That's the same link I used when I submitted -- it's in the story already.:) But since it's a wire-service article, finding other copies of it should be fairly simple. Space.com has a pretty good link, it seems, though -- part of why I chose it (the fact that there's tons of other space info on there is another -- I was hoping people might explore more of the site and become interested in space exploration.)
I think the future of the program is going to be balancing the use of the large heavy-lift Shuttle, with its unique ability to service things in orbit, haul up large payloads and return them to earth, with other spacecraft, disposable or not, that can supplement it for missions that don't require the Shuttle. Crew exchange is one possible use of such vehicles; more uses will be revealed over time. But until we can do everything the Shuttle does with newly-designed spacecraft, it's not going anywhere. The Station's logistics modules (for carrying large supplies up and down) require it, for instance. And the need for their use won't vanish once the station is completed -- it will need fresh supplies and experiments, and completed experiments and no-longer-needed stuff (that can't just go into a Progress for disposal) will need to come down.
Engineers wanted monolithic (non-segmented) SRBs because not having to have segments joined by O-rings would eliminate the possibility of joint failures as occurred on 51L and to a lesser extent on a number of previous missions. They were repeatedly overruled to the point where results of review boards were repeatedly ignored and the worst proposal selected.
The result was a system that was known to be problematic due to post-flight booster inspections, which killed seven people, and which was not replaced even after that fatal accident. To this day SRB segments are routinely sent back to the Thiokol plant in Utah for processing over our rail network, despite the existence of a facility in Florida, near the launch site, that could have built much safer boosters!
In fact, several segments from the STS-114 stack were shipped back to Thiokol just a few weeks ago for test-firing to see how well they perform after a fair amount of time passes after loading with propellant.
Reports say that the KH-11 and/or KH-12 (which is sometimes called an enhanced KH-11) is based on the same design as Hubble (or, rather, the reverse is true) and when one fails they just launch another. It's sad that they won't give the same basic support to Hubble (if they won't fix it, just replace it) when several Hubble-class spacecraft are probably already up there. No, not sad... infuriating. If you give one program that kind of support, the one sprung from it that people actually have become attached to deserves the same support.
The reason they didn't get the funding was that the government suddenly lost interest. There wasn't a loss of interest in actually going -- far from it.
But you can't fund what hasn't been dreamed up first. Someone has to dream something before they, or someone else, can actually do it.
We actually knew a fair bit about Mars -- a number of scouting (flyby, orbital, and landing) missions were sent to Mars in the late 1960s through 1970s, similar to the way in which the Moon was explored through flybys, then orbiters, then crash-landers, then soft-landers and remotely-controlled rovers. Only after the robots went first did people follow. (Interestingly, though, the autonomous rovers didn't reach the moon until after humans did; one would expect the reverse to be true.)
Yep, thanks for elaborating! I was aware of most of that already -- it just didn't make it into the reply.
While it is true that there isn't funding right now (of which I'm painfully aware), coming up with plans and making them known is an important step toward flight hardware. So this IS an important piece of news, even if its future is uncertain.
There's nothing left in anywhere near flyable condition, alas. The single space-flown orbiter was destroyed in a hangar collapse, and others that started construction never were finished... and were later dismantled. I can dream, but it won't happen. I do hope that maybe some of the autonomous landing hardware could be adapted for use on the US orbiters, however...
While I myself (as the submitter of this story!) am skeptical -- and I've seen a lot of skepticism elsewhere -- even coming up with the idea and talking about it is a step toward possibly launching actual hardware.
NASA hasn't been much better lately; all the proposed shuttle replacements keep getting cancelled. Just this week, the Orbital Space Plane program fell victim to the same curse.
Soyuz 1 crashed on landing due to the failure of the main and reserve parachutes, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. And the crew of Soyuz 11 died when a valve in their spacecraft opened on undocking from Salyut 1 -- they were not wearing spacesuits.
