Energia Reveals New Russian Spacecraft

colonist writes "Russian space officials unveiled a full-scale model of the Kliper spaceship. If funding is provided, Kliper will replace the Soyuz space capsule as Russia's human space vehicle. The spaceship, designed by RKK Energia, is twice the size of the Soyuz and will carry a crew of six. It has two main parts: a reusable re-entry craft with a lifting body design, and an orbital module. Like the Soyuz, it has a rocket to pull the spaceship away from the launch vehicle in an emergency. See this photo gallery, Encyclopedia Astronautica and RussianSpaceWeb.com."

Comments

The US's Space Program

[Icarus1919]

There is nothing more depressing to me than listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates. It's as if America has lost its sense of humanity. It doesn't even really care about exploration anymore. Or apparently anything. All it wants to do is consume. Sigh....

Re:The US's Space Program

[ravenspear]

There is nothing more depressing to me than listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates.

Especially considering that Russia has a mere fraction of the money available to us.

Re:The US's Space Program

[th1ckasabr1ck]

It doesn't even really care about exploration anymore.

What do you mean? We're exploring Iraq.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

It's as if America has lost its sense of humanity.

What has space exploration to do with humanity?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing things ourselves is hard. We might fail. We'll attack other countries instead to keep people's minds off our own failures. And you can't say we're failing at that, it's unpatriotic.

Re:The US's Space Program

[double-oh three]

I knew I shouldn't have given Bush that biography of Christopher Columbus.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way it was stagnating a long time ago when Russia put Sputnik up, put the first dog in space, the first man in space, the first woman in space, shot down your U2, etc....
I guess it takes a while for you guys to wake up.

Re:The US's Space Program

[voice of unreason]

Um, this isn't "flourishing". Read the article. The ship in question hasn't been built yet, and the Russian government has not yet agreed to give the program the budget required. If Energia were to actually build this ship, then you would have a point. As it is, this is nothing more than a really good idea that will probably never be realized.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey maybe we can buy the next gen launch vehicle from these guys instead of spending fat flow building our own expensive stuff ... and concentrate on other things such as Mars mission or earth monitoring / space probes.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I wonder if you've noticed, but they did send human beings in space after Laika the dog and Albert the monkey...

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Exploring or exploding Iraq?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Freexe]

Well we have free healthcare for all ;)

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moridineas]

Wow, are you just deliberately being anti-NASA or do you not know what's going on?

Has the shuttle program been all it was cracked up to be? Probably not. But it does give us signifigant capabilities that other "industrial countries' space programs" still don't have.

Know any other countries that could send not one, but two different robotic rovers to Mars and control them for over a year?

Hell, for that matter, just which other industrial countries are even doing anything in space right now? Ok, Russia--let's see if they find the funds to put these things in use. China--ok, China is using borrowed Russian tech to get where we were 40 years ago. True they do show more nationalistic pride in space endeavours, but then again so did we--40 years ago.

I'm not a NASA apologist--I for one think the future of space exploration will be best served by private hands...but we're not there yet. I don't see the point of bemoaning how far behind we are, when no one actually competes with us anymore (Russians simply don't have the cash anymore).

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing more depressing to me than listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates.

You know what? Don't be so pissed off -- I am Russian and can say exactly the same!

Re:The US's Space Program

[Snuffub]

Now that's completely unfair, this administration is working hard every single day to curtail the rights of it's citizens. That alone takes a lot of energy. When you add on the absolutly necissary costs of making sure two guys named frank never exchange wedding vows and the dedicated effort to squash the scientific community its just no wonder we dont have time and energy to waste on trivial things like "exploring"

Re:The US's Space Program

[diablobsb]

you misspelled "exploiting"

Re:The US's Space Program

[JoneK]

;D hahaha ...

Re:The US's Space Program

[WIAKywbfatw]

Well, it's a bit hard to build something as complex as a spacecraft before you've designed it first, and that's the step that's just been taken with Kliper.

Your retort would be more valid if NASA was actually making similar progress: ie, designing possible STS replacements and giving its own manned programme some sort of direction. As it is, NASA seems to be (if you'll pardon the pun) in a terminally decaying orbit.

Whereas NASA's manned programme once had a clear vision and message - using the STS in conjunction with the ISS as a stepping stone to more orbitally-based research and then on to bigger and better things - now it's unclear where exactly NASA is heading.

Manned missions to the Moon? To Mars? Well, sure, those have been mentioned in "rallying the troops" kind of fashion after the Columbia disaster but where's the substance?

The reality of the situation is that the STS is grounded, and even when (if) it returns to flight status it's going to be a lame duck. And I don't even want to contemplate how disasterous another shuttle loss would be.

So, relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing. I don't know about you, but I'm glad that people with as much experience of manned spaceflight as the Russians haven't cashed out of this game just yet and are still willing, scientifically if not politically, to develop the technologies to further our exploration of space.

Re:The US's Space Program

[rob_squared]

And in 5-10 years, when China gets to where we were, 30-35 years ago, they'll be tied with us today. Getting to the moon and the shuttle program have made us very complacent with manned space flight. China wants to actually DO something when they get to the moon, more than just plant a flag, collect some rocks, and shoot some pictures.

I love NASA, I really do, but they and the government as a whole need to set some long term plans, and a way to carry them out.

Re:The US's Space Program

[magarity]

And you misspelled 'liberating'.

Re:The US's Space Program

[The_Hun]

because they think they have some say in US elections Yes, they have. The result of the US elections are felt all over the world, that's why almost everyone has an opinion about Ami politics. And many of the a ROTW-people (ROTW to you, because to me - here in Europe - you are the ROTW fellah) even have the power of affecting US politics - think of Russian "businessmen" paying for presidential campaigns or terrorists with well timed attacks.

Re:The US's Space Program

[krayfx]

India, like Russia - builds rockets with shoestring budgets, as opposed to the average US ones - which cost way beyond.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/india-02i.html
the difference is that while developing countries/ or financially contsrained countries go through extensive optimisation. several factors too exist which spirals the costs upwards:
1) US usually wants to dominate any sector it chooses - this will cost plenty.
2) bleeding edge technology involves taking huge risks, plenty of writeoff on obselete technology, and investment.
3) people in developing countries work for longer hours for cheaper wages - (which is why you can find plenty of indians in nasa! they prefer nasa for a better pay and recognition - unlike a scientist in india who is not financially rewarded as like in the US)
4) people are expendable in the lesser countries - so all those double check facilities that might be deployed by nasa might not be on an equal level in the financially constrained countries - at least not to that insane level of perfection carried out by nasa ( i could be wrong here)
5) this is the most significant - US were ahead in the game - and at one time - nasa was showered with so much money - * just to beat the russians*. after that they continued recieving money. while the rest of the industry were on diet - nasa enjoyed gobs of money to toy around ( not all of it went waste, a large percentage as in research for kevlar was useful)

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

As a non-American, I find this situation exhilirating. Why? Because in USA, when their space program flourishes, the media forgets about the rest of the world and hence, most Americans forget the world too (unless their troops are busy destroying some part of it). But when their space program stagnates, news from outside starts trickling in. Sure at first, Americans do nothing but make racial jokes and discount the others' advances as amateurish, but eventually they will have to face the fact that the rest of the world isn't one mass of stupid bodies lying around waiting for USA to come and rape them. Eventually, the average American will learn that they need to respect and co-operate with others.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the US has definitely liberated several thousand Iraqi civilians from the burden of breathing.

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

And several MILLION from the burden of Saddam. But you don't want to hear about that , do you?

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

Cummon...admit it...you want to be the one controlling things

Re:The US's Space Program

[anothergene]

Has the shuttle program been all it was cracked up to be? Probably not. But it does give us signifigant capabilities that other "industrial countries' space programs" still don't have.

Are you still driving your 1950 Buick to work too?

Know any other countries that could send not one, but two different robotic rovers to Mars and control them for over a year?

In how many tries? But at least you are trying.

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

Several thousand have been liberated from breathing.
Several million have been liberated from Saddam.
Seems like a good ratio to me.

Re:The US's Space Program

[saider]

Remember that NASA received a complete change in direction from the rather useless ISS to a return to the moon (equally useless?). It will take them some time to complete the change as steering a government organization is like maneuvering a loaded oil tanker.

If you ask me, NASA should provide funds to organizations like the XPrize and let man's natural motivations (greed, glory lust, etc) provide the drive to get to the moon. NASA could also facilitate things by making things available (wind tunnels, computer modelling time, etc) to the public at a much reduced cost. This would allow individuals and small companies to test their ideas more fully and attract private funding if their ideas have merit.

/end "if I were king" speech.

Re:The US's Space Program

[magarity]

Umm, >5 million dead in wars with Iran don't count? And don't blame the Americans for current deaths; almost all of the deaths now are the result of insurgents who are mostly from Saddam's ousted Bathists group.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes little difference whether its Americans or Iraqis who run the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib. If Americans run them you call it "liberation"

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

2nd person to misunderstand. The US has liberated several thousand from breathing...ok nice quip. My response: basically every other Iraqi (30+ million) has been liberated from Saddam.

Magarity, I's with ya.

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

" It makes little difference whether its Americans or Iraqis who run the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib."

Ahh, moral equivalence in action: US abuses at AbuG are just as bad as Saddam torturing/killing tens of thousands of his own people. Gimme a break.

Re:The US's Space Program

[twiddlingbits]

The Russian program is doing so-so, the only reason it is ALIVE today is the Soyuz flights that NASA bought, and the Progress resupply flights as well, all to keep ISS going. NASA bought these are a time when the guys in Russia were about to go under. NASA was hailed as a hero. But of course no one recalls that.

Unless the Russians can sell a few of these new vehicles it isn't going to get built, they don't have that kind of budget. How far they are in the design is questionable, the article say this just a nice mock-up. If someone signed a contract tomorrow, it would be at least 2010 before a flight ASSUMING they can get Zenit to work AND get the Ukraine to play along for a lauch site. (RTFA) It's all smoke and mirrors at this time, but it gets good press, and keeps up the reputation that they Russians can do good work and are forward thinking. That can't hurt.

As for where NASA is going, who knows. But we have a pretty decent commercial space industry with Lockheed (who buys engines from Russia) and Boeing. Unless someone can give a clear reason why we need to go to Mars I'm not sure the Public will buy it like they did the Moon Race against the evil Russians. I mean who are we competing against for Mars? The Chinese? The Indians? What technologies useful to those of us on Earth will come from the Mars Mission? Payback has got to be there with Space because IMHO the public has no faith in NASA's Space Program after two STS disasters.

Re:The US's Space Program

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Ahh, moral equivalence in action: US abuses at AbuG are just as bad as Saddam torturing/killing tens of thousands of his own people. Gimme a break

Saddam torturing/killing tens of thousands of his own people is despicable. Coalition forces killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, though, is what, exactly?

Worse, because they and Saddam posed no threat to us and we took actions that killed them needlessly?

Not so bad, because we're Right and our actions are Good no matter what happens?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets first establish that Saddam was an evil fuck that didn't get nearly what he deserved. So that somehow makes what we are doing OK?

And your little line, "almost all of the deaths" are insurgents fault? BWAAHAHAHAHAH! Irregular forces with RPGs and homemade explosives are causing more deaths than a US military that is systematically bombing major Iraqi cities with F16s, artillery and Apaches. But I guess we already established that if you die at the hands of an Iraqi you're a victim of terrorism, and if you die from American napalm, you're liberated.

Re:The US's Space Program

[fuck_this_shit]

And the shuttle has what to do with Mars rovers?

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

"Saddam torturing/killing tens of thousands of his own people is despicable. Coalition forces killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, though, is what, exactly?"

Collateral damage.
It's all in the outcome, the progress towards something better. Saddam would have continued to torture/kill.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia - yes they lack the cash but they have the know-how and they aren't the ones with a grounded manned launcher
China - catching up fast, they have the cash and and the desire
EU - lack the manned capability but as far as robotic craft they're right up there
Japan and India both launch their own satellites too

The USA is still ahead because of the cash they spend and the years of experience, however the shuttle design wasn't capable of matching the shuttle concept and sticking with it has put back the US space effort by a decade.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Rei]

Divert funds to prizes? Prizes are nice for components and joy rides, but don't hold your breath. And yes, that's what SS1 is: a joy ride that doesn't push a single envelope, or come anywhere close to anything useful in space. If someone wins the America's Space Prize, that's at least be a step (although not a huge one). SS1 is more like an airplane powered by a rocket engine than any sort of real spacecraft. It's an aerial equivalent of a rocket sled.

NASA should do what they're best at: research. Unfortunately, we've been making them fly a research craft for the past 2 decades (the shuttle). A research craft which was given half the budget it needed during design time, at that, leaving it with an aluminum cold frame and solid rocket boosters instead of liquid drop tanks and a titanium hot frame. We wouldn't have had any of the major problems that we've had with the shuttle if we'd gone with the original design, and maintainance costs would have been far smaller. We really need a next gen craft that takes advantage of what we learned from the shuttle (and the massive amount of reentry research that has gone on, too). It won't be as expensive now, either - titanium doesn't cost nearly what it used to, although it is still quite expensive.

Also, I used to agree that a moon base wasn't that great of an idea - until I started reading about exactly why He3 fusion is so nice: you can contain it electrostatically, instead of magnetically like current fusion devices. In short, there would be no containment problems, the principal problem in conventional hydrogen fusion methods. And while it takes a lot of lunar regolith being heated to produce a little He3, a moon base will be heating it anyways when it refines regolith for building materials (although not nearly enough of it for a large quantity of He3 to be produced). Transport costs back to earth are a fraction of the He3 total value, although the big question will be whether processing 10 million tons of regolith for 1 ton of He3 (worth over 1 billion dollars, so it'd be about 100 dollars per ton of regolith processed) is viable. Of course, there are other potential, non-natural sources of He3 on earth (for example, high energy neutron bombardment of lithium in fission reactors to produce H3, which will slowly decay to He3), so it's really too soon to say.

Nonetheless, I'd like to see off-earth refining equipment developed and put into use at the very least. :)

Re:The US's Space Program

[roman_mir]

Actually other dogs were sent to space that returned back home alife, 2 of those are a wide known example: Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Arrow)

Re:The US's Space Program

[Rei]

Compare our record with mars to the Russian record with Mars; it's far better.

Mars eats probes. It's eaten a smaller percentage of ours ;)

Re:The US's Space Program

[amabbi]

Your retort would be more valid if NASA was actually making similar progress: ie, designing possible STS replacements and giving its own manned programme some sort of direction. As it is, NASA seems to be (if you'll pardon the pun) in a terminally decaying orbit.

What progress has been actually made with Kliper? A full-sized mockup? Woop-de-doo. The US has made several efforts on new space transport systems, going far past the mockup stage, only to be hampered by design and funding problems. X-33/Venturestar, X-34 CRV, Delta Clipper, etc. etc. If the Russians actually get this bird into the skies and carrying passengers/payload, then maybe you have a point. But who knows what will happen, even if funding comes through... there's no guarantee that the program will be successful.

Oh, and let's not point out the fact that the "venerable" Soyuz has a very similar safety record to the space shuttle.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Rei]

Thanks for mentioning NASA's research. That's what they're best at. For example, here's 21,000 pages on their site (almost all research papers) which merely contain the word "novel":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1 &q =site%3Anasa.gov+novel&btnG=Google+Search

They do a *lot* of research, on a lot of great things. I'm still hoping that they can manage to make Alane hybrid boosters.... that'll be the day! :)

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

And that outcome has sucked Of course none of the war supporters like to bring up that this war was sold on an easy win

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators - Dick Cheney

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

Typical liberal myopia: only focus on the killing part of ousting an evil dictator.

"Of course none of the war supporters like to bring up that this war was sold on an easy win"

Yea, I'm sure probably most everyone in the US thought that maybe 2 or 3 soldiers might be killed. /sarcasm
Whatever Americans 'bought', I don't see them trying to take it back. On the contrary, a vote for Bush was a vote for staying the course.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Tumbleweed]

Excellent point. A rock in space, Iraq in the desert...same diff. :)

Re:The US's Space Program

[deesine]

Selling Saddam weapons (which the French & Germans did 10x more than us) != putting him in power.
How exactly does your argument go that we 'put' him in power?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no; they are not the same and the Soyuz is superior in regard to safety per launch. Cargo capacity differentials are extreme additionally, and figuring based on cargo capacity, the ratios of success/failure for launches of a cargo amount become 10.000/500 or 20 for the Soyuz, and 1.000/8 or 125 for the Shuttle over the service lives that each has been used for. Industry is industry, science is science, but what has been forced through with money and ingenuity for the Shuttle the Soyuz achieved with less money and more practical measures to overtake by more than 6. To head off any nationalist rants, Russia under Putin is where the US is heading with the regressive authoritarians in power hiding behind false light shows and old curtains, if you understand.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Captain Scurvy]

In Fascist America, Russia is industrialized nation with flourishing space program!

