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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....
'See this photo gallery'
He just had to tempt the fates, didn't he?
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
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.
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.
The ultimate test of the Russian space program: can it stand up to an attempted Slashdotting?
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
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... :) )?
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I refuse to use
[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.
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.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
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...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Kliper", eh? I'm sure any resemblance to the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper is purely coincidental.
It's like deja-vu all over again!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
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.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
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
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.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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.
NASA is not guiltless in budget management, but you can only do so much.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There have been some recent updates but essentially the design is almost 40-years old now.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Is it a system requirement that all new manned spacecraft have to look like killer whales?
Blaze a trail to the New World
The black tiles are specially treated to resist higher temperatures than the white tiles, since they bear the highest thermal load on reentry.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
"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.
Thanks to the Slashdotting, the bandwidth bill alone will set their space program back decades...
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
they look alike, but in fact they are quite different.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
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?
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).
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
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.
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.
an ill wind that blows no good
~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.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
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.
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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.
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.)
... and not in 1000kg chunks.
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
kliper? i can't find that under my kde menu.. can someone give me an ftp address?