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."

Comments

makes sense

[MassiveForces]

they don't call it "The Federation" for nothing in Star Trek

Vaporware

[Protonk]

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.

Re:Not sure this will work

[khallow]

other than some toy like commercial projects (Virgin) that will die once the handful of billionaires who can afford it have taken a ride.

That completely explains why successful businessmen are staking their money and reputation on a "handful of billionaires". Too bad they haven't figured this out yet.

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.

Russia does have the experience. Money always is a problem with them so you might be right there. I don't understand the desire for a "standards body". Everyone doesn't need to take part. Everyone doesn't need to get in on toilet seat design. Everyone doesn't need "a nasty bit of work" in charge.

Sorry, but I'm annoyed by the airchair astronauts who know better than anyone else what's to happen in space. You seem to fit that mold quite well with your groundless pronouncements. Maybe it'll turn out that that building things in space are indeed "horrendously complex and expensive", that commercial projects will flop, and that we need some sort of global effort to do this sort of thing in space. But none of this has been demonstrated.

Re:Impressive...If It Works

[AKAImBatman]

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.

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