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Russian Manned Space Vehicle May Land With Rockets
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Russia's next-generation manned space vehicle may be equipped with thrusters to perform a precision landing on its return to Earth. Previous manned missions have landed on Earth using a parachute or, in the case of space shuttles, a pair of wings. Combined with retractable landing legs and a re-usable thermal protection system, the new system promises to enable not only a safe return to Earth, but also the possibility of performing multiple space missions with the same crew capsule. The spacecraft will fire its engines at an altitude of just 600-800m, as the capsule is streaking toward Earth after re-entering the atmosphere at the end of its mission. After a vertical descent, the precision landing would be initiated at the altitude of 30m above the surface. Last July, Korolev-based RKK Energia released the first drawings of a multi-purpose transport ship, known as the Advanced Crew Transportation System (ACTS), which, at the time, Russia had hoped to develop in co-operation with Europe. 'It was explained to us how it was supposed to work and, I think, from the technical point of view, there is no doubt that this concept would work,' says Christian Bank, the leading designer of manned space systems at EADS-Astrium in Bremen, Germany. However, the design of the spacecraft's crew capsule had raised eyebrows in some quarters, as it lacked a parachute — instead sporting a cluster of 12 soft-landing rockets, burning solid propellant. Inside Russia, the idea apparently has many detractors. During the formal defense of the project, one high-ranking official skeptical of the rocket-cushioned approach to landing reportedly used an unprintable expletive to describe what was going to happen to crew members unlucky enough to encounter a rocket engine failure a few seconds before touchdown."
Of all the crap I've seen on /. I didn't realize we had unprintable expletives around here? Now, I'm curious - what could be so bad that it can't be printed on a /. page?!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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It's Russian, and Slashdot doesn't support the russian alphabet well?
That's so retro.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
one high-ranking official skeptical of the rocket-cushioned approach to landing reportedly used an unprintable expletive to
I only know enough Cyrillic to recongize it, I can't actually read Russian.
Imagine, an expletive so vial it transcends language barriers.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Splat!
Chechnya ... I think
SPLAT !!!
In most languages copulation isn't an expletive. A native German speaker told me that the worst he could think of was "Go to the Devil", in Deutch.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
In other words, they must think that adding that extra fuel weight (for landing) is worth the extra fuel weight that is needed to launch the rockets into space. After all, the landing fuel will cost them a lot of extra weight. I don't know how much extra it would be, but it doesn't sound like a good idea.
Full Tilt
McDonnell-Douglas did this almost 20 years ago - the DC-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X), later known as the Delta Clipper.
It seems pretty inefficient to carry the fuel mass for the retro rocket braking all the way up out of the gravity well into orbit and then back down into the gravity well so you can use it in the last kilometer of the flight. There doesn't seem any way to stop at a gas station on the way down, but maybe they are planning on lifting the fuel to orbit on non-reusable tankers, which also seems inefficient. In something like this, inefficient equates to really fucking expensive.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Let's see, how fast might the ship being going when the landing system kicks in? Falling from orbit to the ground is going to produce a lot of velocity to bleed off in apparently a very short time. The shuttle uses both atmospheric braking and S-turns to bleed off velocity and still lands pretty darn fast.
It sounds like this just falls without a chute. I'm not going to do the math, but even if it is subsonic at 800m, you are going to have to brake like mad at the end. 10G braking? 20G doesn't sound like it would be outlandish. OK, so it is a short period of time and with solid-fuel rockets it is just one pulse. But it sounds like it would be ohe heck of a pulse.
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Take a simple, cheap, reliable solution (parachute) and replace it with an expensive, complicated and less robust solution (retro rockets).
I can't help but think of the space pen (beacause regular pens don't write in zero-g) that NASA invented at great expense. The Russians (allegedly) just used a pencil instead.
"Chechnya"
You have insulted my mother you American pig-dog, prepare for a duel!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I can't imagine that a parachute wouldn't still be used for the initial descent. This plan also requires comparatively large amounts of rocket fuel to be launched and brought back down and is a potential safety risk in the event of a malfunction on landing. In the case of the survived malfunctions with the Soyuz system, many have been sheer luck but some of the survivability has to be attributed to the simplicity of the design.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Are they still searching for that dog?!
(Score:0, Offtopic)
It's an urban legend.
Come on Comrade, I'd love to learn some Russian swear words. Openness and all, remember? :)
Just making new capsules without the rockets may be just as cost effective. That is all that you are saving from the trip.
