Slashdot Mirror
Europe to Join Russia Building Next Space Shuttle
An anonymous reader writes "Development agreement takes shape during the Paris Air Show
It's all but official--Russia and Europe will soon embark on a cooperative effort to build a next-generation manned space shuttle. Speaking at the Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, France, in June, Russian space officials confirmed earlier reports from Moscow that their partners at the European Space Agency would join the Russian effort to build a new reusable orbiter, dubbed Kliper."
Why NASA is using a shuttle that is 20 years old is beyond me.
It may well be beyond you, but 20 year old equipment is commonplace for most aerospace equipment. 20 years is mid-life for passenger airliners. Airlines are routinely launched with no aircraft newer than 15 years. Military aircraft see 30+ years and more.
The fact that the orbiter is 20 years old is not relevant. The design intended that the vehicle last through many flights; that was the whole point. Unfortunately, the design ignored basic physics and presumed that some magic propulsion system would exist to get the plane into orbit without 90% of the launch weight being fuel. When the engineer's magic wand failed to create such an engine, they bolted on boosters and fuel tanks and left us with the present costly, low capacity and inefficient launcher.
NASA is on the road to fixing this. Griffin has a clear vision for the future launch platform; separate the cargo from the crew, put the payloads on top, reuse the high quality and well understood booster and shuttle main engine designs for propulsion, de-orbit the crew in a lifting body capsule, and do it quickly so we don't have to keep flying these space planes. It should be cheap, reliable and flexible.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
It's looking like there should be quite a bit of competition soon in human orbital spaceflight. Here are the various competitors I can think of off-hand:
* USA: Shuttle-derived system, probably with a CEV capsule on top. There's several downsides to a shuttle-derived system, but it keeps the constituencies happy and should have enough government momentum to keep on going.
* Russia and Europe: Kliper's been searching around for financial support for a while, and it looks like they finally got at least -some- funding from Europe.
* China: various iterations of Shenzhou spacecraft
In the private sector:
* t/Space: The (Rutan-affiliated?) company just completed a parachute drop test and water landing of a full-scale model of their proposed CXV space capsule. It's uncertain if they'll get more funding from NASA, but their concept seems sound and may get private investment. Oh, and their web page has some really spiffy videos.
* SpaceX: They've already announced their intent to compete for Bigelow's orbital prize, and their upcoming man-rated Falcon V will be large enough to carry a Gemini-style capsule.
Now what about destinations? Besides the ISS, we've got Robert Bigelow's inflatable space station modules, which should be up and operational by 2010, with several prototype launches before then. He's planning on selling these modules to various groups and countries, so hopefully we'll have several different space stations up there.
Between Shenzhou 8 and 9 China is planning on launching a small orbital laboratory, which Shenzhou 9 will be docking with. Various members of the Chinese space program have also been visiting Bigelow's facility, so perhaps we'll see them doing something with his modules.
The future should be interesting.
Agreed.
The Russians and the ESA get the benefit of learning from all of our mistakes without having to spend tax dollars.
I still think wingless is the best way to go for the Kliper and/or the CEV. Unless you are taking off from a horizontal position, those wings are just dead weight.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
By 'they', I meant the EU and Russia, not NASA.
NASA has actually demonstrated that reusable is practical...
I disagree. The turnaround costs to get the shuttle ready for the next mission were far, far greater than the estimated costs. I'm aware of how NASA got jerked around by congress and how the shuttle as implemented was not the shuttle that was conceived. But even so, the cost to turn the shuttle around turned out to be so much more than what they anticipated that putting up single shot spacecraft would have been less costly.
What they should be doing is designing a re-launcable manned capsule which is separate from non-reusable payload module. The reduced launch weight and reduced turnaround rework (compared with shuttle) would make this a good option. You wouldn't be throwing away the expensive life support systems. The payload area would be pretty much structural components, making it fairly inexpensive. It wouldn't have any complicated electronic or mechanical systems.
It isn't really a shuttle. If your definition of "shuttle" is reusable then OK it's a shuttle. But the reason the US space shuttle was called "the shuttle" is because of the payload bay. The space shuttle was to be used to routinely shuttle stuff to and from space.
The Kliper can't do that.
The Kliper is basically an upgraded resuable Soyuz that can host 7 people (good for station) and a basic amount of payload. A Soyuz is a three part contraption of which only 1 module returns to earth and none is resued. The Kliper is just a single piece reusable capsule that's stretched. It launches like a capsule - on the tip of a rocket. It reenters like a capsule (unless they opt for wings... the judges are still out on that one). It's not a shuttle.
-everphilski-
I'd like to add that the 25,000 ground crew personnel positions required to keep the shuttle operations going... rain or shine, lanuch or no launch, certainly add a huge portion of the cost to launch a single shuttle mission. If an airplace going to Europe from America would require 25,000 people to get it there and only flew once every six months, with safety reports and equipment tests that the paperwork alone would make a pile of debris in a landfill larger than the plane + "launch system" on each flight, those flights to Europe would cost about $20-$100 million each as well and would only be done as a congressional junket.
