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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."
Because it takes time to develop new stuff. For anything complex it takes decades. The hardware in the ATC system I work on was obsolete the day the system was comissioned. You couldn't get dec to sell you new ones. That's just the way it is with technology. Sorry about that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If this goes like other discussions on this and similar topics about advanced technologies appearing in various parts of the world, it will split into two camps. One camp that thinks it will be cool because new tech is always cool. The other camp will lament that North America is falling behind. To the latter I say that it is not North America falling behind, but rather the rest of the world is catching up. That's inevitable and that's good. Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too. The the other camp. I say this new shuttle will be cool. It will be interesting to see what approach they take in designing it based on years of observing the North American program.
Hasn't it been proven that a Shuttle type transport is not the most cost effective way of lifting heavy loads and even for things like simple manned space flight? Could this be a case of trying to copy the USA, just because, or is it viable. I seem to remember reading that making a temporary space station for experents say out of Apollo parts like skylab, when done today with other space parts we have lying around would be cheaper than a schuttle. Feel free to prove me wrong, but the one size fits all seems to be what NASA is getting away from, and specialization is the way to go.
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
If they stuck to tried and true, The Saturn/Apollo would still be up and running. The shuttle is an insane contraption. Not the concept, the execution.
What?
It's the US that's broke: it's borrowing half a trillion dollars per year abroad to finance its lifestyle and military.
As for following through, the EU has completed several Mars missions and the Galileo satellites are being readied for launch at the end of 2005. Europe also has a commercial space program with considerable lift capacity.
Hasn't it been proven that a Shuttle type transport is not the most cost effective way of lifting heavy loads and even for things like simple manned space flight?
It has only been demonstrated that the Shuttle, in it's half completed "still a prototype" design, is not an overly cost effective way of putting up payloads.
A number of additional steps in the program, cut by congress, would have significantly helped.
Rod Taylor
Despite the title, it's doesn't look like a replication of the NASA shuttle. The phrase "reuseable orbiter" used in the article seems closer. It looks more like a capsule to which they've added some semblance of "wings" to allow a little bit of maneuvarbility and more landing options. Hell some of the designs for the CEV look not dissimilar, and that is supposed to be NASAs next generation that they are seriously banking on.
Jedidiah.
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To call it a shuttle is almost a misgnomer... it's not a shuttle like a space shuttle: there's no cargo bay. It's not a space truck like the US Shuttle was. It's basically a reusable one piece Soyuz. Yes, it's re-engineered and it can take seven to station with minimal payload, but it launches like a capsule - on the front of the rocket - and it should reenter like a capsule, unless they opt for the wings and thermal tile TPS. That part isn't clear at this point.
-everphilski-
Billions upon billions of dollars. That's why.
I know that this will be considered to be flame bait, but in my opinion it is the truth. The Russians and Europeans collaborating without the US is a direct response to the Bush administrations contempt of international cooperation. The Bush administration has make it clear in every possible way that that the only correct position on any subject is the US position. When the rest of the world disagrees the response is a mix of anger, contempt and disdain.
This is true from the war in Iraq to the Koyoto treaty to appointing Bolton to the UN. After that kind of treatment it is only natural that everyone else will decide that they don't need the US and will go about building the future without US involvement.
This is a very bad development for everyone. The big problems like space, global warming and war need cooperation from all the international community, and splitting into competing factions will only lead to failure.
I'm very upset over this, because we all loose.
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.
But this fails to address the one place that the shuttle was good at: maintance of satellites. While for most mid-term projects we can get away without a shuttle, long term we need one, but only if we can get it to be single stage.
The problem at the moment is that we are having to build new launch vehicles for every satellite that is launched, and then we have problems when the satellites arrive at the end of their life. Also, without a way of maintaining them the satellites in some cases have to be decomissioned before their the end of the expected lifespan if just one thing fails. Maybe the ideal future shuttle would be a hybrid manned-unmanned vehicle, wherein a crew is not required for all flights.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I would love to see us(THE US) do more with Canada and maybe even Japan. I honestly believe it would be better if we had different teams working on different designs simultaneously. The touchy feely goody notion of international cooperation on this one will only slow things down as beareaucrats milk it for personal gain, and competition of design is eliminated.
Get China racing, get Japan racing, get Canada racing, or better still, let all the big countries pair of with smaller ones and get international teams going, doing it for national pride and the advancement of mankind.
I want to see this stuff move faster.
The purpose of the space program was to take federal dollars and spread them around the texas hill country. Johnson was a New Deal bureaucrat who got himself elected to congress. The first thing he did was use federal dollars to bring in electric power to his district. The next thing he did was to get federal money to build a dam, which went to a company which is now known as Halliburton. A chunk of this money went back into Johnson's pocket so he could buy his way into the senate, where he chaired the space subcommittee and gathered power to run for president.
As president, he used tax dollars to build high tech infrastructure in texas, again funneled through Halliburton. Putting a man on the moon was misdirection and PR. Halliburton also was the main contractor for nuke plants and vietnam.
The purpose of a government run space program is to spend as much money as possible. A private sector project to do the same thing has a very different set of incentives.
I tend to favor market economies and be wary of the sort of public private partnerships pioneered by mussolini and lbj. But I have to give the guy some credit for bringing the Texas hill country out of the stone age into the space age.
But what do any of those have to do with the Shuttle? Let's talk about the Hindenburg, the Titanic, and the Chevy Corvair.
The Shuttle has exactly the same level of reliability and safety as the Russian system, ie, it's not fantastic, but this is a dangerous activity.
Continuing the comparison, Shuttle can carry a higher payload, more people per flight, requires less training for passengers, exposes them to lower G loads, and can carry freight back to Earth.