That's got to be some serious thrust and precision. Actually, if this works, without intertial dampeners, the people inside are going to be goo on the floor ;)
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Ok, so the design is based upon rockets, but does it mean that it uses *no* aerodynamic braking at all? I don't know a whole lot about aerodynamics, but I remember from physics class the discussion of drag and terminal velocity. Is it possible that the shape of their vehicle has a relatively slow terminal velocity, so that the rockets don't have to do *that much* braking at the end? Not that I'm saying that I think even requiring a small amount of retro-rocket braking is a good design, but it seems like maybe you are assuming an awful lot about what speed it will be at when they fire the rockets?
Level 80 epicced DK here bitch, prepare to lose.
During the formal defense of the project, one high-ranking official skeptical of the rocket-cushioned approach to landing reportedly used an unprintable expletive to describe what was going to happen to crew members unlucky enough to encounter a rocket engine failure a few seconds before touchdown."
It would accidentally the whole crew!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
That is soooo my new insult of choice.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
In French Québec, we're lucky enough to combine all four.
And not just in your profanity!
The enemies of Democracy are
I think this will work. It's used extensively on giant robots in Japanese cartoons.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The existing Soyuz TMA capsules also have "soft-landing rockets", they're used just at the point of touchdown to cushion the landing. Of course, the TMAs also have a parachute, so it's less of a problem if the landing rockets fail.
Interestingly, the very first Soyuz TMA had all kinds of other problems, but the landing-rocket part actually worked.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The high ranking official and flying expletive both refer not to the spacecraft design of today, but to the Zarya spacecraft of 80's. Read the article carefully - it mentions that; only the /. quote is wrong.
Ex-ple-tive. Nice new word for me. No, "fuck" is not THAT word.
It was a "windy day in Arizona" when the US flag fluttered.
Now, Federal'noe kosmicheskoe agentstvo Rossii, (RKA) will blow DUST in the yankee eyes by landing with RETRO RETROs... But, i don't know if it will be a dusty/chokey day in Chernobyl or Sunny Siberia...
(Since, apparently, Russia has no deserts...
http://www.worldreviewer.com/travel-guides/desert/in-russia/
)...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Astronauts that have heat-shielded spacesuits and pop-out hang-glider wings gliding back to terra firma.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
And Chernobyl would be the past tense, fucked?
+6, Funny
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Ok, so the design is based upon rockets, but does it mean that it uses *no* aerodynamic braking at all?
I'm sure it does. Hard to imagine that they could carry enough fuel to rely solely on the rockets for braking.
But they still need to land. Since you're moving relatively slow at this point (but still fast enough to kill your crew) you can't airbrake with your vehicle body. At this point you have to deploy a system that works at relatively slow speeds. Most spacecraft rely on parachutes, sometimes supplemented by the extra cushioning of an ocean landing. But this doesn't give you a lot of control over how you touch down, and you really need it if you're going to design a reusable vehicle.
And we really need to reuse more of our space hardware. We'll never have a self-sustainable business model for space travel as long as all our expensive hardware is one-use-only.
The Shuttle implements precision landing by turning into a glider after the aerodynamic braking is done. (I still think this is the best model; the Shuttle's problems stem from skimping on other features of the design.) The Russians would seem to have decided that landing rockets are a better approach (pun unavoidable).
Yea! We get the Buck Rogers rocket ships that land on their fins. Do we also get the evil galactic empires too? And the super-weapons of EE Doc Smith?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Is it just me, or does this thing look a lot like the Orion module? Hmm... first the Buran which looks like the shuttle, now this thing that duplicates Orion. The Russians should try their hand at making a small, passenger only ship, like the HL-20 or the X-38, or the Mig Spiral.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Since you can't use parachutes on Mars (atmosphere too thin, craft with crew too heavy), this could potentially be reserved for landings on Mars, right?
In most languages copulation isn't an expletive.
Where did you come up with that factoid?
A native German speaker told me that the worst he could think of was "Go to the Devil", in Deutch.
Surely you must know that the strongest taboo word in German is Belgien.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
As opposed to simply being your new insult of choice?
I don't know the first thing about rocket science, so let me ask the crowd here.
How do you synchronize the firing of 12 solid fueled rockets?
Your poofy lvl80 point and click is no match for my AWP.