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Industry is industry, science is science, but what has been forced through with money and ingenuity for the Shuttle the Soyuz achieved with less money and more practical measures to overtake by more than 6-fold the amount of cargo lifted. That is what matters outside of nationalist idiocy.

Re:The US's Space Program

[robert899]

Well lets get cracking. How 'bout we start with Uranus.

Re:The US's Space Program

[DunbarTheInept]

One shot down spy mission out of hundreds of successful ones is not a good ratio for Russia.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

They shot down more than 1, you ignorant nitwit.

Re:The US's Space Program

[amabbi]

Actually, no; they are not the same and the Soyuz is superior in regard to safety per launch.

Nope. Soyuz has had 92 launches, 2 failed missions with complete loss of life (and 1 unmanned mission which killed 1 person). The space shuttle has had 2 failed missions with complete loss of life out of 113 missions. So, in fact, the Soyuz is inferior in regard to safety per (manned) launch, and it's a toss-up in terms of total launches.

Re:The US's Space Program

[DunbarTheInept]

People who insult from anonymity have no confidence in their words.
Put up or shut up.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Focus on cargo. It alone matters objectively. Include even the 10 other listed unmanned flights and figure based on cargo capacity. The ratios are in favor of Soyuz for safety; but it seems necessary to specify safety to cargo-humans are separate and have in actuality little use in space but for nationalist purposes.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Ash and Flame]

All NASA has to do to show them up is make a full-scale model of the USS Enterprise, then say we'll have it up and running in 5-10 years.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure you sign DunbarTheInept on all your tax forms? Give me your social insurance number or shut up. Insulting the source is always a last resort when your argument is failing, eh?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moofie]

NASA designed the ACRV ten or fifteen years ago. That would have done just about everything Kliper is designed to do.

Designing a space craft is NOT the same as building and flight-testing them.

The question (both in Russia and here in the US) is not one of technology. The question is one of political will, and thereby funding.

We have the technology to put a mission on Mars within ten years, for a fraction of NASA's current budget. Why don't we? No vision. The politicians don't hear the people screaming that this is the Right Thing to Do, because by and large, the people aren't screaming that.

I think they should be, but that's just me.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moofie]

Humans explore. That's what makes them human.

Re:The US's Space Program

[myowntrueself]

"the government as a whole need to set some long term plans"

I believe that this is one of the major flaws in democratic governments; they *cannot* plan very far ahead, maybe 4 years, 8 at the most.

Re:The US's Space Program

[cosmo7]

Nope, there have been over 230 Soyuz launches in one form or another. Also the Soyuz is the only spacecraft to have successfully used its escape mechanism in a booster failure (Soyuz 18, I think).

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, for that matter, just which other industrial countries are even doing anything in space right now? Ok, Russia--let's see if they find the funds to put these things in use. China--ok, China is using borrowed Russian tech to get where we were 40 years ago. True they do show more nationalistic pride in space endeavours, but then again so did we--40 years ago.

ESA, Japan, lots of talk from other countries like India, Canada, and Australia. Get your facts straight.

I do agree with you on this point, however. You shouldn't throw NASA out quite yet. Let's see what they do with the new space vision. You can't say they're not doing anything yet. The first lunar mission is in the design stage, and things are progressing. They even got they're 2005 budget approved (after much bickering)!

Now, if NASA is where they are today in 2010, then I'll completely agree that NASA is stagnant!

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, a vote for Bush is a vote of religious fundamentalist zombies, ultra-patriotic chauvinists, people scared into it by post-9/11 hysteria, and those who don't really care about their country. That's basically what Republicans are now, unfortunately, the party of McCarthy, Nixon and David Duke.

Re:The US's Space Program

[jay-be-em]

Did you read the article??

"But significant roadblocks still remain between today's unveiling and the fulfillment of Ryumin's boast. The actual first test flights of the vehicle, perhaps about 2010, will require funding levels that the Russian government has so far been unable to provide."

Re:The US's Space Program

[rob_squared]

In most cases that's probably true. Only when something is exceedingly popular will it transcend term limits.

Re:The US's Space Program

[magarity]

Ah, yes, having your picture taken while naked with dressed women present described as "torture"... I know people who PAY for that; it ain't torture. Nice try. It's stunning how sheltered you are if you think that's torture and equivalent to the institutionalized raping and mutilation that went on under the Bathists.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignorance of culture is no excuse for your response, many would prefer death by any means to that shame. Your own values are not objective, and do not represent even an average of global values. Fool.

Re:The US's Space Program

[bwy]

listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing

What? Russia still operates exclusively with early cold-war era hardware. Everything they've "announced" in the last several years has proved to be nothing more than hype. Further, they tried to make it to the moon and failed. They tried to build a shuttle program and... well, decided not to. Anyway, did you even RTFA?

Personally I'm damned proud to live in a country where a small company like Scaled Composites can and do exist. This is where the future of space exploration lies- not with the monolithic, inefficent US, Russian or Chinese governments.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Tonytheloony]

Not to contradict your point, which is valid for the first part, but have you heard of Mars Express?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Pig Hogger]

What has space exploration to do with humanity?

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever".
- Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

Re:The US's Space Program

[Pig Hogger]

Whereas NASA's manned programme once had a clear vision and message - using the STS in conjunction with the ISS as a stepping stone to more orbitally-based research and then on to bigger and better things - now it's unclear where exactly NASA is heading.

NASA never had a clear vision and message. It's heyday moon shot efforts were merely an international pissing contest, which, once won, meant that NASA had outlived it's usefulness, and has since ever been decaying into irreleventness.

Re:The US's Space Program

[gadget junkie]

...how about going back to the topic? I know lots of good political forums , and slashdot is not among them.

Re:The US's Space Program

[cheekyboy]

1. Dude, follow the money, no one does anything without any monetory benefit, and its all about cash, big cash, for decades to come, its an insurance policy, for when the worlds oil supplies start to go down hill, why do you think USA isnt in any hurry to suck up as much oil as it can now, since it rather save that for itself much later when its needed, and buy ALL it can from everyone else, so by 2012, you'll have everyone elses reserves going low, while iraq will have plenty left, and Alaska too will be ready to reap for the benefit of USA while the rest of the world goes on declining stocks/rising prices. No one gives a hoot about so called Librartion, its only benefit are 45m new costomers to USA products. There are plenty other countries without oil that need liberating, but USA dont give a crap because there is NO MONEY IN IT.

2. No one in the administration complain about saddam BEFORE 1990 did they, they even liked him and sent him weapons/trade. Ofcouse because the iranians were the real enemy, now look where we are.

Overall, Yes, I do think its good Saddams evils are stopped, he was a prick that should have learned from past dictators, RULE with a soft fist, keep the subjects busy parting/working having fun, he should have made his people too busy enough to care about whos running the show.

3. re killings, its legal for the govt of USA to kill its own citizens, ie the death penalty. Any law that is not 100% active for all peoples, but has exeptions is bolony.

Re:The US's Space Program

[cheekyboy]

Russia has tonnes of cash, they are spending billions in underground military bases that can hold upto 60000 people. It looks like they preparing for a nuke war, funny that.

They have lots of cash from the high priced OIL, russia has more oil reserves than the saudies.

Russia is increasing its military budget by 16%

The space program , like for many nations, is really a 'side op' program for the military, to design/test space warfare. Or supplement other research, like rockets etc...

Re:The US's Space Program

[Paradise Pete]

other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates.

I don't think you can describe the Russian space program as flourishing. From the article: "will require funding levels that the Russian government has so far been unable to provide."

Re:The US's Space Program

[MonkeyCookie]

What do you mean? We're exploring Iraq.

...for oil.

Re:The US's Space Program

[silpol]

Unless the Russians can sell a few of these new vehicles it isn't going to get built

there is always space for maneure - why, do you think, Putin gets down Yukos on their knees? he want to shoot two ducks with one bullet, actually: more money in hands of his power and less power in someone's else hands. And there will be also money for big toyz at Baykonur and Pliseck - while he never admits, VVP likes to be a mecenate. No, The Mecenate :)

Re:The US's Space Program

[paulkoan]

And invade, don't forget.

Of course, that is just to enable further consumption, so you were right first time.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

"Especially considering that Russia has a mere fraction of the money available to us."

Which is the _reason_ why they are so effective: They fired all the managers, and stuff like this is what lonely, bored engineers start to do.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Rei]

He was in power when weapons were sold to him (and actually, it's amusing how people omit the Italians, who built Iraq's navy during the Iran-Iraq war, when discussing who armed him, because the Italians were our ally in this invasion).

The US sold Iraq nearly a billion dollars worth of war goods, but that's besides the point: if the point is "who put him in power", the question isn't about who sold him weapons after his power was already firmly entrenched. Saddam was initially a CIA asset; at the time, Qassim was seen as the real threat in Iraq, and anyone who could take him out was good in their book. Saddam failed in '59 (and fled to Egypt), but in '63, a different CIA-sponsored assasination attempt was successful, and the Baath party took over (Saddam soon returned to head Iraq's security forces)

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070 21 4-6557r

Re:The US's Space Program

[farble1670]

ummm. what about spirit and opportunity? what about cassini? i think we could say that those have been somewhat successful, right?

the (near) future of space travel is not manned. sending humans into space with a reasonable safety factor is prohibitively expensive. and please don't point to that russian craft until it flies successfully, tens of times.

Re:The US's Space Program

[INetUser]

Long term plans? Don't think that will ever happen. For how many years have we had the 1/4 to 1/4 mentality? It's pretty clear that this will only continue for the foreseeable future.

What's more to worry: As the off shoring continues from the manufacturing to engineering and other high value white collar careers, where are we going to get the engineering talent to design and build these future space vehicles? Doing it ourselves is not cost effective, better to get the Chinese and Indian engineers to design and built it for us? We'll just buy them and fly them?. We'll buy a system to take us to Mars and back?

If that's the case, whose achievement is it really? Ours? I think not. It will be theirs!

Even if we will manage to retain the engineering talent to design these systems, whose going to build them? Much of our manufacturing capacity has already moved off shore. Only the military manufacturing is staying, due to it's national security imperatives, and that capacity is not very great. It's questionable if that capacity could support both military and NASA customer bases.

It's the engineering achievement of designing and building the systems that's the greatest benefit to the society, not just the getting there and back. Think of all the industries and advances that we've made from our investment and developments of our space program. If we off shore the engineering, we won't be benefiting from those. The off shore location will be benefiting from them.

I think that we are already screwed, and just don't realize it. Well on our way of falling from a first world nation to a second world nation. Yea, we have a lot of inertia keeping us in our present place, but that'll erode soon enough.

All of the above is IMHO.

Re:The US's Space Program

[foolAloof]

I don't see the point of bemoaning how far behind we are, when no one actually competes with us anymore

remember the race between the hare and the turtle? the slow turtle won the race because the hare couldn't be bothered to move forward.

Russians simply don't have the cash anymore

and with deficit of trilions of dollars, americans will too.

Re:The US's Space Program

[DunbarTheInept]

You have enough information to mark me as a "foe" (slashdot's equivilent of a killfile). You don't provide me with the same when you post anonymously.

Insulting the source is always a last resort when your argument is failing, eh?

Hypocrite.

Re:The US's Space Program

[superdude72]

We never really cared about exploration in the first place. The big push to get into space came because we were afraid the Soviets would develop space-based weapons that would annihilate us. Now that we're no longer afraid of that, we have other priorities than sending humans into space to collect moon rocks. Other countries' interest in manned space exploration (ie, China) seems to me more a function of the fact that their leaders are about 150 years old and still reeling from the propaganda loss they suffered when the Capitalists planted a US flag on the moon. Exploration? What are they expecting to find on the moon? It's a cold, dead, rock. Most of Earth's oceans remain unexplored, and we're far more likely to make novel discoveries exploring there.

I'm depressed that other industrial countries seem to be doing more to develop sustainable, non-petroleum energy sources. If there is to be a Manhattan Project for the 21st century, that would be it for me. But I'm not too depressed, because American universities are at the forefront of that effort, even if it isn't a priority of the government or the corporate establishment. With the right leadership, we could quickly jump into the lead.

Re:The US's Space Program

[FleaPlus]

We have the technology to put a mission on Mars within ten years, for a fraction of NASA's current budget. Why don't we? No vision. The politicians don't hear the people screaming that this is the Right Thing to Do, because by and large, the people aren't screaming that.

In that case, why don't a couple of billionaires get together, pool their money, and get themselves a prominent spot in the history books?

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moofie]

Because they don't have any vision either.

Rutan and Paul Allen are on the right track, fortunately. They're just not there yet.

Re:The US's Space Program

[SECProto]

liberating? Before, women were oppressed, and they weren't really have a right to free speech. Notice how most of the Iraqi's didn't want to be "liberated"? and how now, they are completely free! except... how noone uses their "free speech" because they're still frightened of people with guns, it doesnt make a difference whether the Iraqi's or American soldiers have them. They haven't had a vote yet. They have an American "temporary" government. even if that is eventually changed for one that they actually vote on, the Americans will still have incredible influence on the country. (Yes, I mean more than it does on most other countries in the world.) Thousands of Iraqis are dead, I bet they feel pretty liberated.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

You certainly don't know what it is to kill people or to have your neighbours killed. This is space related topic, so let's not to fall into political arguments even though we have greatly different views on international affairs.

Re:The US's Space Program

[SECProto]

Excellent comment.
As you say, Nasa has recently changed its course. But if so, it was completely internal. They don't seem to be doing anything at all, as far as I can tell from the outside.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't say good about Americans. They don't value lives of foreign people, and their 'liberation' is just words made to sound good, but carrying no meaning. It's a war, a war started by America, and before the war there was no crisis in the region, no mass deaths. It's just a whim of the president's team - and a serious shame to America.

Americans justify the killing of thousands by allowing millions to escape possible deaths from tyrants. It's the same logic as if someone started war to America, killing thousands and justifying it by allowing millions from other countries not to be afraid of american invasion. What, sounds like pretty good ratio to me.

You don't get it.

Re:The US's Space Program

[FleaPlus]

But there's certainly visionairies with money out there, and I suspect they'll be doing great things in the near future. For example, before he was "distracted" by starting up SpaceX, PayPal founder Elon Musk was engaged in plans to launch an experimental greenhouse to place on the surface of Mars. I suspect he'll get back to that later on, once companies like SpaceX succeed in dramatically lowering launch costs.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Your liberation is just a word. No one is benefiting from that. A lot of people is killed along the way. Get real - you don't know what death is, you can't decide. American way is too ignorant of these matters because America didn't have a war on its soil. I don't know how to explain simple things to stupid Americans, but the 'liberation' is just plain myth, no one in the region wants that 'liberation' except perhaps a few people, normally considered crazy in a society.

You don't value lives, that's your problem. You're under an impression of a fictituous scheme, that 'liberation' is always undoubtfully forcefully above all. Liberate yourself from such a mental fog - and learn, that complex problems need far more complex solutions than dropping laser-guided bombs and sending GPS-equipped troops. You just don't know how to fight for the good cause - you just fight, never mind thinking.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moofie]

Hope you're right. We'll see.

For the record, any billionaire visionaries who want a poor visionary with a BS in aerospace engineering need to email me.

Re:The US's Space Program

[paganizer]

I'm guessing English is NOT your first language.
good try, though.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has made several efforts on new space transport systems, going far past the mockup stage, only to be hampered by design and funding problems. X-33/Venturestar, X-34 CRV, Delta Clipper, etc. etc.

That's correct, in my opinion - those are all valid examples of making progress during pre-design and design stage. It's a pity those projects didn't lead to flying vehicles.

If the Russians actually get this bird into the skies and carrying passengers/payload, then maybe you have a point.

No, here you're probably wrong. First, you aren't going to get the credit where it deserves - your "maybe" isn't very applicable to a working (according to your condition) manned vehicle, which by itself is still quite an achievement. Second, no one says the Kliper is ready - or will surely fly in, say, 7 years - it's just a possibility, and some work is getting done toward the goal, and something is already achieved - the mockup is only the most visible part. So, they do have some progress right now - may be even smaller, than, say, the final stage of X-33, but still a noticeable and necessary progress.

And that's the whole point of the whole speech.

