Slashdot Mirror
Russia Says Next-Gen Spacecraft Design Ready
The next generation of Russian spacecraft will be ready for test flights by 2017, according to Energia President Vitaly Lopota. 'We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the Moon, among other places,' he said. Federal Space Agency Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin says the new ship would be built by 2018 and would be able to conduct missions to the International Space Station and the Moon.
At least they're trying - NASA can't even make it to the ISS since the shuttle got decommisioned.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
'We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the Moon, among other places,'
ISS and where? The Bahamas? Restaurant at the end of the universe? Not a lotta stops within breathing time.
. Maybe near-earth asteroids?
I've lost count of how many "next generation" the Russians have announced as being "practically ready" or terms amounting to the same thing.
Not to mention the article is silent on whether this is actually a new design or a new iteration of the Soyuz. If it's the former, then we're likely looking at yet more Russian vaporware. The latter actually might come to pass.
Near-Earth asteroids would be interesting place for a manned ship to go, but if you RTFA they also talk about de-orbiting malfunctioning satellites and large pieces of debris. Potentially that opens up orbital destinations anywhere from LEO to geostationary and maybe beyond, particularly in the case of larger and more expensive research satellites that might need maintaining.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Paper (or Powerpoint) spacecraft and launch systems are a dime a dozen.
Even when they DO tool up their factories and begin production, they need to get on top of their industries' QA issues as well. I would think that the somewhat less-than-stellar track record of their newer systems (e.g. Briz-M), suggests that they have a lot of work to do.
I'm guessing it's a Giant Putin Head with frickin lasers. Amirite?
Hope the Russians name their technology something other than Next Gen Spacecraft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"ISS and where? The Bahamas? Restaurant at the end of the universe? Not a lotta stops within breathing time."
There are plenty of other places in space, its just that there is nothing there.
Setting up a sation at L5 might be a good idea...
Some poor folk would rather see no progress in space exploration than have Russians get us there. I pity those folks from the bottom of my heart - and fingers crossed for Russians, and anyone else willing to invest money, knowledge, experience and time into these projects. Good luck!
Maybe they are considering resurrecting the Buran in some form? (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft) )
in the article they talk about de-orbiting satelites. so, those were likely the other places.
No shit Sherlock! Maybe they'll inspect a Legrange.
Ah, yes, the Legrange, the 2WD version of the Canyonero.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I could have thrown in Baker Street, Watson, and maybe a Hound wrapped in Scarlet, but I thought the bad pun about L5 (or others) and Sherlock Holmes was obvious enough as it was.
Not really.
You have to understand the Russian process. They announce things like this at least twice a year.
This is not a program, it's a proposal. Every year they trot out a couple of proposals (remember klipr?) and see if they can get interest and funding.
If not (and so far "not" has always been the case) then they go back to the drawing board and make another proposal in 8 or 12 months.
Over and over.
And each time Slashdot and others announce what the Russians "are building," never stopping to notice that all of the previous plans that were "nearing completion" never even resulted in a single piece of flight hardware.
Just watch. This will go nowhere, and next year there will be a different plan for a different vehicle.
This space available.
That's got nothing to do with NASA's technical or engineering capabilities. It's solely the result of political decisions, as are all major decisions about NASA's human missions and objectives. They've all existed at the behest of the White House, and they all ended when the White House pulled the plug. Those are major decisions and NASA doesn't get to make them on its own.
It's about money. There's all kind of pushback when even marginal boosts to NASA's budget are mooted. A lot of that is cynical politics playing to ill-informed people.
We've had the capability to support a space station, a lunar base, and exploration of Mars since the Apollo era. We haven't done so because we chose not to do so.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I clicked an there was no picture. Lame!
Mars? Asteroids? ISS 2.0? a future space factory/hotel/other kind of building? and of course the ubiquitous "where no man has gone before" (that it be labeled The Next Generation somehow hints that destination)
This is not a program, it's a proposal. Every year they trot out a couple of proposals (remember klipr?) and see if they can get interest and funding.
If not (and so far "not" has always been the case) then they go back to the drawing board and make another proposal in 8 or 12 months.
Over and over
Pretty much everything you just said could be said about NASA too. How many times have they promised return trips to the moon and men on Mars over the decades?
Just watch. This will go nowhere, and next year there will be a different plan for a different vehicle.
Again, ditto for NASA's moon and Mars programs.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I clicked an there was no picture. Lame!
Lame'
Well, this has a lot to do with our politics. It's a lot like the budget... the president introduces his proposal for the next 10 years. "Ok, I have 2 years left in office so NASA's 10 year plan is to go to the moon, then mars, meet some aliens and invent warp drive. The first 2 years will be the planning stages, funding will begin at 4 years..."
Next president gets into office "Ok, my 20 year plan for NASA is..."
and on and on. What we need are presidents that propose plans and budgets for their CURRENT term. Nearly every budget we've seen in modern times is a 20yr budget, but they rewrite the budget every year. So it's all a bunch of nonsense. "We'll spend more right now, but as soon as I'm out of office we'll cut spending my 50%!!!" yea, that'll happen.