The rest of the deaths, not counting deaths from aircraft crashes, etc.:
Apollo 1: Pure oxygen environment caused a raging fire due to electrical sparking in command module wiring, main hatch could not be easily opened. Three astronauts killed. CM redesign followed, including a much easier to open one-piece hatch.
STS-51L Challenger: Bad seal on right-hand solid rocket booster allowed combustion gases to eat through seals, then into the external fuel tank, causing explosion 73 seconds into flight. All seven astronauts killed.
STS-107 Columbia: Catastrophic failure of left wing resulting from plasma burnthrough due to failure of RCC panels on leading edge from debris strike. Seven killed.
Both manned spaceflight efforts to that date have lost people. It's an inherent risk in spaceflight.
Soyuz 11. A valve was jarred open when the spacecraft undocked from the Salyut 1 station. The crew was not wearing spacesuits; if they had been, they may well have survived -- provided they wore them. There is evidence that not all the STS-107 crewmembers were properly suited for re-entry. While they would not have survived even if they had been fully suited, in a lesser disaster (a less catastrophic failure of the spacecraft), wearing the suits might have meant the difference between survival and death.
Yes indeedy, I know all about Buran.:) I've gone by that name on the net for years, and I've been surprised by just how many people recognized its origin! I very nearly put a mention of the Buran program in the original submitted story text, but it got dropped during my editing process since I felt it detracted from the actual story subject.
A lot more information is available here -- most of it in Russian, but there are some English pages. And there are many, many diagrams and images.
Hermes was designed to fly on the Ariane 5, but was never built; a Japanese shuttle, Hope (Kibo) was designed to fly on the H-2 rocket but was also cancelled; its name survives in the form of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) which is to be launched to the ISS soon. It is currently undergoing prelaunch processing at KSC.
However, the new Soyuz launch site will NOT support manned launches, due to the effort and cost required to equip the site with the infrastructure needed to support human spaceflight, along with the fact that the ground tracks go out over open ocean and that would pose a recovery problem. Not with the spacecraft itself -- Soyuz was designed to land in water, and in fact one Soyuz capsule did come down in a lake in the Soviet Union, so that was a very good move; crews receive splashdown training, as well.
At this point, yes. However, once complete (there are many more modules still to be launched) that will improve. Here's why:
It is quite true that Progress is insufficient -- this is one of the reasons why I believe we just can't retire the shuttle in 2010 as Sean O'Keefe seems to think is a good idea. Progress can't carry many of the replacement parts that the station currently needs, nor can it haul the logistics modules Rafaello and Leonardo that were built to carry the large experiment racks and pieces of equipment that are needed to support research work, and it simply can't return anything to Earth at all as Progress freighters burn up on re-entry -- they have no descent module.)
And the point I made when originally submitting the story addresses your last comment: the simple fact that the crew is limited to three at the most is largely a result of the fact that even the latest Soyuz variant, TMA, can only carry three people and the station crew must be able to immediately evacuate should an emergency arise, so the crew size is limited to the crew size of a Soyuz spacecraft. That is why, if Energia's new vehicle ever is built and funding is found, a bottleneck will be removed that would otherwise constrain crew size no matter how big the station got (unless multiple Soyuz ferries are docked to the station in the future, another possible way to accomodate larger crews.)
And finally, as additional modules are added and the actual station approaches completion as it looks in plans, the life support capacity will increase as habitable volume increases. This was carefully considered when the modules were designed.
We are on the verge of private companies beginning manned space efforts within the next decade, and I am hopeful that private space stations, manned spacecraft, and possibly lunar bases will be a reality in my lifetime. I want to see the earth from space befor I die, not after (via Celestis).
While the ISS has a lot of problems, including some of what you've brought up, it is also an amazing feat and will doubtless serve in ways that are unimagined today -- and what is learned from this station (the first international one, and the first to be built in the way this one is -- all previous stations were launched in one piece or assembled automatically via autonomously docking modules) will be applied to future stations, government-owned and privately-owned both. And it has some functions that just aren't duplicated anywhere else (can't learn to live in space in cramped quarters without actually doing it, which will be vital for future Mars flights, for instance.) And it's what we have right now, so we should make the very best of it we can.