The safety record of Soyuz vs. Shuttle is another topic. Let's not go there just now :) .

Re:The US's Space Program

[dcmeserve]

Also, I used to agree that a moon base wasn't that great of an idea - until I started reading about exactly why He3 fusion is so nice: you can contain it electrostatically, instead of magnetically like current fusion devices.

Huh?

There's no fundamental correspondence between the fuel used and the method used to contain it -- only that different fuels have different ignition temperatures. The magnetic-confinement methods currently being explored have difficulty getting up there in the temperature/pressure range, so they're restricted to the tritium-deuterim reaction, which is the easiest to get going (but spews lost of nasty high-energy neutrons).

But there's nothing about an alternative fuel that suddenly makes electrostatic a possibility. Electrostatic methods (e.g. Hierch-Farnsworth or "focus fusion" are theoretically able to achieve much higher temperatures than magnetic confinement, and so can accomodate other fuels (as well as deuterium-tritium). I don't know the specifics of the He3 reaction, but from what I've seen it's the hydrogen-boron reaction that has the most promise, as it doesn't have any high-energy neutrons as products, and so is quite clean. And I think boron is a bit easier to come by than He3. :)

- Doug

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. "The umanned mission which killed 1 person" - what are you talking about? On Soyuz missions a total of 4 people died. Shuttles took lives of 14 people - so, you see, more people are dying per each Shuttle flight on average. I can provide another statistics (it's all a matter of statistics), showing that Soyuz is safer than Shuttle - and also can provide another reasoning for the same point. Namely, the Soyuz is evolving craft, and Soyuz-1 is very different from Soyuz TMA-5 . The flaws of previous designs are taken into account on newer designs, and while the platform is more or less the same, the overall craft becomes safer - which is shown as reducing rate of failures (and their caliber) over time, as well as the recently demonstrated working in the abnominal mode, when a crew from ISS landed after ballistic descent. In that descent Soyuz have shown the reliability similar to that of Apollo-13, when after near-fatal explosion the crew have managed to come back alive. Shuttle, being reusable, doesn't have that luxury to evolve.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

And that fraction comes FROM the US! We invest a lot of money in their program.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

"Before, women were oppressed"

Actually, no more than Iraqi men were. Iraq was a bastion of secular government in the Middle East. Bin Laden and Saddam hated each others' guts.

Now, of course, lunatic fringe Moslems are running riot and will probably crack down on uppity women in areas they control.

Re:The US's Space Program

[monkeydo]

How's the british space programme these days?

Re:The US's Space Program

[WIAKywbfatw]

Lacking any real commitment, and it has done since the days when Blue Streak, the only launch vehicle in history to have a 100 percent record, was shelved. Margaret Thatcher scaled back Britain's participation in ESA and successive governments have done little more than make half-hearted gestures.

Britain's space programme is virtually non-existant beyond satellites, ground-based observatories and the occassional extra-planetary mission to passing comets. Beagle 2 was hobbled together on a shoestring and at next to no time. Anyone who has serious aspirations about becoming an astronaut is virtually forced to take up a second nationality, as Michael Foale did. Having said that, the National Space Centre, which was delayed for years because of a lack of proper funding, is now up and running, so perhaps we're finally starting to make progress.

However, I've no doubt that if Britain had a space agency level of political and financial commitment that NASA has had for over 40 years then we would have something more concrete to show for it. Whether that something would have been anything more than a token effort is a hypothetical debate for another time. Certainly, something like the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn't have been out of the question, but why waste time speculating about what ifs?

But let's talk about the thinly-veiled reasoning behind your question. If you're suggesting that I'm in no position to comment because my own nation's space programme is pathetic, well, Frankly I find that just sad. It's unfortunate that the only way you can think to reply to comments about how rudderless NASA seems right now is to come back with a pithy comment that fails to address any of the points that I've made. Certainly you haven't added to the debate, have you?

It's this sort of shit - refusing to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, ignoring any problems that appear and just hoping that things will work out for the best in the end - that killed the crew of Columbia in the first place.

Come back to me when you have something constructive to say.

Re:The US's Space Program

[amabbi]

That's blatantly idiotic... the shuttle carries more people, so of course the two shuttle disasters would have killed more people than the Soyuz disasters. WTF does that have anything to do with the merits of the US vs Russian space programmes???

Re:The US's Space Program

[monkeydo]

If you're suggesting that I'm in no position to comment because my own nation's space programme is pathetic, well, Frankly I find that just sad. It's unfortunate that the only way you can think to reply to comments about how rudderless NASA seems right now is to come back with a pithy comment that fails to address any of the points that I've made.

You're certainly welcome to comment on anything you like. Your comments, however, being in the form of comparision, invite a comparative response. You know what they say about glass houses, don't you?

It's this sort of shit - refusing to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, ignoring any problems that appear and just hoping that things will work out for the best in the end - that killed the crew of Columbia in the first place.

What a silly thing to say. The shuttle will fly again, and when it does it will still be vastly superior to anything else out there. Yes we've lost two of them, and whether or not those losses were preventable is hotly debated, but shit like that happens when you send humans into space. Your "constructive" post implies that NASA is actually lagging behind the rest of the world's space programs, which couldn't be further from the truth. NASA has been flying a craft for 23 years, that is still unrivaled today.

Improvements to the shuttle will be made as a result of the Columbia accident, just as improvements were made based on Challenger. Then we'll move on and fly the shuttle some more. When the shuttle is replaced, it's replacement will incorporate everything we've learned.

Re:The US's Space Program

[WIAKywbfatw]

Re-read my post. I didn't say that NASA is lagging behind anyone, what I said was that NASA doesn't seem to be moving forward in any clear direction.

It's clear from your post that you think that the STS really is the best thing out there. Well, as others have pointed out in other posts, the STS is neither truly reusable (because after every mission everything gets stripped down and replaced) nor cost-effective (because, per kilogram of payload, it's far more expensive than any of its major competitors).

When the STS was first proposed, NASA talked about multiple launches a week and seven day turnaround times for orbiters. The reality of the situation is completely different. The STS, which was always a compromise, has never come close to delivering on its potential, and poor management at NASA hasn't helped that situation.

Believe me, I want NASA to succeed as much as anyone else. I've bought into the dream. I've taken a transatlantic trip to see a shuttle launch. I've visited the Kennedy Space Center. I've spent far more than I should have in the gift shop. But, as I've grown older, I'm not the dreamer I once was. The dreamer in me is still there, but so now is the realist, and the realist says that NASA hasn't lived up to its promise for a very, very long time.

As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.

You can gloss over these things all you want, and make "glass houses" comments all you like, but the bottom line is that NASA doesn't seem to be doing more than standing still and living off its past glories. And to all of us - dreamers and realists alike - who want to see the boundaries of space pushed further and further, that standstill is disappointing.

Re:The US's Space Program

[monkeydo]

Re-read my post. I didn't say that NASA is lagging behind anyone

What did you mean by this:

So, relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing.

There is no other component that can carry 7 people and 63,000lbs of cargo into orbit. None. No one has a better way, a worse way, or an equivalent way. The rest of the world has focused on unmanned spaceflight which is a completly different beast. The shuttle has never lived up to the promise of rapid turnaround, but no one else has come up with a reusable vehicle with a seven day turnaround either. So, it turns out, it just may not be practical. But the orbiter and the SRB's are fully reused on every mission. The only thing I know of that is replaced everytime, are heatsheild tiles, and fuel. I'm glad that NASA now has a mandate to go back to the moon, and I hope it happens. But you need to recognize that NASA's "past glories" are still pretty glorious.

As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.

It's hardly that clear cut. Yes, if the specifi precautions reccomended by certain engineers had been followed then those specific accidents might have been avoided. But engineers point out posible problems and solutions all the time. They can't all be incorporated, this would be too costly, and possibly not functional.

Re:The US's Space Program

[WIAKywbfatw]

1. If you're not moving forward then you're at least standing still. You do understand that, right? And if NASA is standing still (ie, you're inactive) while Russia and others aren't (ie, they're at least doing something to move forward) it's not unreasonable to say that, "relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing". QED.

2. The seven people on a shuttle mission include a pilot and commander that, frankly, do nothing of scientific value. And, dollar for dollar, you can get more done (more people or more cargo launched) with Soyuz and/or other delivery systems. Even NASA's other launch vehicles are far more cost-effective than the STS, which is why they were put back into service.

3. When you're talking about space flight, safety should be paramount. Certainly, politics should be way down the list. In the case of Columbia, there were specific checks that the engineers wanted to perform once Columbia was in orbit - for example, they wanted to re-align the HST to look at the damage done to the orbiter's heat shield, which would have told NASA straight away that any re-entry attempt was doomed - but were dismissed by management that didn't want to concede even the slightest hint of weakness.

Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.

As I said, I'm as much a realist now as I am a dreamer. From my point of view, NASA's heyday was the 60s and 70s, but in the 80s, 90s and in this decade it's done next to nothing to fulfill its potential. Does it not irk you that it's been 35 years since man first stepped on the moon and 32 years since he was last there? We haven't been to the moon in over a generation. Please, tell me that's not what you call progress.

Re:The US's Space Program

[monkeydo]

Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.

What would be the point? So that the astronauts could have the option of dying in space? There was no way to fix the damage in orbit, and no realistic chance of rescue. The astronauts still would have attempted reentry, and they still would have died.

NASA should be making mmore progress, no doubt about that. But part of the reason there isn't more momentum is precisly because there is no one nipping at their heels. We just can't ahve a space race with Russia, since their mostly funded by us, and the ESA isn't really doing anything that we weren't anyway. Maybe the Chinese spae program will become more interesting and result in a political push for NASA.

Re:The US's Space Program

[WIAKywbfatw]

What would be the point? Gee, well, I think at the very least that some sort of rescue mission would have been attempted. Remember Apollo 13? Most people wrote those guys off as dead but they still got back home in one piece, didn't they? Are you really suggesting that if Columbia's crippled heatshield had been discovered by an HST inspection that the full force of the US wouldn't have been put behind a bold rescue attempt? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty certain that it would have.

And, if nothing else, early discovery of the problem would have given those on board Columbia the chance to talk to their loved ones one last time with that knowledge, or prepare appropriate messages for them in the event of a negative outcome.

No one nipping at NASA's heels, eh? Well, no one apart from China, India, Japan... Granted, they've got a lot of ground to make up but it's far easier to overtake a stationary target than a moving one.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Luigi30]

And Saddam wasn't doing anything particularly bad at the time we went in. He was doing his usual hide-the-weapons routine.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it.

Believe me, he's not trying. He's just trolling, or flaming, can't tell which. I don't believe he really thinks that way. It's just someone playing games. He's probably just thinking, "Shut up you silly bitch. I'm just having a bit of fun." I responded to him several times, but he doesn't respond to reason or logic.

Re:The US's Space Program

[StarKruzr]

Four Soyuz capsules can recover seven astronauts.

And even if they only recovered three, the remaining four's survivability would have increased because they would have been using less resources per unit of time in orbit.

See this...

[double-oh three]

'See this photo gallery'

He just had to tempt the fates, didn't he?

Re:See this...

[2old2rockNroll]

'See this photo gallery'

Now that we have successfully slashdotted the Russian photo center, we can expect retaliation any minute.

Russia is back in space?

[Metteyya]

With Russia going back to its space programmes, we're going to have more major players than during Cold War - that is, USA, Russia, China, maybe also EU.

Let's hope everyone - in contrary to recent US projects concerning space defense systems - remembers treaties about peace in space.

Re:Russia is back in space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia hasn't ever stopped its space programs - the work continues, it just isn't always visible to the public.

ESA has been a major space player for decades, and is the dominant comercial space agency.

Re:Russia is back in space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope everyone - in contrary to recent US projects concerning space defense systems - remembers treaties about peace in space.

Hmm, maybe if these kids were allowed to fight in space, they'd finally stop using poor third-world countries as their battle arenas and make Earth more peaceful.

Space Race

[RetroGeek]

And the race is on.

Again...

Maybe this time it will have some staying power. Na, the US government critters cannot see past the next election :-(

Re:Space Race

[thepoch]

The only time I'll look to the US for anything space related is on Star Trek. I have a gut feeling that China might be the first to colonize the moon or some other big thing. Then again it sounds like my view on real life is being mixed with Star Trek already.

Re:Space Race

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like Firefly, actually.

(If you didn't see the show, there's a lot of background Chinese influence evident in the culture.)

Re:Space Race

[Anonymous Coward]

Na, the US government critters cannot see past the next election :-(

Not true. GWB is looking past when he is out of office. His friends will be in control of a lot of OIL

Earth to NASA.

[joshv]

This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago. Instead we have the shuttle debacle, and a NASA that is still trying to pretend that the shuttle program is viable.

Re:Earth to NASA.

[Planesdragon]

This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago.

They were. Even after the shuttle was built, replacements have constantly been at the same design stage this Russian thing is at.

Re:Earth to NASA.

[Keebler71]

This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago

Where the hell have you been?.

CEV, X-33, X-34, X-37, X-38, X-40, X-43.

Not to belittle this Russian effort which I think is terrific, but at this point, the Russian vehicle is no more than a concept and a full-scale mock-up.

NASA has been working on such projects for decades; whether or not they are funded is beyond their control...

Re:Earth to NASA.

[RedWizzard]

The X-38 looks a lot like SS1, but was intended to be a CRV (crew return vehicle) for the ISS. Maybe SS1 can be scaled up to oribital use?

Re:Earth to NASA.

[wolf31o2]

Man... you totally forgot about the X-302 and the X-303

Re:Earth to NASA.

[FleaPlus]

Coincidentally, the outside of the CRV was constructed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the same company which constructed SpaceShipOne.

It'd be interesting to see if simply putting on better thermal protection (perhaps like that used on the Soviet Buran) would be enough to allow a SS1-like craft to withstand orbital reentry.

Re:Earth to NASA.

[RedWizzard]

Coincidentally, the outside of the CRV was constructed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the same company which constructed SpaceShipOne.

Not a coincidence at all, I think. That was kind of my point, though I didn't actually say it.

Re:Earth to NASA.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what has happened to these NASA projects?

Cost blow-outs, technical problems, project cancellation. Over and over again.

Time to try someone else. Someone with lots of experience in manned launchers. Suppliers of the only current access to the ISS. The people who copied the Shuttle and made it better. People who know how to make reliable, safe and cost-effective manned spacecraft.

Here's hoping Energia gets the money. If the US doesn't want to play, I reckon Klipper would look pretty cool on top of an Ariane 5 (it's a man-rated launcher, don't forget).

Design vs. Function?

[Bonker]

The nose of the craft looks suspiciously like the front-half of the NASA Space Shuttles, down to the white/black colorscheme.

How much of that has to do with design and how much has to with the function of things like the reentry tiles and hull shielding?

Re:Design vs. Function?

[Rhalin]

I would suspect that the selection of color for things like the special paints and reentry tiles is fairly limited. It's not like there's a SpaceShuttle Depot where you can color coordinate all the panels on your reentry vehical ;)

Re:Design vs. Function?

[LiNKz]

Not the first time Russia and the United States had similar projects appear well, rather similar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Buran

Re:Design vs. Function?

[replicate]

White material reflects light and heat, the black tiles absorb it. This allows the ship to deal with the extremes of spaceflight and reentry. The aerodynamics of a reentry vehicle are even more limited than the choice of colours. Though I should note that IF they had other colours available to them, they likely wouldn't go for it, if only because we've become so accustomed to seeing the familiar black-on-white colour scheme of NASA's shuttle that it makes most sense to emulate it from a PR perspective: "look, it's totally obvious what this does!"

Re:Design vs. Function?

[cmowire]

Well, it's actually pretty simple.

Things that get Really Fsking Hot are black because the only thing that will handle the heat is a carbon-carbon composite.

Things that get Not So Hot are white because it's either that or beige or black when it comes to high temperature ceramics.

There are other alternative coatings like metal, but given that the Russians have already flown a craft with shuttle-like tiles, it's probably the case that they'll stick with those.

Except, of course, that when the Russians coppied the idea of putting tiles on their shuttles, they made them a smidge sturdier.

Paint has undesirable properties, so you want to minimize it's use on the higher-temperature surfaces. If you look at the shuttle, except for small red maintenence markings, they pretty much stuck with that.

Re:Design vs. Function?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is obvious design similarities, but really the underlying engineering decisions for this scheme is far more important than PR.

Let me explain.
White reflects heat. Black absorbs heat.
BUT black materials will also discard heat faster than white as well (you can try this at home with black/while mugs, water and a microwave).

