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Russian Kliper not Funded by ESA
anzha writes "It seems that while the Russians are making plans for the future, they are doing so alone. Space.com has an article profiling the Russian Kliper program. Largely seen as a response to the American CEV, the Russians had been stating the ESA would be supporting the enterprise as well. However, this week, ESA decided not to fund the project."
RTFA.
The ESA has tenatively decided not to fund the project for now citing political concerns that may be addressed by Russia in the future in order to gain much-needed financial support.
Nothing has been decided. Russia will probably try to sweeten the deal if the ESA flat out decides not to support the project.
On the scientific side of things, I hear that Kliper is very promising, and has already progressed further along than the CEV, and is technically superior. This is on top of the fact that Russia already has a suitable lifting body (and has another in development nearing completion). (I'm no rocket scientist -- can anybody here elaborate on the advantages/disadvantages of the two designs?)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I forgot to mention that a member of the astronaut corps (hasn't earned his wings yet) came to speak at my school not too long ago. He was talking about how Shuttle operations were supposed to stop by 2009-2010. If this really happens (though I'm not sure I buy it), that's a hell of a lot less access to space that the ESA has. As it is now, they rely on us and the Russian Soyuz-TMA for their manned space transport. And since you KNOW they're not going to get the CEV ready on time... the ESA may become de facto supporters of the Kliper.
+++ATH0
I know your post is marked "Funny", but I wonder why you have this opinion that ESA is such a failure? ESA has had extremely high success with many of its missions, and probably has a similar if not better hit rate than NASA.
I'm speaking as someone who currently works on a NASA mission here.
Yeah, MARSIS finds huge underground ice-reservoirs.8 ,387725,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltraum/0,151
(sorry, german link)
They've been doing ok. While Mars Express has had no problems that couldn't be resolved, and Hguyens did fairly well, Hguyens failed to return a big chunk of it's data, and Beagle is a crater. I seem to remember a problem with a climate monitoring satellite recently, too.
The real issue seems to be that none of the EU member states is interested in spending any money on space. I think the ESA's budget is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 that of NASA's, and that's reflected in the number and scope of missions they are able to undertake.
Actually, Ariane 1 was based on French Diamant launcher technology, in turn based on the precious stones military launch vehicle series. Which came from Veronique, which was designed by... a bunch of "Nazis" including, among others, Eugen Sänger.
The USA, Soviet Union and France all had ex-"Nazi" scientists working on their rocket programs. IIRC the USA had the V-2 team, the Soviet Union had the Wasserfall team, and the French got the folks working on rocketplanes.
Still, I wonder why some seem to like putting Europe's space program down so much. I mean, Arianespace had for many years the commercial launch market leader in Ariane, ESA subcontractors designed some nice launchers, have working indigenous LH2 rocket designs, and manage to do Carbon/Carbon rocket nozzles. Is this not significant?