Moon bases will almost certainly happen, as we know it's possible already through current and past exploration efforts on the Moon and our (as humanity as a whole) 30-year experience with long-term space flight and space stations.
Space elevators are still mostly theoretical possibility and may require materials that won't be economical or possible to make for a much longer time, so they're a lot farther in the future.
Zero-emissions cars have been proven to be impractical at this point in time (anyone remember the EV1?) but low emissions vehicles are very common today, and partial ZEVs are being shown to be possible (Focus PZEV) with current technology. And gas-electric and diesel-electric hybrid cars are finally starting to become available in mass quantities (a friend bought a Prius just last month, and loves it).
Many people have the motivation. But the current government is so afraid of risk that historically the money has not been given to those who would do if they could do. That is hopefully going to change.
I see Bush's announcement as largely election-year politicking, and there are a lot of shortsighted problems with it (we can't kill the shuttle yet; all the replacements keep getting killed, including -- just this week -- the Orbital Space Plane project -- and nothing else can match its capabilities of heavy lift, on orbit servicing, and cargo return, all important to the ISS) and we just plain aren't ready, nor is enough funding being given to do it right.
But it's a start. Then again, Bush Sr. proposed the same thing in the 1980s but it quietly died when it proved to be too expensive, and look where we are now.
People fear what they do not understand ("... and all this science I don't understand - it's just my job five days a week...") and also don't realize that NASA is working from a miniscule 1% of the US federal budget. No other agency, at least in my opinion, does so many amazing things with so little. I stand up and applaud loudly.
The public also doesn't understand that inherent in any kind of exploration is risk - and they don't seem willing to take those risks today. In the early days of North America's exploration, many people were lost (Roanoke colony, famously) and it took a lot of convincing for governments to underwrite the early missions, and there was no guarantee that any of the explorers would come back (Columbus' fight for financing is a famous example.)
But discovery is going to require risk, and the public is going to have to understand and accept it. As you say, we would be nowhere if we never had people who said "Say what you want, we are going anyway."
Work is already progressing on new drive systems. The Deep Space 1 spacecraft was a testbed for autonomous navigation systems and for ion drive propulsion, which uses electricity and xenon gas to accelerate a spacecraft. Unlike the TIE (Twin Ion Engine) Fighters of Star Wars, a real ion engine provides a gentle push, comparable to the force exerted by a sheet of paper resting on your palm -- but it does it over an extremely long period of time, so the ion engine is extremely well suited to long interplanetary missions.
Nuclear engines are also in the works, those projects having begun in the 1970s (NERVA - Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and continuing today with concepts and development starting for possible use in manned lunar/Mars missions as well as nuclear-powered spacecraft for planetary exploration (the Jupiter Inner Moons Orbiter -- JIMO -- for instance.)
Reader note: Sorry for taking so long to answer questions in this story -- it hit the site while I was asleep!
The labels are mostly for spacewalking astronauts. The ISS (and other satellites, most famously the HST and Solar Max) were designed for on-orbit servicing, so instructions are printed on them for astronauts to follow while working.
Yes, it is station debris. The odds of anything passing within view of the crew is very, very small unless it came from the vehicle they are in. The kind of debris that is being talked about here (possibly launch stow clamps for Progress/Soyuz solar panels) is quite small and would be extremely difficult to see from greater distances. These parts are used to hold the solar panels in the folded position during ascent and are no longer needed once the spacecraft is in orbit and the panels unfold.
The station normally has a Soyuz docked (for crew escape) and a Progress docked (for resupply and refuelling and trash stowage.) That's four solar panels right there. In addition, the Russian station modules (except for the Pirs airlock) have their own solar panels, as they operated autonomously at first, and provided power to the US modules earlier in the assembly sequence before the larger US array was added.
The biggest worry is that one of these pieces could impact the station and damage it.