This is why the underbelly and nose of the US Shuttle is black, and is partly why most high-speed (and stealth) aircraft are black (think SR-71). With the stealth aircraft in particular, you want to discard your heat from friction as efficiently, lest you show up as a lovely target for a heat-seeking missle.

Re:Design vs. Function?

[WindBourne]

It is about the same amount of Airbus's small jets looking like Boeing's. Or the 707 looked like the DC-8. Or the L-1011 like the DC-10. Outward design will normally find optimal shapes and material. OTH, the interior and mechanics will most likely be different.

Re:Design vs. Function?

[wximagery]

Kliper is designed to carry a crew of six as well as a half ton of cargo.

Barely seems like enough to carry food and vodka for the 6 passengers.

Russia Vs. Slashdot

[TychoCelchuuu]

The ultimate test of the Russian space program: can it stand up to an attempted Slashdotting?

Re:Russia Vs. Slashdot

[LeninZhiv]

I know this is "make ourselves feel better" humour, but I must point out that photocenter.ru is not the official website of the Russian space programme :-)

Re:Russia Vs. Slashdot

[TychoCelchuuu]

Commie. Just kidding...

energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

The Soviet space shuttle was called "Energia", because it was the "mule" for shuttling between the Earth, and a planned Soviet solar energy satellite. Now that their oil mafia is running their show in Russia, their solar satellite strategy is about as likely as ours in the US.

Re:energy for all

[shoemaker251]

Close. The lifting body for the Soviet version of the space shuttle was called Energiya. The shuttle itself was called Buran, which is Russian for "snowstorm".

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

It should be called "Mistake".

It looks like they got hold of a space shuttle DIY kit and put it together without following the instructions.

Re:energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

Maybe to you, an SF watching Slashdotter. But the Russians have forgotten more about interorbit vehicles than we even know.

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

Even if the Russians know more about space travel, and posess overall superiority in this area, does this make my description any less accurate?

Re:energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

Of course not: if the "Y" in DIY is "Yuri". Our preconceptions of how spacecraft look have always been created by Russian designs, as we've all been playing catchup to them. So today's DIY look in spacecraft is tomorrow's boring old American design.

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

You're too focused on who's the best, or who invented what first.

I don't care if the Space Shuttle design was completely ripped off from the Russians, I still think that the Russian's latest design looks like a Space Shuttle built incorrectly.

It's the same color, and it has similar looks, just bent in a different shape, and with bits removed.

Re:energy for all

[Phaedra]

Actually, the Buran was designed right IMHO. No unbelievably complex main engines that had to be squashed into the Shuttle airframe and then connected via external fuel lines to a massive tank of H2. Instead they designed it to be carried into space by a big-assed, reliable, dumb-as-a-post heavy-lift booster (the technology for which was worked out many years ago) and the Buran itself only had maneuvering engines. Much easier, much safer, much cheaper.

Making man-rated resusable engines of the power required to lift the Shuttle turned out to be virtually impossible to construct (as you probably know, the Shuttle has to be be essentially completely rebuilt after every flight because the machinery cannot be made reliably reusable for the demanding conditions the Shuttle operates under). Its maybe not as sexy (Buran/Energia) but I'll take cheaper/reliable/safer going into space over sexy anyday.

BTW, did you know that the Buran actually flew? Launch, orbit, landing... remote control.

Re:energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

So if the US shuttle was ripped off from the Russians, but built different (maybe even "incorrectly"), then you see the Russian design later, and decide that the Russian one is wrong, that means the Russian one is wrong, because of your ignorance of the history? Since I know about the Russian one, am I not justified in not caring about your take on it, and thinking the Russian one is not wrong? Especially as I don't think the American one is wrong, just different. They both travel between the surface and orbit repeatedly, so neither is wrong. You're just hung up on the source of your own definitions, without regard to precedence, or merit.

Re:energy for all

[brsmith4]

Not only that, according to this article that is posted somewhere above, it only lost 5 thermal tiles and landed within 5 feet of the runway center line with a 35 mph cross wind... on remote control!!! I'd like to see our shuttle pull that off.

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

I haven't said that it was 'wrong'. I haven't said that the Russians ripped off the design.

You're just hung up on the source of your own definitions, without regard to precedence, or merit.

Of course! I have stated that its appearence (to me, and more than likely a very large percentage of the human race) is as the Space Shuttle built incorrectly.

My statement is made without consideration of what the damn thing does or who built one first. I'm just saying what I think it looks like.

I suppose that this is a big 'faux pas' to space enthusiasts? If so, you could have responded to me as follows:

Yes, it does give that appearence! Ho! Ho! But, do you realize that in reality it would be more likely that the U.S. ripped off the design from the Russians? They're very clever chaps, you know?

If you'd have said that, I'd have responded:

I don't doubt it for a second.

Re:energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

You are so self-centered that you've taken to rewriting my replies, in your own image. Go on - how would you prefer this response to be phrased?

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

Now, now, you'll lower your karma!

Re:energy for all

[Doc Ruby]

Rejecting your negative dharma is fueling my chi; karma takes care of itself.

Re:energy for all

[OwlWhacker]

karma takes care of itself

Not on Slashdot it doesn't.

Rejecting your negative dharma is fueling my chi

There is no 'chi' on Slashdot.

Besides, rejecting something that you have 'perceived' to be negative doesn't actually make it so. And in rejecting, it is more likely that you are generating negativity, purely because you are unwilling to explore a perspective other than your primary one.

It seems to me that your clouded perception of the motives in my non-negative comment have caused you to react in a negative way, and therefore cause imbalance.

Understanding is better than tofu.

Okaaaaay....

[Shillo]

Is it just me, or does this thing really looks SOOOOO much like runabouts from Voyager (sans warp nacelles, but I guess it's a Minor Mater of Engineering... :) )?

--

Re:Okaaaaay....

[Anonymous Coward]

"...I guess it's a Minor Mater of Engineering"

I thought Saint Doris of Birmingham was the Minor Mater of Engineering...

Incremental progress?

[dschuetz]

[note: The newspaper photo on the MSNBC story looks like it's got a space shuttle mockup in the background. The "photo gallery" link has better images.]

Aside from the obvious color scheme borrowed from the US orbiters, this seems like it's really just incremental progress. Going from a 3-person Soyuz to a 6-person Klipper seems very much like one of the crew reentry vehicle concepts that have been floating around in the US for a while. One of those took an Apollo capsule, and extended it downwards a bit, to fit six people instead of three.

On the other hand, the "lifting body" design is interesting, if it'll work enough of the time (I'm gathering the parachute reentry option is for when the runways aren't available or weather doesn't cooporate).

On the gripping hand, I'm having Six Million Dollar Man flashbacks.

Re:Incremental progress?

[drinkypoo]

From what I understand, the color scheme is pretty much mandatory. The black side radiates heat, and the white side reflects it; it's a matter of temperature management.

Re:Incremental progress?

[Fr05t]

RTFM and look at the other pictures. It's not a shuttle with wings - it just happens to have a similar nose on it is all.

Re:Incremental progress?

[david.given]

this seems like it's really just incremental progress.

Of course. Incremental progress is what gave Russia the Soyuz, the cheapest, most reliable man-rated spacecraft in the world. Incremental progress is good if you want to put humans on board. (Won't the Klipper end up carrying the same number of people as the Shuttle?)

The place to start playing with radical new technologies is with unmanned vehicles. If one of those blows up, nobody cares but the accountants.

Re:Incremental progress?

[q-the-impaler]

Not sure if I read it right, but it seems that they only use the lifting body to control the descent and narrow the landing area. I think they still use the parachutes, but the landing area is narrowed to 1 sq Km.
It mentioned that they are considering either specialized landing feet or a deployable air bag. The air bag would allow for water landings.

Re:Incremental progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

[note: The newspaper photo on the MSNBC story looks like it's got a space shuttle mockup in the background. The "photo gallery" link has better images.]

That's probably a Soviet era Buran, not a US shuttle, for those wondering.

A we back to tiles and long-re-entries?

[reality-bytes]

This looks rather like a step back towards thermal tiles which can be a problem in themselves when Soyuz uses one-big-heatsheild.

Also, the shape of the re-entry vehicle is rather like a Buran nose which suggest to me a somewhat longer re-entry than the Soyuz module which 'gets it over and done with'

I'm sure I've heard several times that the Shuttle/Buran re-entry technique is 'less-safe' compared with capsule re-entry due to the duration that the craft is actually being heated.

Re:A we back to tiles and long-re-entries?

[LiNKz]

Perhaps to create a larger vehicle (to seat more passengers) would cause the weight and mass of it to be too large to use a big heatshield in the way they currently do it?

Re:A we back to tiles and long-re-entries?

[kilo242]

Except that once a heatshield is used, it is no longer usable - during re-entry the heatshield is melted and blasted apart, it is there to prevent the spacecraft from suffering a similar fate. The tiled configuration utilizes reusable heat shielding material, so that the entire vessel may be reused after some minor maintenance and tile check work.

The Soyuz is entirely non-reusable, except for some components from the capsule that might be salvagable after landing, whereas the lifting body with tiles is entirely reusable. Seeing as the Russian economy is still in a bit of trouble, being able to reuse a spacecraft as opposed to building a new one every time might be advantageous.

Re:A we back to tiles and long-re-entries?

[reality-bytes]

Our only present yard-stick for costs on re-usable vs single-use systems is the US Shuttle and the Soyuz system.

Currently, a Shuttle launch would cost circa $300m to $500m against a Soyuz launch at circa $30m so to all intents and purposes, the Soyuz is already a 'budget' system.

It would be very suprising if this new vehicle came in cheaper 'per seat' than Soyuz. After all, it requires a larger rocket and is more technically complex.

Humanity?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's as if America has lost its sense of humanity.

Humanity? Personally, I hope the goal of space exploration is inhumanity. We can explore humanity all we want right here on earth.

To get NASA more funding...

[Skraut]

Just pump sci-fi movies into the White House until our president is convinced that the aliens are Terrorists...

Re:To get NASA more funding...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well he already saw Mars Attacks and decided we needed to smoke those evildoers from their Martian Hobbit holes.

You didn't actually think that he wants us to go to Mars for science, did you?

In other news

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Russian space officials unveiled a full-scale model of the Kliper spaceship

The KDE team announced they will sue the Russian government over the use of the "klipper" name, which, as everybody knows, is the name of the KDE clipboard. An outraged free software community is currently demonstrating and marching on Capitol Hill and the Kremlin to demand that justice be meeted out of the space agency. In a gesture of goodwill, the Russian space agency has decided to rename their spacecraft "firefoks". News at 11...

Re:In other news

[LMCBoy]

But if they name it Firefox, won't it be stolen by Clint Eastwood?

Re:In other news

[Azghoul]

Little known fact: The place where Russia makes its laws is actually called the Remlin.

KDE just got there first and named it. Unfortunately, the Gnome team chose to design a car instead.

(for the english-impaired: Gremlin)

Kliper

[LMCBoy]

"Kliper", eh? I'm sure any resemblance to the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper is purely coincidental.

It's like deja-vu all over again!

Re:Kliper

[NardofDoom]

It's about as far from the Delta Clipper as possible while still looking the same. The DCX was a tail-sitter, SSTO VTOL rocket. This sits on top of a booster and lands with a parachute, oriented horizontally.

I miss the DCX. :-(

Re:Kliper

[Quixote]

That Buran site you linked is interesting.
From the site:
Although the first orbital flight of Buran was unmanned, it demonstrated much promise. The autopilot that landed the shuttle was able to overcome a 34 mph crosswind to land within 5 feet of the runway center line. Also, of the 38,000 heat shield tiles that covered Buran, only 5 were missing.

Wow. Very impressive indeed.

I wonder what would it take for someone like Rutan or Branson to hire some of these engineers and really make space travel affordable.

Re:Kliper

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what would it take for someone like Rutan or Branson to hire some of these engineers and really make space travel affordable.

Yeah right, I can see the racist slashdotters already crying out "they're even outsourcing our space program."

Re:Kliper

[21mhz]

"Kliper", eh? I'm sure any resemblance to the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper is purely coincidental.

It's not coincidental, in the sense that both refer to a word of longer history than both countries' space programs taken together.

Re:Kliper

[Wolvie MkM]

The US Shuttle was public domain, the Russians got the blueprints and were quite forward about it. Basically updating the version, hence the ability to be unmanned, more protection from heat, more cargo, blah blah... Same thing with the DCX?

About damn time

[kyouteki]

The Soyuz has been used for how long? I mean, I'm sure there have been internal systems upgrades, but the design is just so old that I thought they'd never change it. Then again, if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Why would this thing not roll over?

[davidescott]

Is there a simple physics explanation to this. Given that there are no visible control surfaces (although I suspect control surfaces are relatively useless at high speed) and the general shape is comparable to that of a brick (as opposed to the shuttle which is more of a brick with wings), why will this not roll over on reentry?

Re:Why would this thing not roll over?

[Vulch]

Same reason as a badminton shuttlecock doesn't, and the Soyuz and Apollo capsules don't. Keep the centre of mass low and the aerodynamics will keep it the right way up.

Wow, take a look at those rockets

[aardwolf204]

FTA: The Kliper itself was a reduced-sized version of an earlier unique design envisioned for launch on the Angara or Zenit launch vehicles in the 1990's (see Energia Spaceplane 1990's). This was larger and had the re-entry vehicle mounted nose-down in the launch vehicle.

I got interested in the launch vehicles and found this site very informative, it has illustrations and information on various Russian launch vehicles. Its amazing how much smaller the Zenit is compared to some of the others, specifically the RLA-150 and Vulkan.

My heart still goes with the Saturn V though.

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at these rockets it seems that a trusty old Delta IV could do the job. The Delta series of rockets have proven reliablity and are fairly cost effective.

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[m50d]

Too bad about the blueprints. The Saturn V probably had enough power to assemble a mars shot in two or three flights.

(tinfoil hat time): Of course, if they still had them we'd know whether it could have really got to the moon

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[cmowire]

Dude, the Saturn V Plans aren't lost, it's just incredibly pointless to try and build one at this point. It's an awfully tired myth at this point.

And it doesn't matter because you can launch a mars shot in two or three launches of a shuttle derived booster anyway.

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[Idarubicin]

(tinfoil hat time): Of course, if they still had them we'd know whether it could have really got to the moon.

Dude, didn't they tell you?

Michael Eisner will continue to control Pixar even after their supposed acrimonious split. Working with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and George Lucas, they will cooperate with the government on certain 'black' projects.

The full-scale Saturn mockups were necessary in the 1960s because CGI animation didn't exist. Now, we can fake the entire Moon landing from the comfort of a server room. Much less expensive that way--this is progress!

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[m50d]

My apologies, I've seen it in enough respectable sources I assumed it was true. Anyway, I think there is at least one good reason to at least consider a Saturn V or Saturn-V derived rocket for a mars shot for one simple reason: it works, we know it works, it is quite simply the only *proven* way to get 100 tonnes into LEO in one shot. And if not, the soviet Energia (hey, that's almost on topic) rocket had a planned upgrade path which could put 175 tonnes into LEO just by using more of the same boosters, I think that's the way if you're really serious about it.

Of course, I could go to mars on an arianne 5. If I get old and no one's done it yet, I think I might.

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[cmowire]

See, that's the weird bit. Everybody centers around the conspiracy theory that NASA burned the blueprints and forgets that there's many many other reasons for why the Saturn-V is no more. Really, we lost the Saturn-V once all of the mobile launch platforms were cut up to make the shuttle's mobile launch platform.

The thing is, if we need an expendable booster to get 100 tonnes into orbit, we can make one happen, either by strapping engines and a payload canister on the back of a shuttle external tank + SRB or by clustering Atlas V or Delta IV first stages, for much less money than trying to revisit the Saturn V.

In fact, we're closer to having a production-ready heavy lift booster than the Russians are. The Russians would have to restart Energia production or get the Angara booster into production. Energia boosters are very very unlikely to return to production, primarily because the bits are made by different companies in what is now different countries. And the Russians have been developing the Angara boosters very slowly.

Don't forget India and private companies

[hpulley]

India is also looking at lunar and manned programs and already has launched its own satellites, etc. Private entries from the US, Canada and the UK (and other countries) can perhaps be considered separately from the goverment operations. There are now many players, some major (some declining, some expanding) and some minor (some expanding, some perhaps will never get off the ground). Exciting times ahead, I hope.

No In Soviet Russia jokes?!

[hsmith]

wtf?

but i think this is great for them but we are breaking into the commerical space market with spaceshipOne. we will win, again.

i think commercial space industry will be the next big thing, thank god we are getting in on it first

Re:No In Soviet Russia jokes?!

