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Russia To Build an Orbital Construction Plant
jamax writes "Russia plans to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft (link to sketchy Google translation of the Russian original) that are too big to build planetside, or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built. Presumably these are the ships we would fly to the Moon and Mars. Plans seem to be rather sparse at the moment, with the tentative construction date set for 2020, after the ISS is scheduled for decommissioning."
This would be a great step forward for space exploration, and hopefully it will kick start the rest of the world into launching their own if/when this proves to be a success. Something this big really needs governments to support it, it is too big for the nascent private space industry at the moment.
Building anything in space is horrendously complex and expensive. The USA will be broke for the next few years so I cant see anything coming from that direction other than some toy like commercial projects (Virgin) that will die once the handful of billionaires who can afford it have taken a ride. Even though Russia is rolling in cash right now I don't think they will have enough money and expertise to pull this off in the long run. Really this needs to be a global affair with its own "standards body" so everyone can take part and a really nasty bit of work in charge to bang peoples heads together when they start arguing over bolt sizes or the colour of toilet seat lid.
Plain and simple. there is a long list of russian projects announced in boom times (like 1995 and now) but abandoned when the rubber met the road.
This is not to say that the Russians aren't advancing the state of the art in space--they are. They are also excellent builders of launch vehicles and spacecraft. BUT. That doesn't mean that proclamations like this are to be accepted without a huge dose of skepticism.
I would be much more willing to believe that Russians would fund a new launch site, a SSTO or similar projects. This smacks of unreality.
As I recall there was talk 15-20 years ago of doing this in the US at a cost of $400-500 billion. Seems to be a tad too expensive for Russia, in fact for anyone. Its much cheaper to send up everything you need for one mission. The biggest cost is putting things into Earth orbit, so unless they have a plan to get raw materials to the assembly station without launching them off Earth first, it seems like they just want to build a giant space station for the hell of it when there is a cheaper way of doing things. I doubt this ever gets past the planning stage.
they plan to send a manned mission to Jupiter in 2100? How about a mission to alpha centauri while their at it?
Notice how people come up with fantastic plans to do space stuff in the year 2020? Bush did a similar thing with his plan to go back to the moon.
Whatever date it is, it's a date that the current people in office, will no longer be in office, or if they are, no one will remember what the plans are.
This is just an attempt by politicians to make themselves look "visionary" while actually doing nothing. If, 70 years from now when someone actually gets around to going to mars, no one is going to remember what kind of plans a bunch of jokers with no intention of providing funding pulled out of the ass in 2008.
One reason that the US doesn't have a plan for an orbital assembly infrastructure is that NASA is working towards a "heavy lift vehicle", the Ares V which will lift somewhere in the order of 130 tons to low Earth orbit. The things NASA has in mind take only 1-3 launches of the Ares V to put up. So the only assembly one would need under those circumstances is docking.
Now my opinion on the matter is that Russia has a superior approach. NASA's Ares V is planned to launch around 2-4 times a year, but it has high fixed costs, and as far as I know, there are no plans to increase the launch rate of the Ares V significantly. That means there are unexploited economies of scale. An orbital assembly station is a cleverer approach in that it means one can use a smaller rocket to launch the material. They can either use existing rockets like Proton or Soyuz or future designs like Angora (which is intended to launch up to 25 tons into orbit, assuming they build it). That means the Russians can substitute frequent launches of a smaller vehicle to build things of comparable size (OTOH, I've been unable to determine how much mass or volume this station would be able to manage at once). My take is that the Russian approach, all else being equal including labor and ground-based infrastructure costs, will result in a lower cost per kilogram of payload. That is the primary metric for the cost of a launch vehicle.
There are tradeoffs between the two approaches. The Ares V has high operation costs and high costs per launch. The Russian approach will result (IMHO) in lower launch costs, but then one must add in assembly costs and R&D costs to make space equipment that can be assembled in space. I hope the Russians are serious about this assembly station and make it happen. If it works, it'll open up space in a way that larger launch vehicles cannot.
For the last decade, Russia has announced LOADS of plans for space but does not want to pay for them (even though they are very cash positive). The only way this will happen is if America or EU backs it. As to not flying to the moon ot mars, that is absolutely their goal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Perhaps they will buy the decomissioned ISS, fix it up a bit, and just use that as a starting point.
I'm glad. That money meant that scientists and engineers from one of the foremost space powers in the world didn't starve or move to Iran. It meant that the AMAZING corporate memory at Krushnev and Energia (among many, many others) could be maintained when the country's ruling elite wrecked the place.
It meant that US companies and European companies could see lower costs to orbit for their products and that means that people in the US would face lower costs on things that required satellites in the first place.
It meant that the US got to get an official window into russian rocketry and that two former enemies could develop close ties between professionals and organizations.
It meant that for about 1/100th of the price of the Iraq war, we got all that, and a functioning Space Station to boot.
It meant that SOMEONE can get into space and push the species forward, who cares what language they speak when they get there.
WEll, I think there are a lot of things going on here.
First: Space is not the bonanza we thought it was in the 1950's and 1960's. Part of the formulation of our space program was the terrible arms race with russia, but part of it was the modernist notion that we would remake space in our image and reap the dividends. Surprisingly this mindset not only impacted the laity but also the technological priesthood (engineers, scientists). We were going to have colonies on mars and the moon within 50 years, no question.
Second: We greatly underestimated the challenges we face. Here was an underestimation made by the public but not by the engineers. We saw that we went from heavier than air flight to being on the moon in inside 70 years and assumed that continued progress would follow the same track. As a matter of fact it couldn't (not least because of diminishing marginal returns but also because of the huge change in challenges between getting to LEO and getting to the moon). Once we got to the moon we realized that the next step wasn't right around the corner. This happened to coincide with a number of social changes that demystified the space race and caused people to be less inclined to pay for large government projects.
Third: We confused lack of public progress with lack of progress and we confused public achievements with scientific achievements. In the time between Apollo 11 and now, we have sent out Cassini, Hubble, Chandra, DS-1, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager, the mars rovers, the Venus probe, and hundreds of earth satellites. We have become much better (in many, though not all ways) at building spacecraft as a country and a species. But we have also glorified achievements that haven't been so monumental. The Space Shuttle wasn't as good a vehicle as it should have been and it should have been phased out long ago. the ISS, for all its good points, does not advance the state of the art as much as DS-1 did.
As a result, we have both an unrealistic expectation of space flight and an underestimation of our progress in the past 25 years. I think we need to be prepared to wait another 25 or 50 before we are talking about the Moon or Mars in any serious, consistent fashion. But we will also not be there in the same way. Corporate space flight WILL be a mainstay of the future and it probably will bring more people into space in the 21st century than government space flight.
So dont look at 4 year timelines. Look further down the road. Also, the 4 year comment of mine was snarky. The OP was complaining about Barack Obama's wish to cut nasa funding as though it would forever doom the US space program. I was pointing out what we happen to get a new president every so often and 4 years isn't the end of the world.
.. "a citation needed", especially for the "does not want to pay for them" part.
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