Yup, those are pretty amazing. NASA did send craft as well (Pioneer-Venus Multiprobe) but that vehicle had no cameras on board. Venera 7 wasn't the first space lander to return photos, though -- Luna 9 (landed on the Moon) gets that honor.
Aha. I already know about Astronautix, seen the Nova, and seen the N-1 footage. It's the Oberg and Harford books I haven't read. Seems like it might be time to hit the used-book shops (I've gotten my hands on out of print books before with relatively little trouble.)
Isn't that amusing that the Atlas is using engines from a moon rocket and nearly nobody but geeks like us knows it?
It's pretty amazing how much stuff they did land on the Moon. The first crash-lander was Soviet. The first soft-lander was Soviet. The first fly-by was by a Soviet probe. The first rover was Soviet. Etc. For whatever reason, those efforts are, as you say, little known among the general public even though the information sent back was vital toward sending humans there (Example: Luna 9 didn't sink into the swamp, so it was pretty safe to guess that it wasn't all that likely that the US Surveyor craft wouldn't, either, and they didn't.)
I once posted in a discussion on fark.com about a different space mission, made a comment in passing about the fact that there were US and Soviet craft on the moon, and somebody informed me, with disdain, that all the flags on the Moon were American.
Nope. Not by a long shot, they weren't. Even the tiny Luna 9 carried some Soviet memorabilia.
I know your comment was meant as a joke, but believe it or not there was some concern from some people that Luna 15 would collide with Apollo 11. The risk was minimal, and navigators were able to show how unlikely it was. However, since Luna 15's orbit wasn't known to the flight team, they just had to hope they were right.
Today, it's not unusual for shuttles or the station to fire their engines to dodge orbital debris and avoid such collisions.
The Russian Orlan suit still works this way (re: one-piece and climbing in through the back); I would imagine it's a modified version of the lunar suit. These are still used aboard the ISS, and in fact the most recent Progress carried one as the suit already on board was past its allowed lifetime.
I plan to visit the NASM sometime this year if I can.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the same link I used when I submitted -- it's in the story already. :) But since it's a wire-service article, finding other copies of it should be fairly simple. Space.com has a pretty good link, it seems, though -- part of why I chose it (the fact that there's tons of other space info on there is another -- I was hoping people might explore more of the site and become interested in space exploration.)
I think the future of the program is going to be balancing the use of the large heavy-lift Shuttle, with its unique ability to service things in orbit, haul up large payloads and return them to earth, with other spacecraft, disposable or not, that can supplement it for missions that don't require the Shuttle. Crew exchange is one possible use of such vehicles; more uses will be revealed over time. But until we can do everything the Shuttle does with newly-designed spacecraft, it's not going anywhere. The Station's logistics modules (for carrying large supplies up and down) require it, for instance. And the need for their use won't vanish once the station is completed -- it will need fresh supplies and experiments, and completed experiments and no-longer-needed stuff (that can't just go into a Progress for disposal) will need to come down.
Actually, it wasn't just the managers -- see this page on the subject.
Engineers wanted monolithic (non-segmented) SRBs because not having to have segments joined by O-rings would eliminate the possibility of joint failures as occurred on 51L and to a lesser extent on a number of previous missions. They were repeatedly overruled to the point where results of review boards were repeatedly ignored and the worst proposal selected.
The result was a system that was known to be problematic due to post-flight booster inspections, which killed seven people, and which was not replaced even after that fatal accident. To this day SRB segments are routinely sent back to the Thiokol plant in Utah for processing over our rail network, despite the existence of a facility in Florida, near the launch site, that could have built much safer boosters!
In fact, several segments from the STS-114 stack were shipped back to Thiokol just a few weeks ago for test-firing to see how well they perform after a fair amount of time passes after loading with propellant.
Reports say that the KH-11 and/or KH-12 (which is sometimes called an enhanced KH-11) is based on the same design as Hubble (or, rather, the reverse is true) and when one fails they just launch another. It's sad that they won't give the same basic support to Hubble (if they won't fix it, just replace it) when several Hubble-class spacecraft are probably already up there. No, not sad ... infuriating. If you give one program that kind of support, the one sprung from it that people actually have become attached to deserves the same support.