[roman_mir]

Actually wrong. The Energia group is only partially funded by the government. They are about half commercial and have been that way for at least a decade now, that's first.

Secondly the Russians have launched space tourists at commercial rates of about 2*10^7 USD a few times now.

I Agree

[Stone316]

Now that we have the space station NASA shouldn't be worried about having to have a shuttle as big as it is. Alot of the stuff they used to do (ie experiments) could be transfered to the space station.

It appears to me that the Russians are used to working on a budget and design stuff to get the job done effectively. They may not be able to do all the things that NASA would like to do but are they necessary? Is that little bit extra worth 10x the cost?

One nice thing about the shuttle was you could do space walks to repair satelites,etc... You wouldn't be able to do that with Russia's model (even tho you can detach for upto 15 days) but i'm sure instead of a cargo bay you can design one that can handle those types of requirements.

Anyways, its nice to see at least one Country looking forward and it looks like they hit the nail on the head.

Re:I Agree

[cmowire]

The problem with half of the possible shuttle missions was that they were presupposed upon the shuttle launching every week.

Repairing a satelite doesn't make sense when the repair mission costs more than a replacement satelite.

So this design makes sense until you get launch costs down. But that's OK, because if you got launch costs down enough, spacecraft construction will be a booming business.

Stupid question, maybe one of you know

[aardwolf204]

Whats up with modern space craft having a black underside? Does this do anything for re-entry, or is it just to help us understand which side is "down".

Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know

[NardofDoom]

The black tiles are specially treated to resist higher temperatures than the white tiles, since they bear the highest thermal load on reentry.

Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know

[Anonymous Coward]

because as every school child knows black is really good colour for reflecting heat ?!?!?

Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know

[Anonymous Coward]

The tile material which resists the most heat happens to be black.

(Paint wouldn't exactly survive the trip, so it's sort of an expensive luxury. And materials science isn't to the point where they can create tiles with the all the desired properties and designer colors, too.)

Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know

[sexylicious]

The black ones are black because they absorb more energy than the white ones. They are also offer a slightly higher tolerance for thermal loads.

Moscow is Mocking NASA

[syntap]

Geez, even the ship's colors exactly match the Shuttle. Not to meantion the nose is a blatant copy. Kind of like giving the finger to the US, as if to say "take that, we've managed to fly something recently."

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[ghjm]

And their engineers have two arms, two legs, and are generally a light pinkish-brown color. And they all wear shirts with buttons in front! They're obviously copying us!

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[Electronik]

You'll find that the Shuttle Buran was the USSR's copycat of the USA's space shuttle. The colours and shape of this new vehicle are based strictly on the materials used (heat shealding) and aerodynamics, surely you don't think rocket scientists choose colours from an aesthetic point of view!

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[kidgenius]

Yeah, but you need to look in the foreground. The background craft is Buran, which incidentally looks a crapload like the space shuttle. The energia is in the foreground, with the black area going up and over the nose. You can't tell me that this looks identical to the shuttle.

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[roman_mir]

Wow, wow, get off your pills man, that's a conspiracy theory.

Ever heard of Shuttle-Buran? Yeah, it looked very much like a US shuttle about 20 years ago this is the same group (Energia was the name of the group and of the booster that was used to launch Buran,) only the Buran flew once and without a human on board, it was totally automated.

So first of all, they don't need to copy the US shuttle, they can just reuse some of their research from Buran. Secondly the color scheme? The color scheme has specific physical properties - white reflects radiation while black stores it. Besides, the compounds for the reentry shield tiles are never painted, and the silica based compounds are black, while carbon based compounds are gray.

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, it looked very much like a US shuttle ... only the Buran flew once and without a human on board, it was totally automated."

The US shuttle orbiter is also totally automated. The pilot is allowed to do some things, but all the important parts (like landing) are always done on autopilot.

The reason the Buran had no humans on board its first flight was that the life support systems hadn't been worked out yet. So it's not that the Buran was more advanced, but that the Soviet space program had less funding.

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[roman_mir]

I didn't say Buran was more advanced! I said it was launched without humans!

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[syntap]

You can't tell me that this looks identical to the shuttle.

No, kid genious, that's why I specified the nose.

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[myowntrueself]

I think you'll find that the black-and-white color scheme is actually copied from New Zealand sporting teams (who don't seem to be able to think past variations like 'tall blacks' 'all whites' 'black caps' and of course 'all blacks').

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[Arcady13]

I think this new ship actually looks more like the spacecraft in "Planet of the Apes*" than a shuttle.

* (The 60's movie, not that recent nonsense.)

Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA

[kidgenius]

waaaaiiiit a second....you mean to tell me that both shuttle and energia have slightly pointed noses!?!?!? GET OUT OF TOWN!

Okay European Space Agency!

[MtViewGuy]

Since I think there is considerable interest at the ESA for its own manned launch capability, how about ESA providing the funding for the completion of the Kliper project? A group like EADS could get the Russians to build Kliper spacecraft that could be launched from the new R-7 launchpad in Kourou in French Guiana at ESA's launch site.

Re:Okay European Space Agency!

[bbc]

I think ESA is hoping to fly its own HTOL shuttle around 2015, so the Kliper might be seen as an unwelcome diversion of funds.

Personally, I doubt the Hopper is going to be ready by then, and ESA would do well to team up with Energia.

Re:Okay European Space Agency!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought HTOL had been abandoned? I'd be interested to know if it's still alive and well.

Wasn't the Russian space shuttled called Buran?

[hpulley]

As in this Buran? Means 'snow storm' in Russian. "Ptichka" ("Little Bird" in Russian) was the name of the 2nd one built, which never flew. Energia did make the booster.

Re:Wasn't the Russian space shuttled called Buran?

[Doc Ruby]

When I attended an Arthur P. Little (construction company) + Grumman presentation, to the Planetary Society, at Columbia University in 1990, they showed some slides they got from their new, ex-Soviet hires. They described their own program for sending up factory satellites, which would extrude girders from harvested nickel-iron asteroids, to make a US solar satellite. Among their fascinating "factoids" was the info in the slides which called the little, designed Soviet shuttle, that never flew, called "Energia", and the remark that the name referred to the solar satellite.

Re:Wasn't the Russian space shuttled called Buran?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick web search shows:
Energia is a company who, had at least hand in building the Russian Shuttle/launch vehicle. The Russian Shuttles are only called Energia as much as the USian shuttles are called Boeing or who ever it was built them or was the prime contractor.

The Russian shuttles are called "shuttles" just like the American ones, and they each have an individual name or designation. "Buran" or "Ptichka" for example.

Here is the English part of the Energia website upon which you will find surprisingly, that the company is called "S.P.Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia".

http://www.energia.ru/english/

Moral of the story don't trust companies to give accurate information about their competitors. :) would you trust Microsoft to truthfully pronounce on GNU/Linux?

There was a mini Russian shuttle as well, but I'm affraid if I ever did know it's name I have now forgoton. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Energia however, what with that being the company's name. :)

Re:Wasn't the Russian space shuttled called Buran?

[bbc]

They had a test craft called BOR, which you can buy from Buran.ru. (They don't mention a price.)

Calling Lance Bass...

[inkdesign]

They're gonna need some money to get this thing off the ground!

No.

[rhadamanthus]

What you have is a NASA forced to continue using the Shuttle since every other developing alternative gets cancelled and then restarted with differing politicians. E.g., OSP vs. Bush's CEV.

NASA is not guiltless in budget management, but you can only do so much.

The US is doing a lot of space exploration...

[Shivetya]

the key is that we are not doing manned exploration. Sending people up in to space isn't exploration.

We have probes to many of the planets, Mars in paticular, we are going to smack a asteroid soon, and there are plans to a new space observatory.

Considering the costs associated with space I think the US is doing just fine. Hell, I like to wonder, where is everyone else?

Besides this is just a mock up, it is no more valuable to space travel than a brochure from marketing... actually that is what it is, an attempt to stir up interest in what they do.

Isn't that..

[Searinox]

the 13-year-old russian spacecraft they recently found rusting in some desert? SNCR ;)

RTA, Soyuz in use since 1966

[hpulley]

There have been some recent updates but essentially the design is almost 40-years old now.

Ob.

[DarthVain]

In Soviet Russia Spacecraft reveal New Energia?

Required In Soviet Russia Joke (bad)

[Warthog9]

In Soviet Russia, Energia reveals you!

Sorry this is bad all the way around.

Re:Required In Soviet Russia Joke (bad)

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone modded that offtopic? How much more on topic than a Soviet Russia joke get than in a Soviet Russia posting!?

Re:Required In Soviet Russia Joke (bad)

[xv4n]

here is another...

IN SOVIET RUSSIA spacecraft REVEAL YOU!

color scheme

[kippy]

Is it a system requirement that all new manned spacecraft have to look like killer whales?

Re:color scheme

[linoleo]

Is it a system requirement that all new manned spacecraft have to look like killer whales

Yes. As others have pointed out, it's thermal management for re-entry into the atmosphere.

#include "tinfoil.h"
Now, why do killer whales look like they've had to survive atmospheric entry? Hmmm...

I hear Canada has designed a new Spacecraft!

[DarthVain]

Oh wait... we lost eh.

Re:I hear Canada has designed a new Spacecraft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada could fund the deployement of a really scookum space program. 1. If we worked in close association with the Russian and American mafia. 2. If we started an export tax on BC bud. 3. If we became a major place for ex-American and Soviet space workers to go for employement.

In short, for as long as growing pot, oil and war production is more financially rewarding than science, our major industries will continue to sink to the lowest common denominator. The almighty buck, not the advancement of humankind.

Well..

[Presidential]

I, for one, welcome our new Retired Soyuz Pilot masters..

Launch dreams and orbital wishes

[Mulletproof]

"The Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, the organization that has built all of Russian's human space vehicles for the past half century,

Space vehicals like the Buran space shuttle! No, wait... That was designed by NASA too...

Re:Launch dreams and orbital wishes

[dunkelfalke]

they look alike, but in fact they are quite different.

The lifting body is for reentry

[roystgnr]

On the other hand, the "lifting body" design is interesting, if it'll work enough of the time (I'm gathering the parachute reentry option is for when the runways aren't available or weather doesn't cooporate).

The parachute reentry option is for a version that doesn't have wings. The body shape alone won't give enough lift to put you gently onto a runway at low speeds; it'll just give enough lift to let the craft spend more more time in higher, thinner atmosphere, so it can decelerate more slowly and shed heat more easily.

In Soviet Russia

[Wordsmith]

In Soviet Russa ... old people are Korean spacecrafts! or something.

Moderated -1, overrated??

[Anonymous Coward]

The Slashdotting starts in 5 minutes.

Ronny Reagan is spinning in his grave.

Russian Oil Mafia?

[RandoX]

See, they want to be like the US too.

The Space unRace

[Mulletproof]

"Na, the US government critters cannot see past the next election"

Um, how many presidencies has US manned space flight endured again??? Yeah, too bad they axed that one after JFK. And what race are you talking about? I think we'll sit here a moment and take a breather while everybody else catches up.

Re:The Space unRace

[RetroGeek]

And what race are you talking about?

The one in the 60's. When the Soviet Union beat the US into space (Soviets had Sputnik, first man in space, first robot on the moon). There was definately a race on.

I think we'll sit here a moment and take a breather while everybody else catches up.

Must be tiring. The breather has lasted almost forty years.

Yes there is a shuttle, but it does not really advance manned space flight much past LEO.

Re:The Space unRace

[pinkocommie]

2 points
1) Why is it that resting on ones laurels and huge lead is bad for the army (read the hundreds of billions being drained by the military being a good thing even though the US army is generations ahead of the rest of the world) vs space?
2) Resting on ones laurels in general is the easiest way to get passed over by others (tortoise n the hare?)

OT: Imagine if the 500+ billion the US invests in military tech was diverting to other sciences for a decade :)

Re:See this... coral cache

[Anonymous Coward]

coral network cache

Private companies are behind all national efforts

[Anonymous Coward]

It's government-designed devices and crafts that should be considered the exception, not the reverse. Governments are just big customers.

Back to Reality...

[Mulletproof]

Decades ago???? OOOOoooh, you mean like back in 1981, right? Let's buy some perspective here-- The goal was to create an affordable, reusable space vehical. Decades ago, this thing did qualify. Heck, for the russians it still sounds like it doesn't qualify.

Sure, now it might be time for a change, but I'd say the current shuttle has served it's intended purpose pretty damn well.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

Sure, now it might be time for a change, but I'd say the current shuttle has served it's intended purpose pretty damn well.

Well you'd only say that if you were ignorant. It costs almost 500 million dollars to launch a shuttle, hardly affordable. The shuttle isn't really reusable as it has to be reassembled by a team of thousands of technicians every time it comes back to earth in preparation for the next launch. NASA was originally talking about seven day turnarounds for the shuttle, that never happened and if the shuttle is so fucking great then why is it that we started building Titans and Deltas again after the Challenger disaster?

The shuttle is a piece of shit, it should be cancelled immediately and the money should be used to build something that doesn't suck, doesn't cost an arm and a leg and isn't quite so good at killing astronauts. If that means that we go back to expendable vehicles such as the Saturn V, fine, let's do it. But let's scuttle the shuttle now!

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

~450 million dollars:

http://flightprojects.msfc.nasa.gov/faq.html

It carries 27,500 kg payload to LEO. So, 16k$/kg. Compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5, and 7k$ for a Proton rocket. However, the shuttle has many advantages to them (much larger payload capacity for larger satellites, the best safety records of any manned rocket with a large number of launches under its belt, much greater in-orbit maneuverability and other in-orbit capabilities), etc, so the extra cost is justified in *some* circumstances. Also, the space shuttle itself doesn't really cost 450 million dollars per launch; that number is arrived at by looking at the annual budget to the shuttle, and dividing by the number of launches. However, the shuttle's budget also goes toward research on and improvement of the craft, among other things (some projects are even barely related to the shuttle). A more realistic number is around 13k$/kg.

> The shuttle is a piece of shit

The safest man-capable spacecraft in the world is a "piece of shit"? It's expensive, but it's not a "piece of shit".

> isn't quite so good at killing astronauts

A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.

> go back to expendible vehicles such as the Saturn V

We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.

Addendum: If we'd given the shuttle development the budget that it needed (instead of *halving it* without cutting scope), it'd be a titanium hot frame craft with no SRBs, and consequently not had any of the problems that have plagued it and increased its maintainence costs.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

It carries 27,500 kg payload to LEO. So, 16k$/kg. Compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5, and 7k$ for a Proton rocket. However, the shuttle has many advantages to them (much larger payload capacity for larger satellites, the best safety records of any manned rocket with a large number of launches under its belt, much greater in-orbit maneuverability and other in-orbit capabilities), etc, so the extra cost is justified in *some* circumstances. Also, the space shuttle itself doesn't really cost 450 million dollars per launch; that number is arrived at by looking at the annual budget to the shuttle, and dividing by the number of launches. However, the shuttle's budget also goes toward research on and improvement of the craft, among other things (some projects are even barely related to the shuttle). A more realistic number is around 13k$/kg.

You trust NASA's accounting figures? How charming. I have some great stock in Enron to sell you, it's going to make a big comeback. Firstly the Shuttle's capacity to LEO is only 24,400 kg (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm, this was reduced after the Challenger disaster). So if we use your numbers the cost is actually 18.4k$/kg. Secondly this still sucks compared to the Delta IV Large. The Delta IV Large can put 25,800kg into LEO for 170 million a launch, for a cost of 6.6k$/kg. (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm) So it would seem the sensible thing to do to use the Delta IV large to launch components of the ISS, except that if we did that the need for Shuttle launches would drop to zero since no one but NASA uses the Shuttle, which would pretty much eliminate the need for the Shuttle program.

As for the Shuttle's capabilities most of them are wasted. The capability to take satellites out of orbit is wasted, the cross range landing capability is unneeded and if you don't need to launch human beings then why are you risking them with Shuttle launches? An F-22 Raptor has a whole bunch of really neat capabilities that a 747 doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that it would be the right plane for FedEx or UPS to buy for their airfreight needs.

As for the Shuttle's scientific missions most of them are a joke. The Russians learned more about the effects of weightlessness on human beings on Mir than the Shuttle will ever teach us (Hell, we learned more about the effects of weightlessness from Skylab) and most of the experiments that are done on the Shuttle are the kind of thing you'd find at a junior high school science fair.

A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.

As opposed to the Saturn V which had a failure rate of zero percent in flight.

We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.

