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RKK Energia Confirms Private Trip To the Moon
Teancum writes "RKK Energia, the prime contractor for the Russian space program and the company who builds the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, recently confirmed negotiations are underway with space tourism company Space Adventures for a privately financed crewed flight around the Moon. While the offer and purchase of at least one seat has been discussed earlier, this is the first time Energia has confirmed the negotiations and has gone into at least some details in terms of what they are expecting to have happen with this flight and the approximate timeframe for when this flight would take place: sometime in 2016 or 2017."
In Soviet Russia, rocket launches YOU!
I am sometimes totally amazed at how much money an individual can have. I can't fathom 150 million USD, let alone be able to pay that much on a tourist trip (no matter how awesome this is). Whoever the two individuals are, they are some lucky b******s!
If this works out, I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)
Please, when you go around the moon, take some time to get some good photos of the Apollo missions remains. When I say "good photos", I mean photos that show stuff almost as good as they are shown on NASA's videos from the moon.
It would shut the Apollo conspiracy advocators up for good, and close this silly subject.
But I guess Ralph Kramden must have invested it wisely.
I'm sure that there has to be a lot of very exploitable mineral wealth on the moon. Not the least of which is water, and the ability to grow low gravity crops. Our gravity well is very expensive to climb. Lunar launches could be made using nuclear engines. Space tourism begins with a service plaza on the moon.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
This won't be easy. The big russian rocket, the Proton has way too toxic fluoric propellant to be allowed for man-rated flight. The smaller Soyuz (the R7 family) is too weak to do the lifting as a single launch. There will be two or three near-simultaneous launches, maybe 1 unmanned Proton and 1 manned Soyuz, or 2 unmanned Soyuz (Zond) and 1 manned Soyuz to bring all the hardware to LEO, where there will be a need for spacewalks to assemble the big round-the-Moon rocket.
That project will be about as complicated and reliable as the 1979 US mission to save hostages from Iran. Over-complicated plans have a high chance of failure. Maybe it would be simpler to adopt the large, but less toxic Ariane-5 missile for manned launch and that could possible do the whole Moon round-trip in one launch.
This was one of the trips Burt Rutan proposed in his 2006 talk? http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html
Correct me if I'm wrong - but wouldn't they have good reason to be skeptical of such claims?
I don't remember any photos of the moon landing site as taken from Earth. In fact, it was my understanding that resolving power of just about any optical system in existence on Earth is inadequate?
I know photos were taken from an orbiting satellite a few years ago, the LRO. Even in those pictures the landing site is a mere few pixels;
http://www.space.com/6997-photos-reveal-apollo-11-moon-landing-site.html
Note that they are apparently just orbiting the moon, not landing. May seem like a "minor detail", but the engineering problems are of an entirely different magnitude.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Why i think that it is not good idea to fly on Russian rocket this days?
Maybe because their launch success ratio dropping lately, and it is not good idea to end up as Express AM4 satellite.
Especially because they use instead of aerospace IC's, smuggled usual IC's from Taiwan. Keywords to search in this translation. "not designed to work in space".
When things go wrong, the taxpayers will catch the bill.
Shotgun! I called it! Mwahahaha!
to carry the harpoons.