The reason they didn't get the funding was that the government suddenly lost interest. There wasn't a loss of interest in actually going -- far from it.
But you can't fund what hasn't been dreamed up first. Someone has to dream something before they, or someone else, can actually do it.
We actually knew a fair bit about Mars -- a number of scouting (flyby, orbital, and landing) missions were sent to Mars in the late 1960s through 1970s, similar to the way in which the Moon was explored through flybys, then orbiters, then crash-landers, then soft-landers and remotely-controlled rovers. Only after the robots went first did people follow. (Interestingly, though, the autonomous rovers didn't reach the moon until after humans did; one would expect the reverse to be true.)
Yep, thanks for elaborating! I was aware of most of that already -- it just didn't make it into the reply.
While it is true that there isn't funding right now (of which I'm painfully aware), coming up with plans and making them known is an important step toward flight hardware. So this IS an important piece of news, even if its future is uncertain.
There's nothing left in anywhere near flyable condition, alas. The single space-flown orbiter was destroyed in a hangar collapse, and others that started construction never were finished ... and were later dismantled. I can dream, but it won't happen. I do hope that maybe some of the autonomous landing hardware could be adapted for use on the US orbiters, however...
Actually, the hangar roof fell in on it.
While I myself (as the submitter of this story!) am skeptical -- and I've seen a lot of skepticism elsewhere -- even coming up with the idea and talking about it is a step toward possibly launching actual hardware.
NASA hasn't been much better lately; all the proposed shuttle replacements keep getting cancelled. Just this week, the Orbital Space Plane program fell victim to the same curse.
But I try to stay optimistic!
Incorrect.
Soyuz 1 crashed on landing due to the failure of the main and reserve parachutes, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. And the crew of Soyuz 11 died when a valve in their spacecraft opened on undocking from Salyut 1 -- they were not wearing spacesuits.
The rest of the deaths, not counting deaths from aircraft crashes, etc.:
Apollo 1: Pure oxygen environment caused a raging fire due to electrical sparking in command module wiring, main hatch could not be easily opened. Three astronauts killed. CM redesign followed, including a much easier to open one-piece hatch.
STS-51L Challenger: Bad seal on right-hand solid rocket booster allowed combustion gases to eat through seals, then into the external fuel tank, causing explosion 73 seconds into flight. All seven astronauts killed.
STS-107 Columbia: Catastrophic failure of left wing resulting from plasma burnthrough due to failure of RCC panels on leading edge from debris strike. Seven killed.
Both manned spaceflight efforts to that date have lost people. It's an inherent risk in spaceflight.
Soyuz 11. A valve was jarred open when the spacecraft undocked from the Salyut 1 station. The crew was not wearing spacesuits; if they had been, they may well have survived -- provided they wore them. There is evidence that not all the STS-107 crewmembers were properly suited for re-entry. While they would not have survived even if they had been fully suited, in a lesser disaster (a less catastrophic failure of the spacecraft), wearing the suits might have meant the difference between survival and death.
Yes indeedy, I know all about Buran. :) I've gone by that name on the net for years, and I've been surprised by just how many people recognized its origin! I very nearly put a mention of the Buran program in the original submitted story text, but it got dropped during my editing process since I felt it detracted from the actual story subject.
A lot more information is available here -- most of it in Russian, but there are some English pages. And there are many, many diagrams and images.
Hermes was designed to fly on the Ariane 5, but was never built; a Japanese shuttle, Hope (Kibo) was designed to fly on the H-2 rocket but was also cancelled; its name survives in the form of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) which is to be launched to the ISS soon. It is currently undergoing prelaunch processing at KSC.
However, the new Soyuz launch site will NOT support manned launches, due to the effort and cost required to equip the site with the infrastructure needed to support human spaceflight, along with the fact that the ground tracks go out over open ocean and that would pose a recovery problem. Not with the spacecraft itself -- Soyuz was designed to land in water, and in fact one Soyuz capsule did come down in a lake in the Soviet Union, so that was a very good move; crews receive splashdown training, as well.
