Europe's Automated Cargo Shuttle Docks With Space Station

An anonymous reader writes "A successful docking of the Automated Transfer Vehicle dubbed 'Jules Verne' occurred earlier this week. The first of its kind, the crewless ship reached orbit and lightly touched up against the international space station on Thursday. By now astronauts on the ISS will have opened its doors and begun air circulation in preparation of offloading the nearly 7.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, food, clothing and equipment they need to survive. The EU Space Agency sees this as a historic journey for the program: 'The Jules Verne, named after the visionary French science fiction author, is the first of a new class of station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles. The craft was built by the nations of the European Space Agency as one of Europe's major contributions to the international station. "The docking of the A.T.V. is a new and spectacular step in the demonstration of European capabilities on the international scene of space exploration," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency.'"

Comments

And on to the stars!

[Iamthecheese]

The science is done; between this and automatic capture and exploitation of asteroids is only a matter of scale and engineering.

Re:And on to the stars!

[M1FCJ]

If only...

If NASA followed von Braun's strategy, by now we would have a permanent moon base already. Instead NASA went for a big-bang project, after initial success, scaled it down very quickly and abandoned everything for a flawed plan and left us with a shuttle which would truck stuff to nowhere. Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. I wouldn't be this bitter at least they had something replacing it.

Europeans (inc. Russia) will have to step up and replace NASA when they completely abandon ISS in a couple of years and ATV is a step in this. The Chinese and Indians might come aboard pretty soon as well. The world will not need USA for space exploration any more and NASA's current plans are doomed with the budget cuts and everything - all it needs is a pretty failure in one of the first flights and that's it, USA won't have access to human spaceflight anymore - they hardly succeed with their current fleet of vehicles.

Re:And on to the stars!

[Dun Malg]

...left us with a shuttle which would truck stuff to nowhere. Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. The trouble with the STS is that its big selling point was as a shuttle to a future International Space Station. By the same token, the ISS' big selling point was that it could be built, manned, and supplied with the STS. They're both lackluster designs limited to a ridiculous LEO slot that's outlandishly costly to maintain. Really, they're BOTH white elephants.

Re:The important question

[eln]

Chuck Norris is SO 2007.

Re:Thursday ?

[WindBourne]

Keep in mind that it is up to the /. editors to pick what interests THEM. As such, there is a bit of a built-in bias about what appears here. 10 years ago, on slashdot, this would have been posted right away. But I have noticed that a number of space articles tend to be posted later and later. I suspect that this has little to do with EU, and a lot more to do with less interest in space by younger folks. Hopefully, with spacex, bigelow, and even virgin, we will see this passion about space rekindled again.

If not, it will probably be re-kindled in about 6-7 years, when china puts a man on the moon, with the obvious intention of building a base there. Just as sputnik spurred America, I think that the realization that China has about 1.5 times the number of ppl working on their space program of what America had in total during the Apollo program will cause nations to re-think their priorities, and how to work together.

Re:The important question

[Eunuchswear]

Progress is more or less Soyuz without a re-entry system. Those russkies believe in reusable systems - reusability of the design rather than idiotic reusability of the vehicle.

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