EU and Russia Show Off New Lunar Spacecraft Design

schliz writes "Space flight planners have unveiled a new spaceship design for a joint EU/Russian trip to the Moon. The EU will be building the crew capsule, using technology developed for the automatic cargo system used to supply the International Space Station." First one to link to decent pics (the article has none) wins undying gratitude and a warm feeling inside.

Comments

Links to pics and the BBC article

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Here

Re:Links to pics and the BBC article

[I confirm I'm not a]

More pictures here. It's a Slashdot article from Thursday entitled "First Images of Russian-European Manned Spacecraft".

Russia is the pioneer here...

[bogaboga]

"...The EU will be building the crew capsule, using technology developed for the automatic cargo system used to supply the International Space Station..."

I thought it is important for Slashdotters to know that when it comes to automatic docking of spacecraft in outer space, Russians have been doing this for decades without much fan fare!

I just do not understand why we in the west always appear to get "full of it" when it comes to technology issues. Why?

Even when we 100% relied on the Russian Soyuz technology not many years ago, this fact did not capture headlines in Russia. If it were the other way round, I am sure CNN, ABC and FOX would inundate us with the story as if nothing else mattered.

Re:Russia is the pioneer here...

[im_thatoneguy]

Nor is their lift capability anywhere near ours.

Sort of like saying "My bicycle never careens into a wall at 100mph killing everybody riding it".

The Soyuz module with a crew of 3 delivers about 1 ton of cargo. The Shuttle with a crew of 7 can deliver 57 tons of cargo. That means a Soyuz rocket would have to make 57 trips to do what the shuttle does in one. Something tells me even with a 2% failure rate for the shuttle I would say it out performs the soyuz. Unless your metric is number of millionaires launched into LEO.

Re:Russia is the pioneer here...

[Thagg]

You know -- sadly what you are referring to was the Apollo-Soyuz mission of the mid 80's. The Russian KURS automated docking system is used all the time on the space station now, and it has worked flawlessly every time.

It also worked perfectly on the Mir. They did have a docking mishap on the Mir, but that as when they tried to do a manual docking.

Thad

Re:Russia is the pioneer here...

[S-100]

Flawlessly? It almost destroyed the ISS in October, 2004. The automatic system unexpectedly accelerated the Soyuz TMA toward the ISS and the only thing that saved the ships was disabling the automatic docking system and taking manual control.

And lest you think manual docking is safe, don't forget the incident where an ISS crewman took manual control of the docking of a Russian cargo ship and ended up smashing it into the station, fortunately at low enough delta-v to cause only superficial damage.

Re:Russia is the pioneer here...

[AKAImBatman]

*sigh* The AC above me was trying to link to the List of Space Disasters article on Wikipedia. Which speaks of two major incidents resulting in the loss of crew. The first was a parachute failure which led to the death of the astronaut on board. The second was a valve failure that resulted in depressurization of the capsule and a loss of all crew members.

Score Card
==========
Russia - 2
U.S. - 2

Seems to be a parity to me. Also, there is the issue that the Soviet Union didn't always tell everyone when an accident happened. It's difficult to tell if there were further incidents that have gone unpublished.

Regardless of that issue, there are more than enough near-fatal space accidents on the Russian side listed in the Wikipedia article to question whether the Russian space program really is safer. The truth is simply that space travel is risky business. It will continue to be risky business for a long time, unfortunately.

Too soon

[Mad Hughagi]

We've been there, and picked up enough rocks to last a while. What else is there to do...?

Until we can build largely self-sustaining colonies and prove them on earth the fuel and resources would be better spent launching probes, satellites, telescopes, etc. - not sending people on moon vacations.

Re:Space Unity

[inKubus]

People simply working for a common goal is "Communism"? EVERY great advance in history is a result of people sacrificing for a common goal. Take the Manhattan project, as a for instance. The inspiration, in this case, was a horrible war. Why, if someone mentions the mere possibility of doing something together, NOT because of a war, but because we're HUMANS and WE CAN, it's branded as "communism"? That couldn't be further from the truth. Your mindset is the result of brainwashing by the people who REALLY benefit from the so called free market. There isn't a free market here anymore.