After all, their current-gen Soyuz capsule and R-7 rocket were designed in the 1950's (by their legendary Chief Designer Korolev)
If the Russians built game consoles, they'd still be running Super NES.
What's odd is they seem to have an endless supply of money to generate paper spacecraft. Considering they never ever get funding to actually build any of these things, I really wonder how they get funding to continue fiddling around with CAD software.
Just another powerpoint rocket from Putinist Russia. Like Kliper, Parom, MAKS, Rus', etc, it'll never make it into production and service as long as the official policy towards Russian rocket scientists is "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
I read the press release. Then I noticed it was Energia doing the announcement. You can dismiss this as a marketing exercise. When it is Roskosmos doing the announcement then I'll get interested. Is this using the triple RD-180 launcher they showed a couples of years back or what?
That's true, but the process is different in that now Russians have two competing design companies rather than one bureau as we have. plus the Russians are poor enough to need international partners to pick up most of the tab. So this is a sales pitch by one of two competing Russian companies looking for both primacy within Russia, but also for foreign investment.
Whereas NASA is just trying to sell itself to Congress.
This space available.
This is also the reason why the last manned spaceflight vehicle to actually fly in space was the Space Shuttle.... in spite of literally dozens of programs that were started after the Nixon administration including several with actual flight hardware (the DC-X comes to mind in particular not to mention the Ares I-X). SLS is just the latest of major NASA programs that are eventually going to be flushed down the toilet of failed programs.
Technically the Space Shuttle was even started under the Johnson administration (at least in terms of initial planning and coming up with a mission profile for the spacecraft). Lyndon Johnson was also the last President to even give a damn about the NASA budget as anything other than a jobs program for aeronautical engineers that never even needed to send stuff into space in order to be considered successful.
Well, there is a Howard Johnsons on one of them.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Rockets take forever to plan and build, especially at the government level. SpaceX (a lean "startup" company) was founded 10 years ago and just this year started regular commercial service. Boeing, Lockheed/ULA are going to drag their feet for 15-20 years to develop a new launch system.
A 10 year plan is actually ambitious. Space Travel is Hard. The Orion capsule has been a complete disaster, they've been working on it since 2005, and the parachute tests have been such abject failures that they've actually reclassified the test flights to "materials testing" so that it wouldn't be as obvious that their parachute system had failed five times in a row over four years. More recently the "flight ready" capsule failed it's overpressure test (hope the cooling system doesn't fail!) and cracked a bulkhead.
10 years for a new space program is ambitious, right up there with building a new jetliner like the A380 or 747, except that the stakes are much higher. You can't just buy a human rated spacecraft off the shelf (unless you're Russian) and start your own space program (unless you're Chinese)
moox. for a new generation.
The DC-X program never made it above 10,000 ft and didn't have a follow-on project*, while the Ares I-X was an avionics package with a dummy load quite literally strapped to the top of a spare Space Shuttle SRB. The only reason the Shuttle survived as long as it did was inertia and the fact that nobody wanted to stand up and throw money at a new manned spaceflight program after the embarrassment that was the Shuttle. Thank god the Shuttle (while awesome) is dead and we can use much safer (and cheaper) technology now.
*unless you want to count the X-33, which as it turned out proved that SSTO is a terrible idea. SpaceX may yet beat the entire United States defense industry to a fully reusable manned spaceflight program with their grasshopper prototype that they've been actively testing.
moox. for a new generation.
My point of mentioning the DC-X and Ares I-X is that those were the highlights of projects that actually got something done and had real flight hardware... post Shuttle development. The rest of the projects never even got that far, other than perhaps the "Big G" Gemini II spacecraft (proposed and developed about the same time as the Space Shuttle). All that was built for that project was a capsule prototype that was supposed to sit on top of an Atlas rocket (I think Atlas IV, but I might be mistaken). Some bent metal, but not enough to really make a difference. If this was just one or two programs that flopped, I might say that those programs were poorly managed.
Unfortunately, I'd consider DC-X and the Constellation programs to be some of the better run programs in NASA that actually made real progress. There are dozens of other projects that didn't even get that far yet for which literally billions of dollars has been tossed in that direction to get stuff done. The amazing thing was that the Shuttle even got built with that kind of bureaucracy, much less had two "return to flight" programs after the two disasters with loss of crew.
As for genuinely reusable spacecraft, I do like the Grasshopper project. Other attempts at reusable rockets include the Stig rocket by Armadillo Aerospace and the New Shepard rocket by Blue Origin. I also like the Skylon rocket by Reaction Engines.... who looks like they are bending a whole lot of metal and may give Elon Musk a run for his money. Getting back to the main topic, Russia has a whole lot of competition and they need to come out with a "next gen" vehicle if only to stay relevant. I think RKK Energia knows this all too well and understands that they are competing in a global market with intense competition.... not in the old Cold War government-financed competition where the rule was "waste anything but time".