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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.
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.