Most private initives are to try and cut the ground crew for launches down to a very manageable number, like 5-10, and to try and increase the number of launches to keep that ground crew busy. Assuming the rest of the cost of manufacturing is kept the same for private launches, that savings alone makes a huge difference. The CEV (and other designs at NASA) mainly try to keep that same 25,000 support personnel in their jobs.
Apollo died because people stopped seing the use of sending people to hop around on moon dust. Saturn died because we ran out of large payloads after Skylab to loft until Freedom/ISS, and by then it was too late. It has nothing to do with the Shuttle.
The shuttle is not an "insane contraption". It's a machine that, due to its completely different design from most rocket systems, exposed a lot of problems that we didn't even know existed. That happens with first-gen systems. Success and failure of innovative designs can't really be tested.
Case in point: US vs. Soviet rocket programs. Even with the US importing of German rocket scientists and incorporating them into the heads of projects (compared to Soviet importing of small numbers of technicians, who weren't relied on much), the early Soviet program was full of staggering successes, and the early US program full of staggering failures.
However, the lunar programs reversed this. Try as they might, they just couldn't get the N1 rocket to work. It kept blowing up on them. Meanwhile, the Saturn V was an amazing success overall. The US stole the world show.
Then comes the shuttle (we can't really analyze Buran since it only flew once, unmanned). The continued Russian reliance on Soyuz, while preventing much innovation, allowed them to refine the system. The US's adoption of a radically new system led to radically new problems. Suddenly, the Soviets seemed again like the more reliable choice**.
I guess the moral of the story is: Fortunes change, and innovation can't be scheduled.
** - I'd still rather take a Shuttle. It's had a slightly lower ratio of casualties to human launches and slightly lower total manned failure rate. Most significantly, however, is that Soyuz has lost a lot of unmanned launches recently (including many ground crew deaths). It's reentry is also quite rough and dangerous; one Soyuz broke through a frozen lake and nearly froze its cosmonauts; another, on a launch abort mode, nearly rolled off a cliff. But there's no disputing that Soyuz is cheaper per kg, even if it has far less capabilities (trash/payload return, length of time for crew support, orbital options, etc).
Kneel Before Christ!
That's was one of the shuttle's original selling points. Unfortunately, the cost of the shuttle flight is more than the cost of simply replacing the satellite in almost every case (Hubble being the one exception). And yet there's a more fundemental problem.
The shuttle doesn't go high enough. It can only get to low earth orbit, which is thousands of miles below the fast majority of satellites (in geosynchronous orbit). It was supposed to go to GEO orignally, and when they realized that wouldn't be possible they proposed a "space tug" to ferry the satellite back and forth. That never materialized. So we're stuck with a ship that, even if it could be operated cheaply enough to be worthwhile, couldn't actually get to the repair job for most satellites.
I don't think most people realise just how low the ISS flies. It flies at an altitude of up to 354.1 km. As a comparison, the diameter of the earth is about 12700 km. Look at those numbers again. It so low that you'd be hard-pressed to even call it "space".
The reason for this very low orbit is that the space shuttle is unable to travel any further out. It a rocket-boosted aircraft that just happens to be able to reach orbit altitude. Well, orbit altitude as long as you boost the altitude once in a while. Remember that the ISS loses 100 metres of altitude every day.
The OP's idea sounds a bit wild, but I just needed to correct you on the orbit decay thing.
I would also note that the current shuttles are not first rev hardware. The Columbia was the last of the first generation. Designed to schematics that predated those of Challenger, it had the disadvantage of being both the smallest and heaviest shuttle in the fleet. It blew up in large part because of that. Had the Atlantis or Discovery been in its place, I think there's a very good chance that the reduced descent heating would have been enough for it to get down in one piece, or at least to get far enough down for emergency egress to be possible.
A lot of people said that Columbia should have been retired when they announced their plans to retrofit it. They were right. It should never have been retrofitted with new electronics. It should have been put in a museum or scrapped. It was an old fossil with plenty of design mistakes.
But the current shuttles are third-generation tech, IIRC. The Challenger was significantly upgraded from the first rev, and the ones that are still intact are all significantly larger, lighter, and have larger payload capacity. Even in the third generation, though, all the things the parent poster mentioned still haven't been fixed, making the shuttle launches obscenely expensive relative to their payload capacity and general scientific usefulness.
Frankly, this is the best news I've heard in a long time. The ESA and the Russians should be able to learn from the mistakes of the shuttle and get things right, assuming they can get past all the politics and corner-cutting. It's like I've always said: build it right to begin with and you won't have to keep rebuilding it....
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.