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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."
ESA is already scheduled to build the ATV, or Autonomous Transfer Vehicle, to haul cargo to and from the ISS. The first, the Jules Verne, should be close to being ready to go as soon as the Space Shuttle can get back to a regular construction schedule and deliver the Columbus module (ESA's lab module). Maybe they are just figuring that they can trade cargo space for a passenger seat or two with the US or Russia, so they don't need a direct stake in a passenger craft.
I am in general a bit weary of Russian designs, especially now that they're low on funding. Look at the Soyuz, darn thing seems to be able to survive anything and get it's occupants down alive. That would be a good thing if hadn't had to use those large margins multiple times already. In other words a good design yet lacking in implementation and attention to details. Granted the newest revision seems to be working problem free or close to it. I'd still trust the Russians over anything NASA builds in this area, by a large margin.
Personally I find the Kliper design very interesting, at least the newest one. You have a very good safety mechanism like the Soyuz, where launch failures don't kill the crew. In addition, it's re-usable in all the right ways unlike the shuttle. The crew vehicle is launched separately and is the bare-minimum, meaning that any extra safety margins require the least cost. The parts you don't need to send back to Earth aren't sent back or burned up (ie: everything beyond the bare minimum), so you don't need to send them up over and over.
In essence: the Kliper does only what it needs to do, get people to and from orbit, without trying to be a jack-of-all-trade/shitty-at-everything. Moving things within orbit is separate, as it should be, and isn't sent up over-and-over. Living and experimentation is yet again separate, maybe they'll finally use the ISS for something.
The only thing which bothers me is the amount of parts and that some will stay in orbit, which makes things more complicated and introduces potential problems that are hard to deal with.
Columbus spent a lot of money trying to find a new trade route to the far east and discovered something far more important, America. The sensible thing might have been to stay home but in the end would have cost Spain countless millions in lost revenue from the find. Bringing back Moon rocks proved that the Moon is rich in Helium 3 that can make large scale fusion possible. With out vast amounts of electricity much of the world would have to go back to candles for light and shadow puppets for entertainment. The technology we have wouldn't exist without pushing the practical limits. Remember a little over a hundred years ago most people were farmers and they plowed with horses. It was just over a hundred years ago that powered flight happened and around a hundred years ago that electricity started to be a common thing in cities, a hundred and fifty years ago it was still largely a curiosity. If science keeps pushing forward what happens in the next hundred years? There was less than seventy years between the first powered flight and landing on the moon. There's beating your dinner over the head with a rock or watching your plasma TV, as a previous poster mentioned, and eating delivered pizza. Since it's impossible to know where the next big break through is coming from it's impossible to pick and choose. The safe bet is to choose knowledge over ignorance. You might be able to live without the TV but remember life span used to average 35 years. I'm nearly 45 and by the standards of a few hundred years ago would be an old man. As it is I'm middle aged and could live past a hundred. Not all science is a waste of money, at times the benefits aren't obvious but they are there.