Slashdot Mirror
Europe Set To Build Experimental Transport Spacecraft
coondoggie writes "Looking to take a giant step toward taking part in low Earth orbit transportation, exploration and servicing of orbiting space structures, the European Space Agency today said it would team with Thales Alenia Space Italia to begin building an experimental spacecraft for launch in 2013. 'The 2t lifting body will attain an altitude of around 450 km, allowing it to reach a velocity of 7.5 km/s on entering the atmosphere. It will collect a large amount of data (PDF) during its hypersonic and supersonic flight, while it is being controlled by thrusters and aerodynamic flaps.'"
It is cheaper to launch the Greeks into space then it is to bail them out!
TFA - contrast (with things taken out of the context)
This goal will be achieved with IXV, which is the next step from the Atmospheric Reentry Demonstrator flight of 1998. More manoeuvrable and able to make precise landings, IXV is the 'intermediate' element of Europe's path to future developments with limited risks.
Then
The 2 t lifting body will attain an altitude of around 450 km, ...
The craft will then descend by parachute and land in the Pacific Ocean to await recovery and analysis.
Precise landing with a parachute, in the biggest ocean, awaiting then the recovery... yeah!
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
...as experimental transparent spacecraft.
Could not figure out why they would do that.
Wonder Woman in space. duh!
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Yes. You always launch spacecraft towards the east so that you get a velocity boost from the earth's rotation. This is a suborbital flight so it's basically a giant parabolic arc. If you're launching from Europe, it's not going to have time to go almost all the way around the world on an eastward path to hit the atlantic, so that leaves the Pacific.
Oh good, I see we've got today's mandatory link to Michael Cooney's Layer 8 blog at NetworkWorld, the convenient middleman between Slashdot and news. This time he hasn't even bothered linking to the actual press release he's regurgitating, as far as I can tell. Still, more hits for NetworkWorld, that's what matters.
Anyone know if he's done a post on Bitcoin yet?
Actually France and Germany, the two biggest economies in Europe are supposed to be just fine and are probably the ones that provide most of the funding to this project. It's just Greece/Spain/Portugal/Ireland etc that nuked their economy.
Europe is going to land their spacecraft in the Pacific?
It's harder to miss.
It's not going to be launched from Europe. The launch vehicle is going to be Arianespace's Vega, which is launched from French Guiana, in South America.
No, some European nations are bankrupt. France, Germany etc are doing very nicely thank you and they are the ones (along with the UK, Netherlands etc) who are providing the money to bail out the other EU nations.
Besides, it's a stupid argument that because we can't cure poverty we shouldn't have a space program. That's like arguing that because we're starving we shouldn't write poetry, or try a new design of irrigation system, or work on that internal combustion engine we've been tinkering with.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Except for the Israelis. They launch to the west in a retrograde orbit because they don't want to drop launch debris on enemy countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.