No, we could actually make something better, instead we're stuck funding the Shuttle, which is used to launch stuff to ISS. And we need ISS because if we didn't have ISS then the Shuttle wouldn't have anywhere to go and a bunch of aerospace contractors would be out some large sums of cash.

Addendum: If we'd given the shuttle development the budget that it needed (instead of *halving it* without cutting scope), it'd be a titanium hot frame craft with no SRBs, and consequently not had any of the problems that have plagued it and increased its maintainence costs.

Yes, and if frogs had pockets they'd carry .38 specials and wouldn't get eaten by snakes. Fantasizing about what the Shuttle might have been has nothing to do with what it is, a bloated, wasteful, stupid means of getting things into orbit that should be replaced immediately.

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

> You trust NASA's accounting figures

Oh please. Please share with me your idle conspiratorial speculation on how money is either being snuck into or out of the shuttle program, and where to/from.

> Delta IV Large

Which Doesn't Exist (which doesn't have even a fraction of the shuttle's capabilities in the design, either). Perhaps you missed the "Status: Development" line? Want me to cite the predicted numbers for how much the shuttle was going to cost per kg during its development phase?

The Delta IV Medium does exist, mind you, but apart from not having the shuttle's capability (reentry of payloads, extensive maneuverability, man-capability, etc), its payload rate is 23k$/kg.

> The shuttle's capabilities are wasted

Completely and utterly wrong. Man-capable? Go ahead, send people to ISS on a Delta series rocket. Extensive ability for in-flight orbit changes? It's what allows shuttle launches to carry many different payloads on a single mission, which has been an incredibly, incredibly useful thing (most launches that don't have this sort of maneuverability often have a large amount of wasted payload capacity). Large payloads? While not as important as they used to be, they're still critical in many cases. Etc.

> As for the shuttle's scientific missions most of them are a joke.

Once again, an unreferenced, detail lacking claim. Lets put some matter into this claim. Here's just life sciences (the type that you specifically derrided) experiments, which are just a small fraction of shuttle experiments:

http://lifesci.arc.nasa.gov/lis2/Chapter5_Post_1 99 5_Payloads/Shuttle_Post95/Shuttle_Profiles_Intro.h tml

I want you to go there and tell me which ones are a "joke". Don't try and weasel out of this, either.

> As opposed to the Saturn V which had a failure rate of zero percent ... Which had only 13 flights, if I recall correctly. With it's margin of error, you're well outside 2%. Try again!

> No, we could actually make something better

Thank you for admitting precisely what I said. We can't make Saturn V's now, and that we should move on to making something better than the Shuttle (the only thing that I add is "using the knowledge that we've gained from the shuttle program...")

> Yes, and if frogs had pockets..

What I said isn't idle speculation. It's fact. The shuttle was not to have SRBs, and was to have a titanium hot frame. Both shuttle accidents would have been avoided with such a design, along with many other "problems", and maintainance would have been vastly reduced due to the ability to accept higher reentry temperatures allowing much simpler TPS.

In short: either add some substance to your posts, or quit posting. General insults are not welcome, and are not debate.

Re:Back to Reality...

[crotherm]

Delta IV Large

Which Doesn't Exist (which doesn't have even a fraction of the shuttle's capabilities in the design, either). Perhaps you missed the "Status: Development" line? Want me to cite the predicted numbers for how much the shuttle was going to cost per kg during its development phase?

The Delta IV Heavy does exist, but will be making its maiden flight Dec 10.

Here is a link.

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

It's not available until you can start buying flights on it (and its cost numbers aren't valid until that point). Back in the 70s, I could have made all sorts of claims about "look at how cheap space flight will be once the shuttle makes it onto the pad!". However, it hadn't yet, and once it actually did, its costs went way up.

Re:Back to Reality...

[FleaPlus]

> The shuttle's capabilities are wasted

Completely and utterly wrong.

It's interesting that you didn't address the Air Force's crossrange requirement, which indeed was wasted. It's never been used, but still takes a significant toll in terms of weight, cost, complexity, and safety.

Re:Back to Reality...

[crotherm]

OK then, nine more days till we talk again.. :)

Re:Back to Reality...

[Teancum]

We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.

I find that a highly suspicious statement to make. While I would agree that re-creating the Saturn V would cost the same as developing any other new manned vehicle, and there certainly have been some substantial improvements in spaceflight since the 1960's when most Saturn V's were made, to simply rule out adoption of the design principles of the Saturn V is indeed being close minded.

The point about the Saturn V is that it was a man-rated space vehicle capable of lifting a tremendous amount of stuff into orbit.... a lunar expedition vehicle and support equipment for a manned landing at that, or even the launch of Skylab. If we could do it in the 1960's, we certainly should be capable of putting together a Saturn V using 21st Century technology. And from what I've seen you could put together a production line of Saturn V's for a price tag that competes very favorably with the Space Shuttle.... and even have the same crew capacity + extra mission payload. Even the Saturn I rockets were a worthy launch platform.

I admit, though, that the requisite assembly lines and technology infrastructure to make a Saturn V would have to be totally recreated if it or something like it were ever developed, and I think there are several other rocket companies (like SpaceX) that will eventually get to the lifting capacity of the Saturn V, if a rocket that size is ever needed. The Saturn V was killed because there were no other mission requirements that required that much mass into orbit.

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

I wouldn't say that it's wasted. The only major thing that they had to do for the crossrange requirement (that I'm aware of) was use delta wings, and there are plenty of other reasons for wanting delta wings on a spacecraft. Delta wings have less drag in hypersonic flight, which means that they can direct more of the reentry energy to lift, and keep the shuttle out of the denser atmosphere for longer, making reentry easier. They're also more maneuverable at hypersonic speeds. The downsides, of course, are that they're somewhat heavier, and harder to work with at low speeds due to air spilling around the wingtips.

A more significant penalty was the requirement for a very large cargo bay. However, that penalty is starting to seem more and more like a blessing, as we've come to realize the difficulties of reentry of large spacecraft, due to the high temperatures experienced because of the large mass to surface area ratio. Consequently, the less dense the craft is, the easier reentry is, and a large payload bay helps with this.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

Which Doesn't Exist (which doesn't have even a fraction of the shuttle's capabilities in the design, either). Perhaps you missed the "Status: Development" line? Want me to cite the predicted numbers for how much the shuttle was going to cost per kg during its development phase?

Bet you that the Delta IV heavy flies before the Shuttle does again. Hell, the Shuttle is in redevelopment because NASA doesn't want to lose another seven astronauts.

The Delta IV Medium does exist, mind you, but apart from not having the shuttle's capability (reentry of payloads, extensive maneuverability, man-capability, etc), its payload rate is 23k$/kg.

Most of the wonderful capabilities of the Shuttle are wasted. The extensive maneuverability? Totally unnecessary and unused, if the Shuttle were designed as originally proposed, something which you keep bleating about, it wouldn't have this unneeded capability. Bringing things back from orbit? How often has this been used? It's largely been written off because it's more effective to build a new satellite and launch it than it is to haul it back on the Shuttle, fix it and then launch it again. Man capability? Mostly unnecessary and an unnecessary risk on many flights and an added source of cost for the safety systems needed to insure crew safety.

Once again, an unreferenced, detail lacking claim. Lets put some matter into this claim. Here's just life sciences (the type that you specifically derrided) experiments, which are just a small fraction of shuttle experiments:

http://lifesci.arc.nasa.gov/lis2/Chapter5_Post_199 5_Payloads/Shuttle_Post95/Shuttle_Profiles_Intro.h tml

I want you to go there and tell me which ones are a "joke". Don't try and weasel out of this, either.

I think they're all a joke. The Neurolab experiment is completely useless, as for studying the effects of zero gravity on lab rats we've got 30 plus years of studying the effects of zero gravity on human beings, which is somewhat more relevant. I want you to name ten major advancements in scientific knowledge that have come about because of the "science" done on the Space Shuttle. No fair counting the Hubble launch or repair missions or the Ulysses or Galileo launches. While you're at it find a reputable life scientist who thinks that the cost of each Shuttle mission and the risk of loss of life is worth it for the "scientific" results that the "experiments" on board produce.

What I said isn't idle speculation. It's fact. The shuttle was not to have SRBs, and was to have a titanium hot frame. Both shuttle accidents would have been avoided with such a design, along with many other "problems", and maintainance would have been vastly reduced due to the ability to accept higher reentry temperatures allowing much simpler TPS.

No, what you said is idle speculation because that vehicle wasn't built. If you can bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then I get to bring up any hypothetical vehicle that I want. Also if you're going to bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then you might want to read the Wikipedia article on the Shuttle. NASA's original design didn't have the cargo capacity of the current shuttle (which you cite as an advantage), didn't have the cross range and maneuverability, didn't have the crew capacity, didn't have single orbit abort, wasn't designed for polar orbit launch, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, the "Shuttle that might have been" based upon Max Faget's original designs or the Flyback F1 would have been a really good vehicle, it wasn't built. If you look at the history of the Shuttle's development NASA basically lied to Congress about the Shuttle's capabilities, lied to the Air Force to get them on board for more funding (which allowed the Air Force to insist on design changes such as single orbit abort, polar launch capability, a larger payload, 1500 nautical mile cross range capability, etc, etc) and delivered a vehicle which h

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

> Bet you that the Delta IV heavy flies before the Shuttle

Nononono! You're completely missing the point. If *You* get to cite *projected* numbers for a craft that doesn't exist for customers yet, then *I* get to do the same for the space shuttle. So, taking your approach, I get to say that the shuttle costs 1,000$ per kilogram.

Beat That.

> The extensive maneuverability? Totally unnecessary
> and unused

IN-ORBIT maneuverability of the shuttle is extensively used on almost every mission, and is what allows the shuttle to deliver multiple payloads and/or visit multiple satellites and/or maneuver into proper observation orbits, all on the same trip. It's an incredibly valuable ability; many missions would be completely impossible without it.

> Bringing things back from orbit? How often has this been > used?

Can't you look things up for yourself? Almost Every Time the shuttle went to the manned ISS, it brought back the trash from the station. It was one of the mission critical roles. Trash won't just float back to earth; you need delta-V to get it back down. This is a critical role for which Soyuz has (poorly) been forced to adopt since. Of course, that's not all it's brought down - dozens of satellites have been retrieved, such as Spartan series, Wake Shield, Space Flyer, CRISTA, EURECA, etc. Through STS-72, the shuttle retrieved 21 payloads (exluding trash), with a total mass of 18.5 tons.

> It's largely been written off because it's more effective to
> build a new satellite and launch it than it is to haul it
> back on the Shuttle

As I just showed that's BS, I need not even bother with this one. However, I'm going to add nonetheless that most retrievals weren't for "repair and relaunch". Some were to figure out what had gone wrong on a satellite. Some were research craft, launched with the intent to be retrieved at a later date. Etc.

> Man capability? Mostly unnecessary

I've seen numbers from scientists arguing for more automation that about half of the experiments done onboard the shuttle could be automated. That still leaves the other half, missions to ISS, etc.

> I think they're all a joke.

Oh really? This should be easy, then :) Everyone, here is what this poster says is a joke (just a small handful):

Study of skeletal myofiber atrophy (Want to have humans in space or low-G bodies for long periods of time? Apparently you don't.)

To examine the effects of space radiation on both somatic and germ cells and the effects of microgravity on cellular repair (Want to have people in space not get radiation poisoned? Want to have future colonists' children not all have horrible genetic diseases? Apparently not.)

To further test the ability of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1) to prevent or reduce the detrimental effects of space flight on the immune system (I.e., you think that we shouldn't be testing a proposed *solution* to the first problem - it's a "joke" to you)

To determine whether compression wood formation occurs in microgravity, and to establish the time course of its (potential) induction at both 1 G and in microgravity (Because, of course, you never want to see plants grown in microgravity; a joke, right?)

I could *easily* keep going. And here, we're just looking at life sciences!

> I want you to name ten major advancements in scientific
> knowledge that have come about because of the
> "science" done on the Space Shuttle.

Name you're field. I'll just pick 10 random ones. Lets assume that you don't want any that only apply to space exploration, just to make it easier.

SIR-C/X-SAR (allowed scientists to understand the physics behind anomalies in radar measurements using a single frequency, as well as providing some of the most detailed maps of earth ever (everything from vegetation to temperature to altitude, with a resolution of 100 meters). In hours, made most la

Re:Back to Reality...

[6th time lucky]

AFAIK the crossrange ability is a big thing in the man-rated features of the shuttle. If you *need* the shuttle down *now* then the 1000km crossrange is going to help a lot in getting to a landing site. Near enough can be good enough, rather than waiting a dozen orbits for the right place on earth to appear under you.

The 1000km number comes from the air force requirment to land in the same place it took off from after only 1 orbit. Dont forget the Earth moves as well as the shuttle. How much? depends on your inclination, but if you are flying over soviet russia ill bet its close to 1000km. So to get back to where you started you need to be able to move which needs fuel or gliding ability.

So in either case it is a *good thing* that the crossrange ability hasnt been used because:
a) we havnt needed to spy/nuke russia
b) we havnt had an in-orbit emergency

Re:Back to Reality...

[grozzie2]

The safest man-capable spacecraft in the world is a "piece of shit"?

If the shuttle is the safest spacecraft for the job, why is Nasa using Soyuz equipment for thier manned launches ?

Re:Back to Reality...

[Rei]

To put it bluntly, because if something bad happens on the Soyuz, we can blame the Russians ;)

NASA, unfortunately, is mired in congressional politics (undoubtedly much to their chagrin). Another accident on a US spacecraft shortly after Columbia, no matter how unlikely, would be devastating. Any NASA director who kept launching shuttle flights after Columbia without the review currently going on would be immediately replaced. An accident on Soyuz, however, would actually be somewhat beneficial from a PR standpoint, as it would reinforce in the public's mind how dangerous space travel is (which it, indeed, is; you're strapping yourself to a ready made bomb and accelerating yourself faster than a bullet every time you try and take off, and then reentering at brazing temperatures).

The facts remain nonetheless: There have been a lower percentage of disastrous Shuttle launches than Soyuz launches.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

You are so pathetic, and the evidence of this is contained in this sentence:

Can't you look things up for yourself? Almost Every Time the shuttle went to the manned ISS, it brought back the trash from the station. It was one of the mission critical roles. Trash won't just float back to earth; you need delta-V to get it back down. This is a critical role for which Soyuz has (poorly) been forced to adopt since. Of course, that's not all it's brought down - dozens of satellites have been retrieved, such as Spartan series, Wake Shield, Space Flyer, CRISTA, EURECA, etc. Through STS-72, the shuttle retrieved 21 payloads (exluding trash), with a total mass of 18.5 tons.

Wow, that's great, the Shuttle can retrieve trash from ISS (another huge waste of money). So the Shuttle can be used to bring back to earth the empty bottles of water (which we spend about $250,000 a day on for the ISS crew). Dude, can you say "pathetic attempt at reaching for justification"? Oh, and did we really need the Shuttle to bring all of that stuff back from orbit? Could missions have been designed to return things from orbit without using the Shuttle? Yep. They sure could have.

You've drank the NASA Kool-Aid you've bought the NASA party line and you obviously love the taste of Shuttle cock (nice little play on words there). For those of us who haven't bought into the Shuttle myth as you have the Shuttle is a program that is desperately in need of justification, it always has been.

Congratulations, with credulous tards like you around NASA will never have to actually go anywhere or do anything significant with the manned space program, they can just fly around in orbit, over and over again, feed lots of money to USA to make Boeing and Lock-Mart stockholders happy (Are you one of them perhaps, or do you work for NASA?).

Why more than three people?

[reality-bytes]

That could well be the case but I can't see the reason behind the pre-occupation with cramming more people into the launch vehicle.

If you need more than three, the obvious solution is to launch twice.

Depending where you look, the cost of a Soyuz manned launch is between $20million and $30million. For that money, you can launch one crew, then another, then another, then another.....

And eventually, you will arrive at the cost of one $500million, 7-seater Shuttle launch.

Re:Why more than three people?

[niall2]

If you need more than three, the obvious solution is to launch twice.

No the big deal is we need more than 2 on the ISS. This delvieres more people and provides for 6 to reenter in one craft (after NASA canceled its lifeboat lifting body project due to cost overruns).

Re:Why more than three people?

[reality-bytes]

So you could launch twice or even three times while rotating crews on the station.

You would of course, need 2 or more Soyuz standby return vehicles and a docking point for each.