I think while this is fairly useless for landing on earth. It could be more useful for landing on other planets. If we are landing on a planet without much atmosphere or some harsh environment parachutes could be rendered useless. Ignoring that repacking parachutes outside of a cleanroom using robots is not really done. So parachute re usability is down. As well parachutes do not allow you to chose a very specific landing point even here on earth where we know pretty much everything about the wind. As well most of the parts involved in retrorockets are already in the spacecraft or would be in a good future design. The only lost space/additional mass is in the fuel itself (which IS a lot).
I don't think it is a very useful idea NOW. But in future spacecraft or more likely with future propulsion systems it could be. As odd as this sounds firing your rockets at insanely precise amounts and angles with thousands of recalculations a second could be simpler than using a parachute.
As well, the downside many people mention of noplanb is silly. If parachutes don't deploy sure you have more time to think about it but you are still going to impact the earth fast enough to liquefy your body. I don't see why it matters if your death is decided at 10km in the air or 1km. The pieces of ship remaining would be slightly larger that is about it.
Also this is old tech. I played lunar lander yearrrrs ago.
And illness. In Dutch, Kankerman (Cancer Man) is a pretty bad insult.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of spaceships landing on a tail of fire, "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended!" But rocket-powered landings on Earth are a questionable engineering decision even when you get to reuse some of the liquid-fueled rocket engines that you already needed for liftoff and already wanted to recover intact. If you instead have to add extra weight to your upper stage for single-purpose solid rockets of lower ISP, it seems even more dubious.
And that's before you get into the issue of "solid rockets" and "precision". Even designing a liquid-fueled rocket with adequate throttle control for a gentle landing isn't easy. (It's like brain surgery! Or possibly like some other appropriate metaphor!) But at least throttling liquid fuel consumption rates is possible. Solid rockets basically have just three settings: "off", "on", and "kaboom".
My mother was a saint you bastard!
Takes off and lands straight up and down?
Just like God and Robert Heinlein intended. Huzzah!
2174.749 f/s SOMEONE has the wrong terminal velocity. Are we sure this isn't a way to eliminate political dissidents?
In American english we have things like "God damned pig buttfucker"
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
could take-off from the ground with its own power. It was
also fly-by-wire.
So what? Thunderbird 3 (and 1 come to that) did this way back in the '60s.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Had a friend of mine that was Lithuanian. She told me that they had no curse words.
About the worst thing you could say to someone in Lithuanian was, translated to English: "I hope your rabbit gets mange!"
Scary words, those.
Poutine! Nothing worse.
rewriting history since 2109
how does launching site location limit landing landing location?
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
I once heard a Spaniard curse:
"Me cago en las tetas de la Virgen MarÃa para que el niño JesÃs coma mierda!"
It doesnÂt have sex or animals, but the double dose of religion makes up for it
No sig for the moment.
Damn you Slashdot and your lack of UTF-8 support! ...dang, that was an unprintable expletive, allright
No sig for the moment.
I thought the Ruskie's where smarter than that, sounds like something nasa would propose. Russia has always had a successful space program
because they use well tested and simple engineering. Just a capsule it goes up and parachutes back to the ground, no wings no crazy rocket
assisted landing. The higher the component count and complexity the more room for failure.
Got Code?
I'm a Night Elf Mohawk. Bring it bitch!
Sounds like she was a naive girl.
http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Lithuanian
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In Dutch it is also common to swear with diseases. Common ones are typhus ('tyfus'), tuberculosis ('tering') and cancer ('kanker'). They can be used as expletives or as adjectives. In the latter case this can either mean that the speaker is unhappy with something ('teringweer', tuberculosis weather) or it can be a superlative ('kankergroot', cancer big, i.e. very large). The superlative use is only common around Rotterdam and The Hague, however.
This is probably an aspect of the Dutch language that comes across as very awkward and uncivilised to non-natives.
Might I suggest that the Russians call the new system the "Spacecraft Precision Lander And Transporter". The name might not be the greatest, but the acronym says it all.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
5- Mother (for Chinese insults) (sometimes plus other elders too)
I feel bad for the guy that cleans the people soup this makes in the crater.
Ron White might say. This will take them all the way to the crash site.
Huh?
"Go to the devil" is probably the mildest expletive either in German and in Russian.
