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Russia to Build New Spacecraft by 2020
Tech.Luver passed us the word that Russia is now working on a new generation of spacecraft, presumably to help fuel its renewed space exploration ambitions. The Space-based industry is still one of the few areas in which Russia is intentionally competitive, and they intend to exploit that in the coming years. Even still, the new technologies are not expected to see use until 2020. ""A tender to design a new booster and spaceship has been announced," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov as saying ... Perminov did not give further details of the tender, but said TsSKB-Progress from the Volga city of Samara is likely to bid with its Soyuz-3 design of spacecraft, as well as Moscow's Khrunichev centre with Angara 3P and Angara 5P. The United States beat the Soviet Union in developing multiple-use Space Shuttle rockets, which form its current fleet of manned spacecraft. Russian space officials have said single-use spacecraft like the Soyuz-TM currently used are cheaper and more practical."
The United States beat the Soviet Union in developing multiple-use Space Shuttle rockets, which form its current fleet of manned spacecraft.
If they want to be practical about getting to space, the old X-15 program had it down pat. Three vehicles, 200 flights in less than 10 years. One fatal crash. You launched the thing from a plane or a balloon. No waste, no fuss. And because you're not constantly throwing something the size of a young apartment building into orbit, a single accident doesn't effectively knock you out of space for years. It couldn't carry much more than the pilot, but only an idiot would doubt that by the third generation (the original RFP's went out in the mid-50's) it would have carried a reasonable payload.
I think it all started to go wrong for NASA when politicians were allowed to their poke their long, ratlike noses into the business of scientists and engineers. If not for the damned shuttle program, there'd be a crew drinking beer on Mars by now.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The Russians need to stay focused on modernizing their economy and political system. Russia still has considerable poverty, and the money wasted on the space race would be better spent on welfare programs and the education system. At the same stage of development, the Japanese did not waste money on either a space race or a massive weapons program.
Unfortunately, the Russians have become obsessed with nationalism since Vladimir Putin came to power. Big, impressive national projects have become more important than simply improving the quality of life for the poorest segments of the population.
The Russians have a lot to learn from the Poles. The latter are not wasting money on either a space race or a massive weapons program.
The most important lesson that the Russians can learn from the West is that the greatness of a nation is not measured by the size of the weaponry or the speed of the space ship. Rather, the greatness is measured by the quality of life for the average person.
The Soviet Union had awesome weapons and space vehicles, yet was the Soviet Union a great nation?
"The United States beat the Soviet Union in developing multiple-use Space Shuttle rockets, which form its current fleet of manned spacecraft."
The United States (together with Europe) have also beaten the Soviet Union in wasting countless billion of dollars on an International Space Station of very limited research value. Basically they just trying to try to stay alive up there and do 30 minutes of research projects per day. The Shuttle is currently also just a pork-barrel project. Those funds need to be spent in different ways (such as next generation planetary rovers).
The Russians have managed to keep their total costs for development and launches lower over the decades, by having at least some sort of "mass production" economies of scale.
Their MIR space station managed to get along for years against increadible odds, for a fraction of NASA money.
The Russians have very good and practical aerospace engineers. This illustrates the difference nicely: during the space race NASA spent money and effort in developing a pen which could work in weightlessness. The russian astronauts instead of pens used pencils in space.
Another attempt to blame a bunch of rare and disorganised hippies with no political power at all at the time for some dubious political decisions mostly about spreading the pork. The shuttle design is most likely a lot older than the poster and "moronic treehuggers" don't even have the political clout to get Kyoto signed now let alone sabotage a space program decades ago.
1. heavy: the size of one that would be of use is so great that rover must be made huge, and expensive / impossible to launch to Mars. NASA's choice was solar, I guess they know better.
2. dangerous: in case of bad launch someone has to find damn thing, or its peaces. Solar panels are safe to be left where they are...
100 tons to LEO is nice, it's a pity 70% of it is useless.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Don't be a dipshit. The comparison of the GP was for spacecraft. Saying that the Space Shuttle costs $450 million to put 22 tons into space while the super advanced European and Russian rockets can do it for hundreds of millions is misleading at best. A better comparison would have been something like a Delta IV rocket or an Atlas V rocket. Using the Space Shuttle as a comparison was done simply to make it look like NASA couldn't figure out how to put 20 tons into space without spending half a billion dollars. The GP was trying to intentionally mislead people and you know it.
Manned spacecraft don't have a high cargo/total weight ratio. The Soyuz craft has basically a zero ratio. The Shuttle comes in at about 1/4. This is how manned spacecraft work. You may think that the Shuttle is a waste of money and that it is not worth it to put so many support systems into the spacecraft as well as trying to make it reusable and able to operate in space for weeks at a time (and I do as well), but it is intentionally misleading to compare it to a cargo craft. It is not a cargo craft. That is just one of its many abilities.
Egads people..... The shuttle has a long list of problems and shortcomings. It's expensive and it isn't as reliable as the designers had hoped, NASA and the politicos who control the purse strings have finally come to a consensus on this point. Can we finally stop beating a dead horse? Every space-craft that we've launched -and by "we" I mean the human race, not just Americans- has had strengths and weaknesses. It's early in the game here people: a good analogy would be that the Europeans are just realizing that Columbus found a "new world" and not a shortcut to the far East. There have been a lot of people who have realized the right way of doing things for a long time, but like those early Europeans coming to the new world, it takes time to convince the people who have the money. There was a lot of begging for money, saying "I've got a plan that will work." Furthermore, there were a lot of failed starts in the new world: settlements that collapsed and vanished or packed up and left... This is not the time to say that spending money on manned space exploration is a waste so let's give up: of course it's wasteful right now, we're still figuring out the best way to go about it! There are those in Russia that have come to realize that someday the economic health of good ol' terra firma will depend on what we do in space, and they hope to be on the leading edge and therefore profit from it: I say good luck to them, the world needs their efforts. There are those in the USA, Germany, China, Japan, India (the list goes on) who agree and want their contries to be on that leading edge too: good luck to them as well. There are going to be a lot of false starts and a lot of wasted money, but in the end, we will find the best way by trial and error and forge ahead until space becomes the next economic powerhouse, the powerhouse that takes the world into new prosperity and health.
Like military invasions?!
If every dollar George spent in Iraq had gone to space instead, we'd all be better off.