Slashdot Mirror
Countries Considering Circumlunar Flight From ISS
FleaPlus writes "The BBC reports that the space agencies of Europe, Russia, and the US are in (very) preliminary discussions about a potential collaborative mission where astronauts would assemble a small spacecraft at the ISS, then fly it around the Moon and back. This is somewhat similar to previously-proposed commercial missions, with many elements adapted from spacecraft systems already in existence. This would also be a testbed for eventual asteroid and Mars missions, which would likely require modules to be launched on multiple rockets and assembled in space."
I think they should make it look like an awesome motorcycle, with flames painted on it and a kick-ass logo with a skull, spinners, and a lot of chrome--I mean a LOT of fucking chrome! And that shit should have hydraulics too, just a crazy lift kit...an INSANE lift kit!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
Real World aspirations approaching within 50 years of Science Fiction dreams.
You Have Been Warned!
Also: "WHAT THE HELL TOOK YOU SO LONG"?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Well, I guess it's not exactly the same. Given the collaborative international nature of the effort, I can guarantee that it'll take five times as long to get going as Apollo, cost ten times as much (mostly in pork), and it'll be nobody's fault when it fails. Except maybe the French.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
But people will blame the USA no matter what.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Here, get yourself a ride (those are people cooperating on almost all private spaceflights so far); also in Soyuz, it would seem - only apt, considering how it was the first spacecraft to carry macroscopic life (turtles) beyond LEO (around the Moon) and return it safely, on a Zond 5 mission.
Funny how, out of both sides involved in Lunar Race, it is Russia who now has few decades of experience with a spacecraft essentially capable of beyond-LEO operation.
One that hath name thou can not otter
...we should've been doing YEARS AGO.
Thank you and have a nice day.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I wonder why they went with the plan to have the craft return to earth? It makes more sense to me to have a reusable "shuttlecraft" that ferried
astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
using a space station as a station...in space!
The big problem with using the ISS to do this type of mission is that the ISS is in the wrong orbital plane to easily launch flights to the moon. While it's not impossible to fly from the ISS it will be far more costly(in terms of fuel) to do so. Basically as long assembling the mission at the ISS is less costly than a single launch into the correct orbital plane this might be feasible.
Just send the whole ISS. Most of their experiments don't care where the station is, so long as it is space, and plenty of instruments are already onboard.
lol except people in the USA will blame the French no matter what, apparently.
Qxe4
So yeah, maybe the ISS is a good place to integrate a vehicle like this but the best way seems to fly it around the moon then straight to Earth.
No, the inclination makes it a lousy place to go to the Moon from too. But using it is probably cheaper than building a construction shack in a sensible orbit if you're not planning to be going to the Moon on a regular basis.
Using a Earth-orbiting space station is exactly what von Braun recommended sixty years ago before you idiots turned it into a mad dash to "beat the commies". Then we would have had some real space infrastructure for our investment instead of several disposable programs with nothing left to show when they were over.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not if you have to change inclination like anything coming from the ISS would have to do.
But people will blame the USA no matter what.
As long as there are large numbers of Americans who are unable to acknowledge that the USA is ever at fault for anything, or ever less than the best at everything, you have to expect a certain amount of reaction.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not if you have to change inclination like anything coming from the ISS would have to do.
It depends. For example, I believe if you want to go into a lunar polar orbit, departing from the ISS's 51.6 degree inclination actually requires less propellant than if you were to depart from an equatorial orbit. If you want to go somewhere else that the ISS inclination is suboptimal for, all that means is that you need to carry up a little more propellant.
The ISS is in a 51 deg orbit (so the Russians can reach it from Kazakhstan), which is one the worst possible places to depart for the Moon from. Optimally, you want a transfer orbit coplanar with the Moon's orbit, which varies from 18-28 deg (depending of the time of year). This is because trajectory errors in coplanar orbits tend to cancel out, increasing safety, as well as reducing the mass of fuel required launch to the transfer orbit. So, either the ISS-launched mission does a very-expensive plane-change maneuver, or weighs more and is more unsafe than a conventionally launched mission. Either way, launching to the Moon (or any Lagrange Points) from the ISS is orbitally dumb.
BTW, the latitude of Kennedy Space Center is 28 deg, the furthest north it can be to optimally launch a mission to the Moon...
True, but such knee-jerk reactions of blaming us for everything don't help fix the issue.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
One other big difference in this case is that they are talking about using an on-orbit space station as a staging ground for a mission. That is a huge step in terms of mission cycle and design. There is a very large difference between using big rockets to get from Earth to a destination, and using smaller rockets to get from Earth, to an intermittent way point, to your final destination. If a mission like this was executed well, and yielded good, reliable, cheap results, there could be a movement to develop on-orbit assembly infrastructure and on-orbit mission staging resources to a large degree. Such a paradigm shift in mission architecture would definitely represent a historic landmark in mankind's endeavors into space.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
increasing poverty-wealth gap
I keep hearing this... but it think it's safe to say that we've come a long way since the feudal system of serfs, lords, kings, etc.
You stand a far better chance now of switching from poor to rich than someone did even ~100 years ago.
Plus, the "super rich" of today are nothing compared to the likes of Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.
Instead of decomissioning the ISS they should just put it into orbit around the moon. It can be used as a base of some kind, store supplies, etc. at a later date.
Send the entire moon! I'll bet we could have done it with 1999 technology!