I'd take it as being, you can already have 2x Soyuz modules docked with the ISS (the lifeboat + one at the UDM)

So, if you were to launch 3 Soyuz crews (2 crew per capsule + cargo) and replace the Shuttle dock with a dock costing the same as the Pirs one (which is also an EVA staging module) at $32 million + launch cost, You'd be needing to spend around $130 million initially and then $60 million per rotation if one crew of two people are not rotated. That gives the ISS a crew of 6 between changes.

That could be a really bargain remembering that one Shuttle launch costs $300-$500million.

Didn't qualify ~ Typo

[Mulletproof]

"Decades ago, this thing did qualify."

Didn't didn't DIDN'T.
Damn typos.

Chinese Ambitions in Space: Not Funny At All

[Anonymous Coward]

I caution the Russians against revealing any technical data about their spacecraft to the Chinese. The Chinese have designs to militarize space. Indeed, the Chinese space program is located entirely within the Chinese Department of War. By contrast, NASA is an entirely civilian effort.

One thing that the Chinese have planned is to install a particle-beam laser battlestation in low earth orbit. Not coincidentally, Peter Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant to the USA, was arrested and punished for giving top-secret laser technology to Beijing. Also, not coincidentally, another Taiwanese immigrant to the USA gave neutron bomb technology to Beijing, according to the Cox Report produced by a Congressional committee on national security in the early 80s.

Why?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do poeple spend the time to create a "rocket" insted of using resources to make an actual ship, something that can take off and land from a runway. Seems a bit more practical to me. But Hey! what do i know, im just a geek..

Re:Why?!

[WhiplashII]

what do i know, im just a geek

To help you out here - most people agree that at least taking off from a runway doesn't make sense for large launches. Getting to orbit takes a LOT of energy, typically more than 7 times the mass of the ship in the highest energy mass density fuel available (hydrogen)! So, in order to lift off horizontally, you need wings that can carry all that mass at takeoff. It turns out the wings are too heavy if strong enough to support the fuel mass. It can be done with staging (leaving the wings behind), but then you need an amazingly huge aircraft, that can lift multiple thousands of tons!

Landing is debatable, though. Wings weigh more than a parachute, but add a LOT of capabilities. The common fight here is retro-rockets (seen as having safety issues) verses wings (heavier, and not quite as capable as retro-rockets). For real examples of the various problems, the DC-X landed hard and broke, the Space Shuttle landed short (and would have been destroyed anywhere but in the Utah desert).

Landing mass is very important, because it has to be lifted up, accelerated (using 7 times its mass in propellant), and decellerated (requires your shielding to handle more energy disipation).

Re:Why?!

[amorsen]

the Space Shuttle landed short (and would have been destroyed anywhere but in the Utah desert).

The only story like that I can find is about a simulated landing. Is that what you are referring to? It is an interesting story though, particularly because the problem was with the actual simulation hardware. Therefore it wasn't an intentional simulated emergency. The simulation ended with loss of vehicle and crew, caused by nothing more than a stuck gauge needle.

Re:Why?!

[WhiplashII]

That one was very interesting - I was actually thinking of STS-37, which landed 600ft short of the runway at Edwards. (Of course, that is not in Utah - I got that one wrong, I was mixing up two missions.)

Basically, the weather people miss-predicted the winds at altitude. Fortunately, the Edwards runway has large under and overruns (its really just a big dry lake bed), so the Shuttle didn't break up. On a normal runway it would have been loss of orbiter, loss of crew.

Best Link I can find

It is interesting that this isn't mentioned in any official places - wouldn't it be better if NASA admitted to any and all mistakes? That way people would know that space is still dangerous. As it is, the public thinks that the shuttle is safe and boring - so they go ballistic when it fails. In reality, I think almost every mission has some failure.

Oh, great!

[Quixote]

Thanks to the Slashdotting, the bandwidth bill alone will set their space program back decades...

ROFL

[RAMMS EIN]

I somehow find this very funny. I still remember reading that the russian space agency did not have the money to deliver the promised parts of the ISS. So it feels like they didn't have enough money to build the current space station, so they did the one thing they could do and designed the next one. ROFL

Poor talented but discarded engineers.

Re:ROFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to mention that NASA wasn't able to deliver these modules despite they had billions of dollars and 15 years of research put into them.

The best part of the entire article

[deft]

is when he says neither the US nor Europe have anything like it.

And I'm thinking to myself, its a MODEL you assclown, you don't have it either... otherwise I'd have a B-17 bomber.

Just reminded me ..

[apankrat]

I happened to see a promotional video of one of the Energia subsidaries, who were developing Buran's thermal tiles.

The demo'ed tiles that were about 4" x 4" and a half inch think or so. They had really impressive bit where the tile was resting flat on the palm of some girl and it was blasted with oxy-acetylene torch from the top. The spot under the torch was red hot, yet the girl was alive and smiling :)

Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war?

[alwaystheretrading]

Picture 26 in the photo gallery shows a close up of the front of the ship. But what are those three 50cal machine gun ports doing there? Have the Russians developed a space fighter?

Re:Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

But what are those three 50cal machine gun ports doing there? Have the Russians developed a space fighter?

Sigh. These are the mount points for the emergency escape system that is supposed to sit on top in the launch configuration. This, like the Soyuz, and unlike the Shuttle, features an escape system which is operational in every stage of launch all the way from launchpad to orbit insertion.

Re:Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh. These are the mount points for the emergency escape system that is supposed to sit on top in the launch configuration. This, like the Soyuz, and unlike the Shuttle, features an escape system which is operational in every stage of launch all the way from launchpad to orbit insertion.

While those ports are certainly for the purpose you mentioned, the Russians appear to have put cannons on their spaceships before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3/ I guess it's one thing to be able to shoot down a satellite in 1975, another thing entirely for someone to start using anti-satellite weapons nowadays.

Besides, would the Russians post a big picture of their shiny new machine-gun equipped spaceship model on the web?

Re:Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war?

[CSG_SurferDude]

Noooooo....

That's what they WANT you to think.

Those are really the new and improved Mark III Ion Cannons which are disguised to look like mounting points for the emergency escape system.

Re:Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war?

[Anonymous Coward]

The previous design was slightly heavier - 14.5 tons vs. current 13 tons - and the launch escape system was at the Kliper's front. The current design has the LES moved back, behind the life module (that one with docking unit) - in fact, the LES even supposed to add some delta-V to Kliper, being used as additional stage after its primary function isn't needed anymore. But the Kliper mockup was constructed for the previous design - with LES on the highest point of the rocket stack - and the connection points weren't removed by the time of presentation.

So they aren't guns, but leftovers from the previous design.

Radiates?

[way2trivial]

s/b absorbs?

Re:Radiates?

[drinkypoo]

Look up some references on near infrared radiation. A black object does absorb more of the energy directed at it, but it also radiates more energy.

Shuttle notwithstanding,

[StarKruzr]

this Russian Kliper design is excellent. If NASA were smart they would jump on the Russian project and ask to co-develop it with them, it appears they've already done a lot of the research legwork.

Sadly, however, NASA's culture is far too arrogant to do something that smart.

Makes all the difference in the world....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

When AMERICANS run the rape rooms and torture chambers, it provides opportunities to shovel tax money into the private sector to pay for all those "contractors" and "advisors" from DynCorp, CACI, Titan, etc.

http://warprofiteers.com/article.php?id=11285

When the Iraqis did it, all American corporations got to do was sell them weapons...

Carbon-carbon confusion

[amightywind]

Things that get Really Fsking Hot are black because the only thing that will handle the heat is a carbon-carbon composite.

The carbon-carbon panels on the space shuttle are grey, not black. The black tiles on underside of the space shuttle are silica based, not carbon composites.

Re:Carbon-carbon confusion

[cmowire]

Oops. You are entirely correct.

I found a nice article about the different versions of the thermal protection system.

finally

[wes33]

this is just what america needs. NASA isn't really up to designing new spacecraft. So pony up the money and let the russians build this thing and america gets to be first in line to fly it. You can pay for it with action movies and Brittany Spears' videos (something america, for the moment, leads the world at).

In Modern Russia

[Retep Vosnul]

In Mordern Russia Soyuz is only for old soviet. Bye bye karma ( Oww. I had none ! )

The US Space Program

[NetNinja]

Well Like NASA, FBI ,CIA The military

With cut backs and everybody looking out for themselves its no wonder everything is fucked up.

People not sharing information because the other person will get the credit.

People worried whether they are going to have a retirement.

Not taking pictures because it cost to much money to see if the shuttles wing might have been damaged on lift off.
"Hey and if your wrong they can your ass and you sweep the hanger deck for the rest of your career".

The name of the game is watch your own back because nobody else will.

This crap is rolling over into the private sector.
Everybody is so fucking petty now.

When enough people are wrong nobody is to blame.

Energia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh, with a cool name like that, no wonder my Lethargia Rocket Company isn't doing too well.

Maybe its just me...

[Digital G]

But doesnt this look a bit like a StarTrek shuttle craft? Hmmm...

Re:Chinese Ambitions in Space: Not Funny At All

[Rei]

(sarcasm)
Yes, the militaristic Chinese, who are so militaristic that they spend 1/20th as much on their military as we do, with their economy that's over half the size of ours.
(/sarcasm)

cool...

[Gizmoguy]

Sounds good to me. Good to see the USSR fighting back against the USA. SPACE RACE!!!

What's that....

[MarksManB]

I smell failure. This is reminescent of the Boron (Shuttle clone).

Re:What's that....

[z3021017]

Boron is a non-metal element with atomic number 5.
Buran is the name of the Russian space shuttle.

Re:What's that....

[FleaPlus]

Do you actually know anything about the Buran? It successfully launched and landed autonomously. Several aspects of the design were superior to the US Space Shuttle, and I'm fairly certain it had a lower cost-per-flight.

The primary reason we don't have Buran's zipping around today is because the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing down many of its pet projects. That, and the head of the Buran project was part of an attempted coup of Boris Yeltsin.

U.S. fund Kliper? Maybe that's the idea.

[Latent Heat]

You don't suppose the "here is Kliper, our next-generation spacecraft" and the scuffing of feet and "gee, we don't quite have the funds to build it" isn't a solicitation of some sort? It looks like they are casting about for partners.

As to "NASA's culture is far too arrogant to do something that smart", there is a lot more to the story. That James Oberg fellow who wrote one of the linked articles worked for NASA a long time ago but has been an independent author and consultant on these matters. It is safe to say that James Oberg is not NASA -- he has been as critical of NASA as he has been of the Russians, and he has been NASA's biggest, biggest critic for doing what you say they have been unable to do -- cooperate with the Russians.

Oberg is one of these uber geeks who has made it his life work to understand as much as anyone in the West about the Russian space program. As to why his interest in the Russians, it is kind of like a Trekker who is into Klingon gear rather than the Federation.

While Oberg knows more about the Russian space program than anyone outside Russia, he is not one of these guys who has "gone native" or has ungrudging admiration for their work. He is a true geek who calls it as he sees it, has travelled to Khazikstan just to see what kind of shape things are in, and the Russians get nervous when he wants to know what is in that junkyard just over the fence.

His big cause was trying to put the brakes on NASA when "let's use Russian hardware" was the solution to everything NASA was trying to do with the International Space Station. The Russians obviously had the most experience with their Mir space station, but their industrial base was imploding, and Oberg was concerned that the return on the dollar for buying Russian hardware wasn't going to be there -- things were in such bad shape it wasn't clear whether they could deliver on their committments.

NASA's big problem is they keep going in different directions that don't pan out. One direction was X-33/Venture Star. Another direction was co-develop with the Russians -- while I don't think it was quite as bad as Oberg made it out to be, I don't think NASA has been left with warm fuzzy feelings about the Russians.

Ariane 5 could mount Kliper!

[Holger Spielmann]

Great! Kliper is about 14.5 tons in launch configuration, and Ariane 5G can launch 16 tons to LEO. Ariane 5G was designed for the Hermes space plane, so it should be feasible to man-rate it.
Let's hope that there will be a close cooperation between Europe and Russia. Rumours about Russia joining ESA already surface now and then. AFAIK the main prolem (next to authoritarian, non-democratic tendencies in Russia) is that the cuurent ESA treaty requires every member to pay a share of the common space projects. The treaty would have to be altered to allow Russia to pay it's share in hardware and services.
Nevertheless, this seems as a promising opportunity to me. Especially as a the article on russianspaceweb.com states that a major portion of the 10 bn. Rubel development costs is for the Onega booster, which wouldn't be required if Ariane 5 could be used.

Re:Ariane 5 could mount Kliper!

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia has been officially invited to join ESA and they have officially declined the offer. Ariane 5G does not meet Russian safety standards. The Ukrainian Cyclone booster is far closer to what the Russians need for Klipper, but that country is going to hell right now, so they decided to build their own booster. Onega will be ready before Ariane becomes man-rated. Heck, Ariane is not even fully satellite rated at the moment -- the first stage (exploded, what, three times so far?) engine needs a complete re-design, it seems.

Re:Ariane 5 could mount Kliper!

[Anonymous Coward]

The first stage has so far exploded once in 18 launches.

Otherwise, I guess you are right. I also don't see Europe in any particular space programme that might justify such significant investments. They seem rather content with what they can do with the Russians right now, and sort of dance around the limitations.

When will this Russian concept never get finished?

[heroine]

They better get started on the Mars base they said they were going to build a few years ago if they ever intend to get this one started.

Even in Trek, the US isn't boss

[meringuoid]

It is not like startrek, where americans rule the world, you know.

Even in Star Trek, Americans don't rule the world. The Vulcans rule the world - they're massively overrepresented in Starfleet high command and in the Federation government, every time we see the top brass there are pointy ears everywhere. But we notice that no Starfleet ship ever has more than one or two Vulcans on board, and the occasional representative of one of the other Federation races. What's going on here?

Answer: the Vulcans, nervous about their Klingon and Romulan neighbours, found a culture just emerging from pre-warp savagery and made contact. Since then they've been quietly manipulating Earth, making sure it's always humans in the front line doing the fighting and dying and Vulcans in High Command, and placing Vulcan agents on all starships to ensure political control of the fleet, like the KGB used to do with the Soviet navy.

Of course, humans aren't stupid and a lot of them have caught on to what the Vulcans are up to. So what have they done about it? Answer: exactly what the Vulcans did, on a smaller scale. Notice how not only are Starfleet crews predominantly human, but predominantly American? No coincidence. And the occasional Scottish engineer or suspiciously English-sounding French captain? Yep... political control again.

Note that the Federation government is based in Paris (IIRC), while Starfleet Command is in San Francisco. Who's giving the orders, and who's doing the fighting? Right.

Re:Even in Trek, the US isn't boss

[Thundersnatch]

Even in Star Trek, Americans don't rule the world. The Vulcans rule the world...

From this tirade, we can all safely assume you have never had consensual sex with a woman.

It's a FREAKING TV SHOW, allright? Not real life. You should have listened to your mother when she told you to go play outside, join a team sport, and make new friends.

Re:Even in Trek, the US isn't boss

[myowntrueself]

The Vulcans of Trek are actually just a devious ploy by the Romulans; the Romulans knew that the Earthlings wouldn't trust them so they invented the Vulcans to infiltrate the fledgling UFP. :-P

Never *ever* trust a Vulcan.

Re:Even in Trek, the US isn't boss

[bbc]

Round ears good, pointy ears bad?

Re:Even in Trek, the US isn't boss

[myowntrueself]

Yeah and that applies to elves too...

I'll never forget some of the one-liners from Baldurs Gate;

Kagain the Dwarf: "Damn forest, always reminds me of pansy elves"

or my favorite...

Xzar the necromancer: "I wanted infravision like the elves, but tis more than just eating their eyes!"

Name

[medvezhatnik]

does anyone know whay hey called it Kliper ? to me it sounds very stupid, even by the russian standards. there are no such word in their dictionary. is it an acronym ?

Re:Name

[Rick Genter]

This implies that it is a derivation of the word Clipper.

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Migraineman]

The US Space Shuttle has significant capabilities - like returning heavy payloads back from orbit - that even *we* don't use. The primary return-mission for the Shuttle is to return the Leonardo module from the ISS. Leonardo, if you don't know, is a glorified trash can. Hell, if you compare the Saturn V launch capability to the Shuttle, the US space program took a giant step backwards because of the Shuttle (and associated politics.)

The Shuttle is the equivalent of a pickup truck that's been tasked with replacing tractor-trailers, Greyhound busses, garbage trucks, and NASCAR race cars. Sure, it's capable of performing all those funcitons, just don't expect it to perform any of them well.

