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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"?
my first slashism:
in soviet russia, the moon circumnavigates you!
I'll post as a logged in subscriber, I'm not going to renew the subscription after the 503s....
Watch the karma burn!
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!
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
Don't you hate having to explain your own jokes Timothy? I mean AC?
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
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.
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...
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.
we lost a shuttle and crew due to old systems breaking down
Actually, the old systems have been pretty reliable. In the two shuttle disasters we've had, neither has been the result of equipment breaking down because of age. NASA took very good care of the shuttle, but the culprit of one disaster was a design flaw and the other disaster was caused by an accident. There's a big difference between a piece of foam damaging the leading edge of wing on take-off and a wing not working correctly because of lack of maintenance and care.
Thankfully the Soviets got Sputnik up there, though, huh? Otherwise, no Internet for us!
"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?
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 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.
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.
*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...
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...
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.