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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."
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....
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
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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.
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 ;)
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NASA is not guiltless in budget management, but you can only do so much.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
"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.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
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!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
(tinfoil hat time): Of course, if they still had them we'd know whether it could have really got to the moon
I am trolling
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.