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."

Comments

Re:rockets vs shuttle

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah wow so the rocket is cheaper... pity it carries a fraction of the shuttles payload Shuttle's payload? Russia did develop the Energia rocket to launch their Buran Shuttle (which was launched once unmanned). This rocket had a 100 ton payload which is just about the bare minimum needed for reasonable lunar exploration. But more importantly they were also developing the Energia II shich would have had the ability to reenter the atmosphere and glide to a landing at an airfield making it completely reusable. They also had a 175 ton rocket under development.

Though to be fair, NASA still wins in the ideas department with advanced Saturn models, the NERVA rockets, and especially the completely reusable 500 ton Sea Dragon Rocket (which had a full design study). Hopefully the latter two ideas will be looked at again when the different space agencies consider building a spacecraft to travel to Mars.

If you take some time

[yoprst]

to read Russian space-tech related forums, you'll be pretty sure that Angara is a scam. They won the tender(many years ago) with one design, replaced it later with another (probably the only common thing for both designs is that they're rocket designs) and did nothing to implement either of those designs. This: Russian space officials have said single-use spacecraft like the Soyuz-TM currently used are cheaper and more practical still indicates that Russian space agency has not gone haywire yet, and may be capable of producing something useful in the future, but Angara is very unlikely to be one of those useful things