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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."
I hope that the Russians are *not* looking at flying to the Moon or Mars. The NEAs make much more interesting destinations where their expertise in micro-gravity environments can be best put to use.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
they don't call it "The Federation" for nothing in Star Trek
At the very least, it might start up a new space race, which would be a much needed motivation to get the US to start seriously looking at space travel again.
The Internet is generally stupid
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.
Well you can't very well build a giant steel planet with an energy weapon capable of destroying other planets in a warehouse.
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.
Sadly the US probably won't - It looks like Obama will be the next president, and his is planning to gut NASA's manned space program:
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obamas_nasa_plan_gets_little_p.php
It looks like the Russians or Chinese are our last best hope to find a way off this rock.
My rights don't need management.
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.
Actually, the engineers were far more on the ball than this. They really did envision a grand space program with colonies across the solar system. To make it happen, they designed quite a few incredible machines. The Saturn V was only the herald of many amazing advancements in spaceflight that were to come. Artificial gravity, Single-Stage to Orbit, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, Nuclear Thermal Engines, and other amazing designs were drawn up, prototyped, and in some cases even built.
Rockets were going to diversify into craft that were smaller and cheaper for manned space flight as well as craft that were larger and similarly cheaper for launching massive payloads like space stations, moon base supplies, interplanetary craft, raw materials, foundries, whatever you could imagine.
So what really happened? Well, there's no question in that respect. The space race was 98% politically motivated. The US and the USSR couldn't lob nukes at each other due to that pesky MAD thing, so they lobbed space technology breakthroughs at each other in the biggest pissing contest in history. Both sides developed incredibly expensive crash programs to bring advanced space technology to fruition. The result was the development of new materials, new engines, new electronics, new physics, new logistics, just about every area of science and technology was pushed to the limit of what these post-WWII economies could muster. (Which was quite a bit given the breakneck pace of WWII technological development and modernization.)
Each side tried to out-muster the other, with the USSR handily keeping one step ahead of the US in every development. So the US set its sights on an incredible goal: Landing a man on the moon. The USSR tried to beat the US to the punch on this task, but when they failed, they didn't take the loss lightly. Rather than admit defeat, the USSR buried any information on the fact that they had even tried. The official line to the public was, the USSR was not in a race to the moon.
Where did that leave the US? Ultimately, with a very expensive space program that had outlived its political usefulness. Lunar missions were scaled back and eventually canceled. The SkyLab station was put in a parking orbit and eventually allowed to reenter and burn up. The grand plans for a small space shuttle, a large Saturn V, a "jumping off" space station, a moon base, and interplanetary mini-Orion missions were scaled back to a single spacecraft. President Nixon demanded that both NASA and the military fly one craft, and one craft only. So they hatched a grand plan for the future, put all their eggs in one basket, and asked the impossible of their engineers: They wanted the Space Shuttle.
Now there's an interesting economic issue with trying to create a machine that is everything to everyone. Unless you have a strong history of both successes and failures from which to understand every nuance required to design and build the all-in-one wonder, you are almost guaranteed to produce a machine that is jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. Which is exactly what happened with the Space Shuttle.
* Cargo capability was too small for military sats
* Launch cost was too high for commercial sats
* Satellite return capability was unnecessary
* Extreme cro
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