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First Images of Russian-European Manned Spacecraft
oliderid writes "The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been unveiled.
It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia and will allow Europe to participate directly in crew transportation.The reusable ship was conceived to carry four people towards the Moon, rivaling the US Ares/Orion system. This project is the Plan A for the European Space agency. The plan B is an evolution of the ATV proposed by a consortium of European companies led by Astrium."
They can go visit the Moon, but the US has already claimed it with the cunning use of flags.
Looks like a goddamn iCapsule. Damn you, Jobs!
Anyone else getting depressed with the space race? We've been at it for decades and the latest and greatest the Ruskies and Americans come up with looks like pretty much the same shit we've been doing for years, or in America's case, a 30 year wasted effort and then we come back to capsules. Repackaging the same old shit, up the price and call it a new version for the future, where have I seen this before? Oh, right, Microsoft. Apollo would be something along the lines of Win9x, better than what came before but not great. The shuttle would be like WinMil, we skipped XP and went straight to Vista with this Constellation debacle, and once that fails the next next shuttle successor will be something like Windows 7, a looming future failure.
*sigh*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm not sure I'd be too happy if I was being put in that, the booster landing thing sounds like its asking for trouble if you get low on fuel, or they get knocked out of alignment or a floating point error messes up their servo controllers....
At least with a parachute or wings you know that so long as they are they they will work. Also I imagine that it will require a huge amount of fuel to turn it around and then slow it.
Or have I got the wrong idea and they're going to parachute in and then just use these at the end at which point again you have to ask - why bother?
And can't do now.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Apparently the ESA / Russia are ushering in a new age of "close enough" space exploration.
News Report, 2021:Today astronauts from the ESA will begin a new chapter of space exploration by first going up really high, and then kinda drifting off in sort of a that way direction. The mission captain was interviewed recently concerning the importance of today's historic flight.
"We are confident that the up portion of the mission will go smoothly. We then plan to transfer to the next stage where, God willing, we will be the among the first humans to end up somewhere over toward the Moon." He commented, waving vaguely off toward the sky.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
You might as well ask what the point of new music is? We've already got tons of it, more than enough to go around for a lifetime, so why don't we just close up shop, and put all that money, which happens to be more than is invested in manned space exploration, into poverty relief?
It's human nature to see something you can't do and then try to do it. Why bother scaling Everest? It served no purpose, but it was there and we did it. There should be no area of human existence where we refuse to advance ourselves - whether poverty relief, musical innovation, or space exploration. Mankind needs to do more, it needs to search higher. Knowing more about the universe is never a bad thing, and while cost-analysis should be taken into consideration, it borders on inhumane to deny our basic instincts for discovery.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
The lack of a Saturn-class booster does pretty much kill the idea though. Neither Arianespace nor Energiya are going to fund the development of that kind of monster, not when there's no commercial use for it and no guarantee of continued political backing for manned Moonshots.
Hence the first related story linked from TFA, which discusses the prospect of an ATV-derived spacecraft to launch on an Ariane 5. Much cheaper, and using existing kit. Funding for it might require political change in Britain, however, which has so far refused to get involved in manned projects.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Not a bit of it. It's a question of fuel.
Having reached the Moon, you have to fire engines to slow down into orbit. Otherwise you loop around the back and head straight back to Earth like Apollo 13. So you need to carry fuel for this.
So now you're circling the Moon like Apollo 8. Good. To come home, you need to fire engines again to speed back up. More fuel.
But wait, you want to visit the surface? Then you need a lander. Those things are heavy. And it needs fuel: fuel to land, and fuel to take off again.
That's the trouble with spaceflight. It's all about fuel. Every manoeuvre burns fuel. Every kilogram of fuel means you need even more fuel at the start, just to carry that fuel into space with you. It's why the Saturn V rocket was the size of a skyscraper, but only carried something the size of a minibus to the moon, and brought only a tiny capsule home to Earth. All the rest? Fuel tanks.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Is there any way we can look through a telescope from Earth and see the flag on the moon?
Well, our esteemed Houston (Democrat) Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee suggested that the Mars Pathfinder could do that for us.
But I guess then they'd claim Pathfinder was fake.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Saturn V got Apollo to the Moon, with the fuel and equipment necessary to stop and land there and to come home again.
Let's see: the service module, the lunar excursion module, all the fuel for both of them... that's got to be three or four times the mass of the command module, which was all that got back to Earth (I haven't looked it up so this is probably well off). A rocket whose sole purpose was to send a crew around the Moon, but not to land, could have been a whole lot smaller than Saturn V.
Look at it this way: suppose that bringing along a lander and fuel supplies for a Moon landing doubles the mass of your spacecraft at the Moon. Then clearly, that must require that you at least double the size of the rocket on the pad.
I don't actually know what the plan would be for a Moon landing with this vehicle. The fact that it has its own thrusters for landing suggests to me that it might have a direct-ascent mission profile: no separate lander, just bring down the whole ship. NASA considered this approach when planning Apollo: it has the benefit of simplicity, but would have needed a more powerful rocket even than Saturn V to bring enough fuel. Perhaps with modern materials and engineering it could be done this way: but as the article says, no rocket powerful enough currently exists.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.