There are many other advantages. Based on this the Shuttle is the best system flying to space today.
Of course, future systems should be safer.
For apollo thing Wright Flyer. For shuttle thing about an aircraft from 1930.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"Yeah, it was cooperation and not competition that put a man on the moon!"
Y'know, I'm gonna burn some karma here. But there are times I really hate this attitude.
When I was a kid, say, early 1970s, I picked up an old book on the planets and the "future" of space flight. This book was written probably around 1959 or 1960. It talked about Sputnik and Explorer I. And it talked about how man would get into space. The book started with the "space plane" (what I learned in later years would be considered the X-20). It sat at the top of a rocket, was launched into orbit, and landed again like a normal airplane. The book then talked about the next big step--a space station constructed in orbit. This looked remarkably like the space station shown in 2001. The book ended with what would be the next big step--probably sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s--of an expedition to explore the moon.
Well, of course, we beat that by 20 years! We landed on the moon in 1969! But what did we get out of it? Are we on the moon now? Could we do more with the moon now, if we were to land on it again, than plant some flags and play some golf?
Your vaunted "competition" to get us to the moon gained us very little in the long run. Yeah, we made it and we developed some pretty impressive technology to do it, which had all sorts of commercial benefits. But we didn't go to the moon to explore. We didn't go to the moon to expand humanity. We went to the moon to beat the Commies. And once that was accomplished, we were done.
I liken it to a 240,000 mile race. We're all excited at the approach of the race. We discuss, debate, and argue about who we think will win. When the race starts, we are glued to our seats. Whoever wins, we cheer, we applaud, slap them on the back and say what a great job they did. But a week after the race, it's business as usual. The winner's name is written in the history books and that's it.
The American Public wasn't behind the Apollo program in order to broaden mankind's knowledge of the universe. We were behind it to whoop some Commie butt and show the world how great the U.S. of A was. And so, when the race was won, the banners were taken down, the streets swept clear of the ticker tape from the parades, and people went back to their own business secure in the knowledge that their country was #1.
That, to me, is what our "competition" to get to the moon got us. Getting to the moon was sold to the people as a race which we had to win. The money spent on Apollo was taken from programs like the X-20. It short-circuited plans for a permanent space station. It put all our resources behind one big "show"--get to the moon. We're only now starting catch up to where we might have been in the late 1970s, if only we had hadn't gotten distracted by beating the commies to the moon.
Consider the concept of "competition": You have an objective--a thing you have to accomplish. If you reach the objective before the others, you win. If you don't, you lose. I'm not interested in that. I'd like to see colonies on the moon. I'd like to see manned exploration of Mars. But these are long-term things--there is no "competition." And if we waste the money on "flags and footprints" kinds of missions so we can thrust our collective index fingers in the air and yell "We're #1!", the long term goal of having my children or my children's children live and work on the moon will never be realized.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Apollo wasn't an amazing achievement. But everyone complains about the fact that we didn't follow-up Apollo with more and better trips to the moon. But as I said, this wasn't how Apollo was sold to the people. It was sold as a competition. And competitions are over when somebody wins. I want the follow-up. And the only way we'll get it is to stop thinking about "beating" other countries and start thinking about how we can do this "for all mankind."
Isn't that what the plaque says it's all about?
--"Apollo died because people stopped seing the use of sending people to hop around on moon dust."
Not exactly. It just wasn't what the US military wanted. The current shuttle design suffers a lot from this, since early NASA tried playing politics but got eaten alive by the more experienced groups they were trying to use.
Unfortunately, the shuttle is a far less capable launch vehicle. Yes, it really is. The Saturn V can put bigger cargos, including humans, into LEO than the shuttle can. And the shuttle can't put any significant cargo into GEO at all; the additional booster ring they have to use to launch from the cargo bay is too bulky, heavy, and risky to make it worthwhile much.
It wouldn't be that big a deal to recreate the Saturn Vs. We've got the plans, just not the tools and dies (never have figured out why standard military policy is to destroy these when the project ends, like they did with the SR-71). With an upgrade for modern materials and avionics, these Saturn VIs would outstrip anything else around right now. And still be cheaper than Shuttle launches...
--"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."
What makes it an insane contraption is the fact that we've never bothered/managed to address most of those problems.
Even worse, there were a number of problems with the design we knew about in advance, but we went with it anyway because (wait for it) it was the low bid.
What am I talking about? Segmented SRBs for a starter. Instead of building a single big rocket, we build it in sections, ship the sections, and then put them together later. Why? To spread the pork around. Unfortunately, this is what killed Challenger.
Heat tiles for another. Custom-made for each location, meaning absolutely zero economy-of-scale. Very stupid thing to do for such a fragile, expensive and necessary piece of the project. Lost two to this one.
And there's other problems we've lucked out on so far. Like the SSMEs. Sure, they're powerful. They're also finicky, and have never had the multi-flight capacity they were supposed to have. They have to be completely rebuilt every flight to be inspected and repaired. Why? Lots of little, medium, and even big problems with them that we've never been able to fix completly. They were just flat out designed with the wrong methedology.
So we've got three major components of the system that are flat out bad ideas to be used in something like this. Stuff like avionics hasn't ever been a problem; it was properly designed, and it's something that can be upgrades as we go even if it wasn't. We managed to get all the major, high-cost-to-fix items wrong. So why keep using it?
strictly speaking, the shuttle's safety record: ~98% is the highest of any launch system (soyuz is 98-.1% or something like that). The difference is that the shuttle's record is declining with disasters lat in the projects lifetime whereas those other systems are improving with each successful launch: their disasters all occured during development or at the begining of the life cycle of those systems.
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