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Excalibur Almaz To Offer Commercial Orbital Flights
xp65 alerts to the plans of an international consortium called Excalibur Almaz Limited to open up a new era of private orbital space flight for commercial customers. The group, consisting of Russian, US, and Japanese companies, will use a formerly top-secret Soviet re-entry vehicle called Almaz to carry paying research crews on one-week missions into Earth orbit by 2013. This ambition represents a large step beyond the sub-orbital flight market so far targeted by most other private space companies. "Excalibur has raised 'tens of millions of dollars' to initiate what will become a several hundred million dollar program, [CEO] Dula tells Spaceflight Now. He has spent more than 20 years eying this specific Almaz program... He also says 'the business plan closes' generating profits within a few years. His surveys have found research and science customers for space missions that are not tourist hops, but less demanding than ISS operations."
Going to the moon is a big elliptical orbit. The Apollo missions had an abort of just letting the vehicle pass the moon and head back to earth. I think one of the early missions used it, and Apollo 13.
Bruce Perens.
Nice submission, although here's a few more details from my own submission:
Excalibur Almaz has come out of stealth mode and unveiled their reusable spacecraft capable of carrying a crew of three and/or cargo to orbit for up to a week. According to VP (and former NASA astronaut) Leroy Chiao, the spacecraft are designed to be launched on a variety of rockets, and are modernized versions of vehicles developed and flight-tested for the Soviet Union's military space station program (the company has also purchased some of the space stations for potential future use). EA plans to begin flight tests in 2012, with revenue flights starting in 2013. The company will likely be competing with the SpaceX Dragon and Bigelow Aerospace's recently-announced "Orion Lite" for a chunk of the emerging commercial orbital transportation market.
An interesting bit of trivia is that the original Soviet Almaz space station carried a rapid-fire cannon and performed a successful test-firing on a target satellite. I'm assuming the space stations which Excalibur Almaz bought don't have the cannons anymore. :(
I wonder, what science do they think people will be using this for? I guess it could replace some of the Shuttle-only payloads we used to fly, but for anything else the ISS is a much more capable research laboratory. I should know, keeping them doing science is my job these days.
I guess it might have better downmass? Usually, though, you only want to bring it home if you think the long term exposure effects are interesting. This won't be very long term.
My understanding is that a large part of the problem is that it takes a terribly long time to get anything launched to the ISS and you have to go through a substantial amount of red tape. Currently, you need a lead time of years to fly an experiment on the ISS, which makes it really difficult to do meaningful science in the fast-paced scientific environment. Heck, a grad student putting together an experiment would be lucky to have the experiment results back before they finished their PhD. Hopefully the more rapid access from commercial providers (SpaceX Dragon, Bigelow Aerospace's Orion Lite, and now Excalibur Almaz) will help change that picture.