At this point, yes. However, once complete (there are many more modules still to be launched) that will improve. Here's why:
It is quite true that Progress is insufficient -- this is one of the reasons why I believe we just can't retire the shuttle in 2010 as Sean O'Keefe seems to think is a good idea. Progress can't carry many of the replacement parts that the station currently needs, nor can it haul the logistics modules Rafaello and Leonardo that were built to carry the large experiment racks and pieces of equipment that are needed to support research work, and it simply can't return anything to Earth at all as Progress freighters burn up on re-entry -- they have no descent module.)
And the point I made when originally submitting the story addresses your last comment: the simple fact that the crew is limited to three at the most is largely a result of the fact that even the latest Soyuz variant, TMA, can only carry three people and the station crew must be able to immediately evacuate should an emergency arise, so the crew size is limited to the crew size of a Soyuz spacecraft. That is why, if Energia's new vehicle ever is built and funding is found, a bottleneck will be removed that would otherwise constrain crew size no matter how big the station got (unless multiple Soyuz ferries are docked to the station in the future, another possible way to accomodate larger crews.)
And finally, as additional modules are added and the actual station approaches completion as it looks in plans, the life support capacity will increase as habitable volume increases. This was carefully considered when the modules were designed.
We are on the verge of private companies beginning manned space efforts within the next decade, and I am hopeful that private space stations, manned spacecraft, and possibly lunar bases will be a reality in my lifetime. I want to see the earth from space befor I die, not after (via Celestis).
While the ISS has a lot of problems, including some of what you've brought up, it is also an amazing feat and will doubtless serve in ways that are unimagined today -- and what is learned from this station (the first international one, and the first to be built in the way this one is -- all previous stations were launched in one piece or assembled automatically via autonomously docking modules) will be applied to future stations, government-owned and privately-owned both. And it has some functions that just aren't duplicated anywhere else (can't learn to live in space in cramped quarters without actually doing it, which will be vital for future Mars flights, for instance.) And it's what we have right now, so we should make the very best of it we can.
Moon bases will almost certainly happen, as we know it's possible already through current and past exploration efforts on the Moon and our (as humanity as a whole) 30-year experience with long-term space flight and space stations.
Space elevators are still mostly theoretical possibility and may require materials that won't be economical or possible to make for a much longer time, so they're a lot farther in the future.
Zero-emissions cars have been proven to be impractical at this point in time (anyone remember the EV1?) but low emissions vehicles are very common today, and partial ZEVs are being shown to be possible (Focus PZEV) with current technology. And gas-electric and diesel-electric hybrid cars are finally starting to become available in mass quantities (a friend bought a Prius just last month, and loves it).
Technology is moving along nicely.
Many people have the motivation. But the current government is so afraid of risk that historically the money has not been given to those who would do if they could do. That is hopefully going to change.
I see Bush's announcement as largely election-year politicking, and there are a lot of shortsighted problems with it (we can't kill the shuttle yet; all the replacements keep getting killed, including -- just this week -- the Orbital Space Plane project -- and nothing else can match its capabilities of heavy lift, on orbit servicing, and cargo return, all important to the ISS) and we just plain aren't ready, nor is enough funding being given to do it right.
But it's a start. Then again, Bush Sr. proposed the same thing in the 1980s but it quietly died when it proved to be too expensive, and look where we are now.
People fear what they do not understand ("... and all this science I don't understand - it's just my job five days a week ...") and also don't realize that NASA is working from a miniscule 1% of the US federal budget. No other agency, at least in my opinion, does so many amazing things with so little. I stand up and applaud loudly.
The public also doesn't understand that inherent in any kind of exploration is risk - and they don't seem willing to take those risks today. In the early days of North America's exploration, many people were lost (Roanoke colony, famously) and it took a lot of convincing for governments to underwrite the early missions, and there was no guarantee that any of the explorers would come back (Columbus' fight for financing is a famous example.)