Consider what space exploration would be like today if the Saturn V (or VI or VII) were in service today, in concert with a crew-only vehicle to transport the sentient meat. Use the Saturn booster to take the large, heavy ISS sections into (a useful) orbit, and haul the people up and down on a vehicle designed just for that. And while we're at it, just how do any future missions plan to escape earth orbit (to go places like, say, the Moon?) The Shuttle is incapable of getting out of LEO, so you ain't gonna use that. The Saturn series were the only ones that could get useful[*] payloads into a lunar insertion orbit. The Delta IV Heavy might be able to do it, but it'll be a smaller payload than a Saturn, and it'll be sans meat.

[*] I use the term "useful" here because it's obvious we can get 1000kg to Mars or to the Moon or to interesting comets. But in terms of establishing a manned presence on another planet/moon, we need to send lots more than that ... and not in 1000kg chunks.

See also SpaceShipOne

[Artifice_Eternity]

Scaled Composite's X Prize winner was also designed to be aerodynamically stable during re-entry. No steering, control surfaces, or attitude jets required.

A Two-Tattoo Country (Re:The US's Space Program)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Psychologists tell us to beware of a man with two tattoos. One, he may have gotten on a drunk or a dare. But two means he went back. Owen is a two-tattoo man."
(Larry Shue, "The Foreigner")

So that's what we are now, a two-tattoo country.

"New" Spacecraft?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you all, but I found there to be a more than slight resemblence between this picture of Kliper:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/kliper_ch1_2.jpg
And Blofeld's spacecraft from "You Only Live Twice" (1967 007 Movie)
http://www.thejbw.com/pics/yolt/bondpic5eats.gif
(Sorry for the awful pic. Only one I could find of the thing. Unless you want to rent the movie.)

kilper?

[spasm]

kliper? i can't find that under my kde menu.. can someone give me an ftp address?

How american of you

[SmallFurryCreature]

Only mention the things you did, not the ones others did. Like has nasa been able to keep a space station going? Answer NO. The ISS survives thanks to russian engineering. The latest rocket used by NASA? Russian technology. All the data on long time space habitation? Russian again. Probes to venus? Russian again.

It doesn't require all that much money. A soyuz launch costs 30 million. Even to the russians that is peanuts. Better it is money that remains in the country and gives scientist a reason for staying in russia (what would you choose, be an other imigrant in the US or doing space research in russia?)

Re:How american of you

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, it all stems from german v2 rocket technology captured by the US and USSR at the end of WWII.

Therefore, I invoke godwin's law on myself and declare this thread at an end (thank god)

Re: "significant capabilities"

[cheekyboy]

How much fuel does the shuttle need to get out of LEO to the moon? 3tonne? 10tonne? Surely it could carry that with it. It could get to moon orbit, but not land, or perhaps launch a lander, will it withstand the RADS? Perhaps not.

Btw, the Shuttles engines are a descendant of the Saturn V engines, but just one, not the 5 i think the Saturn V had. Its impressive, something like 1 tonne of fuel per second, through a nozzle 1 inch wide and super high presure that is ignited. Thats the trick. Uber pressure.

But maybe the shuttle has a secret role, to go up and capture enemy satelites, I think the US Airforce had some input into its design.

Torture in Iraq

[Rei]

Ok, lets see what you are trying to say isn't torture.

Manadel al-Jamadi beaten to death during interrogations in a prison shower, with medical officers faking the death certificate, and those who killed him posing for pictures with his corpse. Ather Karen al-Mowafakia died during a similar British interrogation. Worse conditions were being reported at a BIF run by Delta Force. Gary Bartlam was arrested for hoisting prisoners around on forklifts and forcing them to perform sexual acts. The Black Watch forced 17 year old Ahmad Jabber Kareem Ali to swim across a river at gunpoint after he told them he can't swim; he drown. Sgt. Lisa Marie Girman repeatedly kicked a prisoiner in the groin, abdomen, and head, and encouraged her subordinates to do the same. Sgt. Scott McKinzie held a prisoner's legs and encouraged others to kick a prisoner in the groin, step on his previously injured arms, etc. Several others were tried along with him. One prisoner, Hossam Shaltaot, reported scorpions (which are widely reported to have been common in the open-air cells) to have been placed on his body as a means of intimidation. Abd Al Jubba Mousa was beaten to death with rifle butts by British troops. Said Shabraham died in custody (no details released). An Iraqi guard hired as a translator raped a juvenile male prisoner while US soldiers looked on and took pictures (part of what spawned the Taguba investigation).

The Taguba report documents punching, slapping, and kicking detainees, as well as jumping on their naked feet; extensive sexual humiliation, forced masturbation, the rape of a female prisoner by a male US guard, jumping on top of piles of detainees, breaking chemical lights and pouring phosphoric liquid on the detainees, sodomizing detainees with chemical lights and a broom stick, beatings with a broom handle and a chair, slamming prisoners against the wall of their cells, the actual having of prisoners bitten by guard dogs (not just threatened), etc.

Of course, things didn't stop with the Taguba report. Hassan Abbad Said died in custody, and details of his death were blocked. Baha Mousa was beaten to death by members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. An al-jazeera cameraman was forced to stand for 11 hours and kicked when he collapsed (as well as being forced to wear a vomit-covered jumpsuit, and witnessed a 12-13 year old girl stripped naked and beaten). One detainee drown after being forced to jump from a bridge. Various tactics included "Waterboarding" (holding people underwater near, but not to, the point of drowning), "Gimp In A Box" (locking prisoners in the trunk of a car for extended periods of time; there were reported deaths), and hitting prisoners in the back of the neck hard enough to knock them unconscious after assuring them that they wouldn't, to catch them off guard. There have also been several allegations of the use of car batteries attached to prisoners, although noone has yet been brought to trial over these.

*** This Is Just What Has Managed To Make It Out To The Public ***

Meanwhile, to declare places used by Saddam's security forces as "torture centers", we cite small cramped rooms and hooks for hanging people upside down to have their feet beaten. This is torture, while all that we did isn't??? Someone, please explain this to me.

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Anonymous Coward]

... " is a glorified trash can."

And the shuttle is picking that up from the space station after they filled it with trash? Doesn't that make the space shuttle a glorified ... ?

(I'll let filling in of the dots as an excercise to the reader).

Then why are the astronauts on the inside and not on a ledge at the back?

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Firethorn]

Satellite retreival was indeed one of the shuttle's missions on the design board. However, the weight capability is not great.

Most of the abilities were adjusted down when the shuttle was being designed, as physics and material science reared their heads. Whole missions were scrapped.

Resting on one's laurels is bad

[Firethorn]

I think it's bad for NASA too. The problem with resting when you have a lead is momentum. As in when you realize they're catching up, you're not moving. By the time you get moving, they've passed you.

The military wants new stuff because so much is at stake. Total dominance on the battlefield actually reduces casualties for both sides (though it is canted towards the winners). But we also use a huge amount of old stuff. Think about how long we've been using the B-52, or even the F-15, F-14, and F-16. That's why we're working on the F-22 so hard. Other countries are catching up.

Re:When will this Russian concept never get finish

[angulion]

Knowing russia, you'll hear of it only after it is allreay there.

To hell with NASA...

[SvnLyrBrto]

They went from being the organization that put a man on the moon less than a decade after setting out to do so; to the organization that's done nothing but dick around in LEO for the last twenty years.... using hardware that was broken by design ten years before.

They've botched and cancelled every shuttle replacement since, and have fumbled the space station down into an almost pathetic shadow of what it was supposed to be. Oh, and those twelve men are STILL, thirty-five years later, the only humans ever to set foot an any astronomical body other than the Earth.

When I was a kid, some of my most favorite books were a set of aerospace encyclopedias my dad found in a thrift store. They were published in 1968, when NASA was competent, and about to land men on the moon. They were written with the assumption that NASA in particular, and the US aerospace industry in general, were going to REMAIN competent and continue the pace they had set. To go back and look at those books NOW, to see where we're SUPPOSED to be in space and on the moon and on Mars... it makes a sad mockery of the pathetic creature NASA has become.... just another petty bureaucracy, dominated by the ass-kissers and the ass-coverers. To hell with them.

By the time NASA gets their sorry selves back to the moon; I wouldn't be surprised if Burt Rutan has already relocated Scaled Composites headquarters there, and you can take a Virgin flight to Richard Branson's Tranquility Resort, Casino, and Historic Landmark Museum.

cya,
john

Re:To hell with NASA...

[Anonymous Coward]

"By the time NASA gets their sorry selves back to the moon; I wouldn't be surprised if Burt Rutan has already relocated Scaled Composites headquarters there, and you can take a Virgin flight to Richard Branson's Tranquility Resort, Casino, and Historic Landmark Museum."

You forgot that Chinese laundrys and Indian take-aways will be there by then :-)

Re:To hell with NASA...

[Moridineas]

Personally I find it amusing how the gamut of opinions run, even on a place like Slashdot--Bush announces Mars mission, everyone starts yelling about how it's stupid, there's not reason to send a man to Mars. Then at another time, everyone starts yelling about how NASA sucks because we haven't sent anymore people to the moon, etc.

I'm not meaning this against you, but the public is a fickle bunch :)

Ha Ha...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting that the President does not create the budget.

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Anonymous Coward]

To make a translunar injection using the hydrogen-oxygen fuel, you need (with Shuttle-like engines) about the same fuel mass as the Shuttle itself. The Shuttle weights about 70 tons, so...

Mind you, that's only translunar injection - no lunar orbit injection.

And Shuttle engine isn't that narrow - with 1 inch wide throat. Though it is a descendant of Saturn's engine - J-2.

NOT A TROLL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The above comment is making a sound point and is exactly what I was thinking.

Here's an excellent design that would do what NASA wants for crew return probably for a fraction of the cost of a US equivalent. It's done by the same people who produced Soyez, ie they have a record for building reliable, low-cost spacecraft (as opposed to the Space Sh*thole), and also showed with Buran that they could do the reusable stuff as well.

In a rational world NASA or a NASA contractor would be funding this thing with Energia (NOT the Russian govt) as a partner.

However, it's not NASA's fault that this won't happen. It's politics: the funding will go to a way over-ambitious US proposal that will take years to be developed (if it isn't cancelled in development, like every other US spaceplane since the Shuttle) and cost umpteen times as much.

Your tax dollars at work...

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Anonymous Coward]

"The primary return-mission for the Shuttle is to return the Leonardo module from the ISS. Leonardo, if you don't know, is a glorified trash can. "

And the advantage over the current system (Russians send up a Progress freighter to boost the orbit and provide supplies, crew fills it with rubbish, then jettisons it to burn up on re-entry) is what????

"Hell, if you compare the Saturn V launch capability to the Shuttle, the US space program took a giant step backwards because of the Shuttle (and associated politics.) "

Amen to that, bro! The Shuttle has been IMHO the worst thing to have happened to manned spaceflight.

New Physics?

[Anonymous Coward]

... it has a rocket to pull the spaceship away from the launch vehicle in an emergency...

Every rocket* I ever played with always pushed.

Sir Isaac?


* firework

Re:Chinese Ambitions in Space: Not Funny At All

[twitter]

Chinese, who are so militaristic that they spend 1/20th as much on their military as we do, with their economy that's over half the size of ours.

What do you know about Chinese spending? It's not like they have elected officials acting as watchdogs to tell the public they are responsible to. Nor do they have an independent and impartial press to report it. Even if they did, like the good old USA, you still might not know. Chinese government figures are about as good as the BS Winston's girlfriend made up for 1984 party bosses.

Intentions are more important than spending anyway. The last big worker's paradise does not spend money on creature comforts or the safety of their citizens. That's how they manage to kill thousands of people a year in their coal mines and have one of the most hazardous navy duty in the world. A country that's not afraid to run down it's own citizens with tanks is not afraid to use it's nukes. They are far more dangerous than the Russians who simply gave up when their people revolted.

Objective

[hhawk]

The point of a space program should be to get one with enough economy that it can actually be used.. That Russian system is years away and each module good for only 25 trips.. Figure on the future value of money and inflation in general in Russia and it may cost a lot more than they are expecting...

Our space program is getting more market based ant that is the way it should be. The only space ships that should be built are those that make economic sense. Getting the government out of it, is a big huge and wonderful first step.

except...

[Anonymous Coward]

you would need to *use* the shuttle to get the dock onto the station...

Chicken, meet the egg. Egg, meet chicken...

Re:except...

[reality-bytes]

I don't know where you read that.

The Pirs docking module was launched on a Soyuz Fregat and docked automatically with the station.

The Shuttle was not on-site during the installation.

This reminds me of plans I've heard:

[Firethorn]

Step 1: Seperate out the cargo and personel lift operations.

Step 2: Replace the shuttle with something smaller and more efficient. Whether that uses a lifting body design or simply plops down using albative shielding is a project for the rocket scientists. Figure out if it's cheaper to use a reusable, rebuildable design, or to just go disposable. Safety is a design spec.

Step 3: Design a series of efficient cargo rockets for a range of cargos. The largest should be able to lift double size ISS modules. Try to get weekly launches, so that you can actually get some benefit from mass production.

Step 4: Work with the ISS for now, but work on designing a replacement modular station system. Think tinker toy. Talk with Bigelow about inflatable modules(note:I'd talk with anybody who'd spent that much money in research). Put it in a more useful orbit.

Step 5: When research comes up, either use a generic research module, or design a customized one. If the custom one isn't going to be a long term study, try to design it so that it can be re-purposed. Launch more modules as necessary, but try to not bring stuff back, instead look at using solar power, hydroponics, and other stuff to recycle. Heck, those can be research modules too(at least at first). Sending up mass is expensive, let's try to keep it there.

Step 6: Use this station to stage for trips to the moon, mars, and other places. Specially designed modules could be used to make a spacecraft. Remember the civilization method of sending a spacecraft to win the game? You built it with modules...

My buttocks are more insightful

[mi]

Alaska too will be ready to reap for the benefit of USA while the rest of the world goes on declining stocks/rising prices

Is this bad too somehow?

There are plenty other countries without oil that need liberating, but USA dont give a crap because there is NO MONEY IN IT.

This "war for oil" bullshit has been demonstrated as such so many times, it is tiring. Simply lifting the embargo would've been much simpler and easier.

"If it works, don't mess with it". We did not care for Saddam's abuses within Iraq, until he tried to take them without -- in 1991, when "it stopped working". This -- attacking neighbors (our other allies, BTW) was the reason for the first war. 11 years after that one, Saddan still did not make good on most of his promises and had to be taken out completely. We waited too long, because we had the wrong kind of president before.

Now that we found ourselves in need of reconstructing Iraq's government from scratch, we picked Democracy, of course, because that is what we know and like.

Then, again, your first word was "dude"...

Re:Chinese Ambitions in Space: Not Funny At All

[Rei]

Yeah, they're so eager to use their nukes that they've only got less than a dozen DF-5's.

I'm not looking at Chinese-released military statistics. I'm looking at publicly available *US* intelligence about China. The Federation of American Scientists, Janes, et al.

> That's how they manage to kill thousands of
> people a year in their coal mines

Sounds like the US during OUR industrial revolution.

> one of the most hazardous navy duty in the world

Please cite what you're referring to, with an article from a respectable source.

> A country that's not afraid to run down it's
> own citizens with tanks

Oh please. Then they could say about America, "A country that's not afraid to shoot peaceful protesters is not afraid to use its nukes" (Kent State ref, in constrast to your Tiananmen Square ref), although they of course could use the much better line, "A country that's already used its nukes is not afraid to use its nukes."

Re: "significant capabilities"

[Migraineman]

The problem isn't just that you need more fuel, but that you need to haul that extra fuel up out of Earth's gravity well. So if you need even more fuel to haul the extra fuel to LEO so you can use it to get to the trans-lunar injection orbit.

Example - lets assume a linear relationship between fuel mass and imparted velocity (delta-v.) LEO velocity is about 7000m/s. You need to get to about 11000m/s to escape earth's gravity, so let's assume you need about an additional 40% fuel to do the job. That fuel doesn't just magically appear in LEO ready to be used. You had to increase the launch vehicle's initial fuel mass by that amount. Now the beast it heavier, and you need even more fuel/thrust to compensate for it.

I believe that it's approximately a square-law relationship between delta-v and fuel - i.e. 2x faster requires 4x fuel. (Bear with me, this is Slashdot napkin math, and I'm feeling too lazy to actually do the calcs right now.) So to get the 1.5x delta-v required for trans-lunar injection, you'll need to roughly double the initial fuel mass.

The Shuttle's engines are impressive. Unfortunately, they're shackled to a crapload of multi-mission deadweight that seriously impairs the system performance. The Shuttle is the wrong vehicle to try to send to the moon. Even if it could stop at the ISS and re-fuel the main tank, it'd never get back.