I call for a FREER market, where anyone who is willing or able can contribute, rather than sitting on our thumbs and watching our tax dollars flow into the pockets of the space oligarchy. History only proves what HAS happened, not what can. Free society works because people are rewarded for merit. What I'm saying is that people are discouraged because they are NOT being fairly rewarded for their merit. And a collective success, for all humanity, would be a mental reward, a turning point in human history. For money, yes, but also for everyone's livelyhood.

We sit at a time where the basic necessities in life, WORLD-WIDE are less expensive in time and energy than ever before in history. The reason for this is technology. We HAVE time, especially in America, to spend thinking about the greater goals of humanity because we don't have to spend all of our time worrying about food, shelter, medicine, etc. This is a direct result of the free market, not because we all decided to collectively create a better standard of living. A FEW men, GREAT men, made these things possible through their hard work and ingenuity.

The competing and crawling we are all doing now is simply to make more waste, not produce anything. To get more luxuries that are basically made by robots nowadays. And so people are discouraged. They are not seeing anything INSPIRING anymore.

So there are two ways to go about it. Rally everyone around their fears, their unseen enemies, their negative emotions OR rally everyone around their hopes, dreams of peace for all, their positive emotions. That is not COMMUNISM. That's humanism at it's finest. Capital, human capital, money, rewards for those who succeed; these are all essential to the goals of humankind because you're right--people want to compete. But will it be a friendly game or a war? It seems to me that you have given in to the dark side, and no longer recognize that we--as humans--are all one, stuck on this planet with nowhere to run except together. In the melting pot that is America, there is no greater concept.

So, why don't you stop looking at the past and start looking at the future and stop giving in to your fears (which were probably created by some newspaper anyway)?

Re:Simply not true

[inKubus]

Yeah, but you're not thinking about the big picture. The ACTUAL cost to produce the food, house, clothing item, whatever, in energy and time (human time), is lower than ever in history. Because of the free market, the focus has been on efficiency. Tractors pretty much drive themselves nowadays on the big corporate farms. And they use less energy because their engines are more efficient. I can think of a thousand examples. I generalize it into basically robotics. A robot can give you time, in return for energy. Now we are at a point where a robot can do the work with less energy than a comparable human. Because they are efficently turning energy into pure work, not wasting it playing Gears of War or soemthing.

What you're seeing is a temporary disruption in the free market because of lack of confidence in the paper we use to exchange. It doesn't change the fact that it is, physically speaking, cheaper. I understand that prices are higher, but the underlying physical concepts that "money" is just an abstraction of have changed for the better, and will continue to do so every year. It's a great leap to make, I understand, but I'm not a crackpot. I'm a scientist.

Re:Simply not true

[sumdumass]

It isn't the government printing money that is causing inflation. In fact, we aren't printing any more then enough to replace the damaged money anyways. It is the cost of energy that is causing it. You have it right when your said "Especially when the currency is practically tied to the cost of energy (Joules)". Everything from growing things to using electricity to transporting products is going up. That causes prices to increase which gets us to where we are now.

We have far more money recycled on credit then we have printed. The big problem is that in the late 90's, we removed regulations that were put in place during the 1970's oil crisis and now speculators can buy contracts for oil that have no capabilities whatsoever at all to take delivery of it. This takes oil off the market and causes the spot prices to drop to almost the same amounts as the contract prices. There used to be around a 10-20% differences in prices, this is down to less the 3% in most cases now. Currently it is going at a 42 cent loss. But to give an idea of how much of the market is given to speculation, we were at $147/bbl and dropped to $124 or so on the mention of a government report that we are using less oil. That's about a 15-16% drop all the sudden and it is still shrinking. Now even with this, people are still expecting to make money which means that speculation is still driving the costs to some degree.

Combine that with low dollar values and poof, there is the problem.

Re:Space Unity

[spandex_panda]

you been watching that Enron movie? Geez some of those Americans are nasty bastards... De-regulation killed folks. European Union type regulation seems much more equitable and 'free' than American 'freedoms'.

Link to further discussion of this vehicle

[meringuoid]

A popular tech website posted news about this a few days ago; there was a lengthy and interesting discussion: here.