But discovery is going to require risk, and the public is going to have to understand and accept it. As you say, we would be nowhere if we never had people who said "Say what you want, we are going anyway."
Work is already progressing on new drive systems. The Deep Space 1 spacecraft was a testbed for autonomous navigation systems and for ion drive propulsion, which uses electricity and xenon gas to accelerate a spacecraft. Unlike the TIE (Twin Ion Engine) Fighters of Star Wars, a real ion engine provides a gentle push, comparable to the force exerted by a sheet of paper resting on your palm -- but it does it over an extremely long period of time, so the ion engine is extremely well suited to long interplanetary missions.
Nuclear engines are also in the works, those projects having begun in the 1970s (NERVA - Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and continuing today with concepts and development starting for possible use in manned lunar/Mars missions as well as nuclear-powered spacecraft for planetary exploration (the Jupiter Inner Moons Orbiter -- JIMO -- for instance.)
Reader note: Sorry for taking so long to answer questions in this story -- it hit the site while I was asleep!
The labels are mostly for spacewalking astronauts. The ISS (and other satellites, most famously the HST and Solar Max) were designed for on-orbit servicing, so instructions are printed on them for astronauts to follow while working.
Yes, it is station debris. The odds of anything passing within view of the crew is very, very small unless it came from the vehicle they are in. The kind of debris that is being talked about here (possibly launch stow clamps for Progress/Soyuz solar panels) is quite small and would be extremely difficult to see from greater distances. These parts are used to hold the solar panels in the folded position during ascent and are no longer needed once the spacecraft is in orbit and the panels unfold.
The station normally has a Soyuz docked (for crew escape) and a Progress docked (for resupply and refuelling and trash stowage.) That's four solar panels right there. In addition, the Russian station modules (except for the Pirs airlock) have their own solar panels, as they operated autonomously at first, and provided power to the US modules earlier in the assembly sequence before the larger US array was added.
The biggest worry is that one of these pieces could impact the station and damage it.
Yup, those are pretty amazing. NASA did send craft as well (Pioneer-Venus Multiprobe) but that vehicle had no cameras on board. Venera 7 wasn't the first space lander to return photos, though -- Luna 9 (landed on the Moon) gets that honor.
Aha. I already know about Astronautix, seen the Nova, and seen the N-1 footage. It's the Oberg and Harford books I haven't read. Seems like it might be time to hit the used-book shops (I've gotten my hands on out of print books before with relatively little trouble.)
Isn't that amusing that the Atlas is using engines from a moon rocket and nearly nobody but geeks like us knows it?
It's pretty amazing how much stuff they did land on the Moon. The first crash-lander was Soviet. The first soft-lander was Soviet. The first fly-by was by a Soviet probe. The first rover was Soviet. Etc. For whatever reason, those efforts are, as you say, little known among the general public even though the information sent back was vital toward sending humans there (Example: Luna 9 didn't sink into the swamp, so it was pretty safe to guess that it wasn't all that likely that the US Surveyor craft wouldn't, either, and they didn't.)
I once posted in a discussion on fark.com about a different space mission, made a comment in passing about the fact that there were US and Soviet craft on the moon, and somebody informed me, with disdain, that all the flags on the Moon were American.
Nope. Not by a long shot, they weren't. Even the tiny Luna 9 carried some Soviet memorabilia.
I know your comment was meant as a joke, but believe it or not there was some concern from some people that Luna 15 would collide with Apollo 11. The risk was minimal, and navigators were able to show how unlikely it was. However, since Luna 15's orbit wasn't known to the flight team, they just had to hope they were right.
Today, it's not unusual for shuttles or the station to fire their engines to dodge orbital debris and avoid such collisions.
The Russian Orlan suit still works this way (re: one-piece and climbing in through the back); I would imagine it's a modified version of the lunar suit. These are still used aboard the ISS, and in fact the most recent Progress carried one as the suit already on board was past its allowed lifetime.
I plan to visit the NASM sometime this year if I can.