs so much to get a pound of weight up there finding a way to recycle the thousands of pounds they jettison on each mission would seem to be cost effective.
I agree that the radiation that the Apollo crews experienced was pretty nasty. The continuous doses that the low earth orbit astronauts experience is also pretty nasty.
Thankfully, this will be mostly solvable when we get to building a space elevator. The main reason why they experience the radiation is because you need too much mass to absorb it. So they opted to take a calculated risk of an excessive radiation dose so that the mission would be possible within the technology of the time. A space elevator may not need such restriction.
Gentoo Sucks
Once again our big, expensive, fancy space shuttle seems more turkey than eagle; as the cheaper, disposable Soyuz proves itself adaptable to more missions.
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
Well, it can't. USSR went through the hardships of 1941/1942, when the Western front could really come handy, but by the late 1943, the wermacht and the fascist regime were largely doomed, and many suspect that the U.S. joined mostly to salvage at least a part of Europe from the Soviet occupation.
Eastern front exceeded the western one in duration, geographic span and combat intensity. If you prefer headcount, the western front and the african campaign combined accounted for less than 10% of German combat casualities. Transfer to the Eastern front was used as a punishment for German soldiers on the Western front.
We are infinitely gratious for the American lend-lease and their effort on the Western front (which indeed likely saved hundreds of thousands of Soviet lives), but pay credit where it's due. Would you find it outrageous if I claimed that it was the USSR who defeated Japan, just because it happened to knock out the Kwantung Army? Then you understand what I feel when reading your post.
Remember, there was a reason why Charles de Gaulle said "The Second front will always remain in history as the second".
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
So is this like the flying saucer the Russians were going to build in 2003 but never finished? Is this like the Russian nuclear power station on Mars that was never done? Is this another Russian post office abort the space station that never happened? If it's anything like the Russian suborbital space shuttle planned in 2002, it could be a long wait.
With the question of insurance/liability having been brought up already, I can imagine such an underwriter requiring a space-tourist on a long voyage (to the moon, etc.) to HAVE to wear (at ALL times) some sort of "incapacitation device" that would render them, er, mostly harmless in the event they have an episode of "space rage" -- it may suffice to rely on their fellow passengers whacking 'em across the back of the head with a drink tray for "air rage" on domestic and international flights, as an emergency landing is at most a few hours away (plus the added complication of subduing a rowdy drunk in zero gravity (ok, ok, freefall) isn't a problem), but in space there's no place (or time) to pull over and invite the troublemaker to walk back home.
If this isn't a "feature" on the very earliest moon-tourism excursions, just wait until some jerk takes a dump on the drink cart and see how fast they invent a "remote-controlled Mickey patch"!!
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
you are welcome!
finaly someone who has a clue. The U.S. was a industrial powerhouse, Russia was as well but they were quickly running out of key resources like aluminum. plus without our distraction of german forces Russia would definitly have fallen as you said. A wise man once said, if we fail to learn the lessons from history we are doomed to repeat them. I certainly did not take all my history in public educ. since it has a definate bias same as in all countries
I assume you're talking about the legal principle of less liability in regards gifts.
Liftoff: free = gift
Trip to lunar orbit: free = gift
Return to Earth: free = gift
Re-entry: free = gift, therefore
Deployment of parachutes: $100 million is the only item with the implied liability of a commercial transaction.
Mind you with the millions of statutes in US civil law destroying any posibility of minimising legal counsel, I doubt such logic would work in a US juristiction. However Russian spacecraft are Russian registed meaning generally Russian juristiction, & I have a funny feeling that one maybe able to get away with such logic in a Russian court.
I'm not sure that the American Way means what it used to; but I do think that the war in Iraq is, perhaps, changing that.
We lost a lot of national pride somewhere. We need it back, and we're getting it back - not, perhaps, in the best way, but it is happening. How that translates to purely "science fiction" endeavours - not my words - I don't know.
Commercial space entrepeneurs are definitely going to be the future. Hopefully we won't let civil lawsuits choke them. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one, either, tho. There *will* be the suits and the fight, one can pretty much guarantee that. How it affects the fledgling industry remains to be seen.
Agreed, any country that can establish themselves in space is welcome to. It might foster some competition among the rest. Good. We need to get up there, any way we can. Long term, I'd place money on the Chinese.
Just FYI, most euthanasia techniques in shelters are painkiller overdosages, which is about as painless as it gets. I doubt suffocation is painless. CO2 suffocation may be.
(BTW, Rob, Gina and I are considering becoming shelter volunteers next year; although the paperwork is crazed. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff they ask you. It's almost like applying for adoption. Hurk.
Something that was an eye-opener for me in Kraft's book was that there were people in the hierarchy of the early NASA who considered doing centrifugal and other tests on chimps to the point, where, quote "some of them were destroyed in the interest of science" so that they could continue testing the Mercury systems before a human manned launch - apparently, forever and ever. Somehow I doubt that even then that would have gone over that well with the public (it sure as hell wouldn't now) but fortunately it was slapped down, and not for humanitarian reasons, either.
This country is so confused at this point it's a wonder it's still functioning. The frontier spirit is not dead among individuals, but it's hopelessly tangled/strangled as to government policy. I'm not even going to go into the rest of the tangle here.
Cheers, and call me sometime, eh?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Well, that's really not true.
The chamber is actually filled with CO2, which results in animals feeling tired, falling to sleep peacefully, going unconscious, and then dying. It's not really suffocation, and it's most certainly not what people think of when they hear suffocation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How on *Earth* did someone mod this as Troll?
-Markvs
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
It was called the SPACE Race, not the MOON Race. And yes, the Russians kicked the Americans ass, in the SPACE RACE. Another thing, neither the Russians NOR the Americans would have gotten anywhere without the Germans. By the way, old Chris didn't discover America either. Jerk.
I think you ment the MIR station.
ISS hopefully remains as floating cost. At least for a while.
Heh, pretty good. Though to be more accurate I'd have to characterize MIR as a combination of sunk and vaporized cost.