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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.
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
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???
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
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.
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.
Is it a system requirement that all new manned spacecraft have to look like killer whales?
Blaze a trail to the New World
Thanks to the Slashdotting, the bandwidth bill alone will set their space program back decades...
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.
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.
~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.
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
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.
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
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.
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