By the way, the word for "to fuck" in russian is "yebat'" and is indeed considered unprintable.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Not exactly. Half of the list are just ordinary words with negative meaning. Lithuanian really lacks strong swearwords of lithuanian origin. So we import the majority from russian, some from polish. But this does not mean that lithuanians swear in foreign language. Usually some description is combined with foreign swearwords to make a satisfactory expletive. The curious side effects of this is that lithuanians can understand perfectly russian swearing, but not vice versa, and that some really bad russian swearwords sometimes can pass just as a salty language. Sometimes I really envy other languages for having original swearwords, lithuanian ones for some reason vanished. I really doubt that they never existed.
I strongly suspect that russian name for men genitalia was used. Russians can say a whole sentence, which of course is unprintable, using only this word :)
there is an old russian joke going along the lines of:
- What's the name of your cute doggie, little girl?
- Boar.
- Why's that?
- He fucks pigs.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Being able to hit the runway every single time seems like good precision to me.
please type the word in this image: excrete
There are all sorts of programs, both government and commercial (or, more accurately, hobby-companies of wealthy people), that have proven the tail-first rocket landing approach can work reliably. The question is do you want to carry all that fuel into orbit so you can burn it on the way home. From what I understand, since fuel is the major weight component for a rocket as you start your landing burn the ship weighs almost nothing compared to launch, so it's not as big a drawback as you'd think.
Sometimes I really envy other languages for having original swearwords, lithuanian ones for some reason vanished. I really doubt that they never existed.
Couldn't it just be that the Lithuanian "think of the children" movement is just slightly stronger and older than any of us previously thought?
In German you can say "Fuck you" (Fick Dich) and even Motherfucker (Mutterficker), and it is a pretty bad insult, but the usual nasty German ones revolve around crap and piss: "Bekacktes Arschloch" - "shit covered arsehole" will makeyou friends all over the place, and "Pisser" (no proper translation) will save you teeth extraction fees at the dentist.
Why don't they just attach a big drill to the front of it, and it can drill a new oil well as it lands?
Lots of math regarding the impulse required to slow said spacecraft to a speed worthy of using retros to attain a near stationary speed and land slowly with all cosmonauts alive and... well just alive.
Let's consider one more thing that simply may not add up: the speed of the capsule when its rockets are fired. How fast is a vehicle under re-entry speeds moving when it reaches the altitude of 800-600 meters? If the margin of error is in fact 200 meters like the difference between 800 and 600 suggests, will this not leave only seconds between knowing there is an emergency situation and calling for the recovery crew to get out their egg flippers to pick up what's left of the cosmonauts?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
What is the russian translation for fuck?
It strongly depends on whether it's used as a noun, adjective or verb, as well as on the specific context; i.e. "fuck off", "fuck up", "fuck over" etc translate to different Russian words, though normally with one of the two basic roots: "houy", a vulgar word for "penis", and "yeb", ditto for "copulate".
On a side note, the latter one is actually recognizable Proto-Indo-European root for the very same thing - "eib" - so you could say that Russian vulgarities are among the most ancient (though the same goes for other Slavic languages, most (all?) of which also retain the same or similar root for such purposes).
My profanity of choice is "flocon de mais!", which sounds very bad to anyone who doesn't understand French, but translates to "corn flakes!".
Poor Delta Clipper...
Passed over in favor of a plane-like vehicle that would need runways to take off and land, and which had fuel tank requirements which were technically impossible. Looks like the government made the right choice of contractor on that one... the only thing the space-plane design had going for it was the linear aerospike engine, which the DC-X could have had as well, if not for the patent issues.
Here's hoping China or some other country that ignores US patents puts together a VTOL SSTO craft like the DC-X with all the pieces that can't be put together for the next 20 years because of patents that aren't being used for anything, and then builds enough of them that we can start buying them used.
-- Terry
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"... what was going to happen to crew members unlucky enough to encounter a rocket engine failure a few seconds before touchdown."
Every considered what happens if the Parachutes fail?
It sounds like it will work until you put yourself into this situation:
You're floating in space, and this really really big, multi-trillion ton rock is being thrown at you.
Now, just turn yourself around and fire your rockets until you can land on the rock being thrown at you without breaking yourself.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
> What is the russian translation for fuck? Babelfish doesn't translate it...
[yebAts]
What is the russian translation for fuck? Babelfish doesn't translate it...
yob, but it's not used quite in the same way as fuck. hui (or in Russian) is probably what you're looking for.