Ok, so none of those were exactly the most memorable films. But still, it makes the point exquisitely. Anyone who thinks that Firefly is a ripoff of anything needs his head checked. This "genre" (really just a combination of two genres) has been around forever.
I'm sorry, you think Cowboy Bebop was the first? Someone else mentioned Outlaw Star. Neither one is even close. The whole lot of you need to rewind to AT LEAST 1986.
Somewhere in the future Far away from here Trouble is waiting On the last frontier
Into these worlds of unknown danger they ride They're the Galaxy Rangers Heroes in the sky
No Guts No Glory!
A year later, the cartoon BraveStarr was released. I don't know if there was anything earlier, but it wouldn't surprise me. Kids growing up in the 50's and 60's had two competing loves: Cowboys and Spaceships. It was only natural that someone would combine them eventually.
It has nothing to do with the intelligence of the audience. It has to do with the flow of the story. The reasons for an individual exile are lost in the exposition given, thus making the scene seem strained. Even adding the following lines would have smoothed it out considerably:
Yoda: "Lost, the only chance is. No longer accessable to the Jedi, the Emporor will be. Wait in exile, I must."
Senator: "Yoda, are you certain? If we tell the people..."
Yoda: "No! Chosen this path, the people have. No room for Jedi."
Dunno. The screens just show the spaceship landing and Yoda in the doorway. I imagine the rest is still left to the imagination.
FWIW, I think the whole "exile" thing was one of the worst handled parts of Episode III. Yoda failed to dispatch the Emporor. So what? Suddenly, he MUST go into exile? No one is going to question the decision? No one thinks that they should regroup and attack the Emporor in force?
I can understand the idea behind the exile, but the execution needed a lot of work.
True enough. I completely forgot about the MOL. Still, the Dynasoar project was not cancelled due to technical difficulties, but rather political ones. As your own page states, the problem with the Dynasoar was that the government didn't have any actual plan for it other than to deliver weapons. It was determined that this was just as doable with the Gemini program, making the Dynasoar redundant.
The design is still changing and they obviously have not settled on the rocket they want yet. Your link even states as much.
Regardless, that is the plan for now. Unless they come up with a new idea in a hurry, they won't have a booster ready for the planned 2010 (apparently now 2011) operational period of the Kliper.
There is a Russian government policy not to rely on foreign suppliers of potentially hostile countries for parts with possible military uses, and this includes launch vehicles.
One of the reasons both these vehicles were shelved, and indeed why the Shuttle configuration was picked decades after the Dynasoar debacle was precisely because of aerodynamic instability caused by the wings during launch.
Monsense. The Dynasoar program continued right up until Shuttle development when the president forced the Airforce to accept the Shuttle program as an alternative. The Titan IIIc with its revolutionary SRBs (later to be used by the Shuttle) was the rocket intended for the Dynasoar. (Yes, they were that close to completion.)
Seriously, even the Soviets weren't fucking stupid enough to use SRBs on manned launches.
Whoa, time out. What's you're big problem with SRB's? Other than the O-Ring failure (a failure that wouldn't have happened if we didn't use sectioned SRBs) the SRBs have been surprisingly reliable.
And it's not like the Shuttle was built without an understanding and experience with SRBs. The basic launch configuration had been well explored by the Titan IIIc before the Space Shuttle was mated to SRBs.
Optimally, the Space Shuttle would have been an SSTO and never have needed the SRBs. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, so we have the SRBs and they work. No other single engine has the raw thrust to weight ratio these suckers put out.
thought the main reason for using lifting bodies to to have greater crosstrack.
The word is "cross-range", and yes, winged vehicles excel at this.
The deceleration from a capsule landing should be in the same direction as the acceleration during launch.... but for a lifting body the directions are different... which, to me, implies more problems with reverse g's for lifting bodies.
You might want to think about that again. In a capsule, you are going upward during ascent and downward during descent. During both manuvers, your nose is pointed up. (An oversimplification, but you get the idea.) During a winged landing, your descent is more gentle, and the nose of the craft follows the gentle slope.
You do have the ability to control the flight with capsules (Apollo did this)
This is where the cross-range ability comes in. Cross-range means that you can put your ship anywhere within thousands of miles of the intended landing zone.
There's nothing wrong with the SRBs (other than a lack of control once ignited). And in a vertical stack, not even the O-Ring problem would have caused a loss of the craft. (A problem, which I may mention, didn't have to occur.) With an escape tower, the top part of the stack (where the humans are) could be saved even in the event the SRB is lost.
Bah. They can deal with it. Not even the Nuclear Test Ban treaty was enough to stop the Saturn-V launched Mini-Orion concept. It was the cancellation of the Saturn-V program itself that had that effect.
Umm the leading edge that failed was carbon-carbon. The tiles have never caused a shuttle fatality.
Indeed. But that wasn't a failure on the part of the carbon-carbon shield. The fragility of the shield is highly overrated. i.e. You could walk up to it with a sledgehammer and you'd have a hard time getting through. The area of failure had experienced a variety of foam hits and had never failed before. That's why NASA didn't concern themselves with it.
The real problem was the use of a side mounted orbiter as opposed to an inline stack. The side mounting meant that any debris thrown about during launch (and there's plenty of that) would fall near the orbiter. In an inline configuration, you don't have that problem.
Also carbon-carbon is not as light as the tiles.
True, but the carbon-carbon requires almost no maintenece and makes a better heat shield.
Bringing back the engines was a good idea and will be used again if we ever get a SSTO craft which I hope we do someday.
If we ever get there again, I agree. The problem is that the Shuttle was NOT a SSTO craft, and as such the compromises made were the wrong ones.:-/
Big and complicated are not problems if it is reliable. A 747 is big and complicated.
Allow me to rephrase: "The Shuttle was too big and complicated for its otherwise simple mission of bringing five people up and down."
Guess which is the highest-payload rocket in the market right now? That is right, the 10 ton Ariane 5 ECA.
Really? I could have sworn that was the Atlas V Heavy with 25000 kg to GTO. The Delta IV Heavy comes in next with 13,130 kg to GTO, leaving the Ariane 5 in third with 10,500 kg to GTO.
Russia's past experience with Buran TPS was allegedly less than stellar, with the thing returning with a lot of tiles blown off and the chassis warped from the temperatures at reentry.
*cough*Bullshit*cough* That was a rumor started on Usenet years ago. It has since been tracked down and squashed.
This will most likely need a new rocket,
It will use the Zenit booster.
new launch facilities
Is there something wrong with the Russian Cosmodrome?
and then you will have to put a winged vehicle on top of a rocket
<sarcasm>No!</sarcasm>
which to the best of my knowledge no one has got working yet.
You know, the Space Shuttle didn't just appear out of nowhere. The idea came from the Dynasoar program which was able to trace its roots back to the original German rocketry done during WWII. No one has yet used inline wings because of reentry problems with the vehicle, not launch problems.
I do not like the fact that the shuttle-derived launch vehicle uses solid rocket boosters.
I'm sure NASA would love to obtain more control over launches by reengineering a kerosine rocket like the F-1s on the Saturn V, but the fact of the matter is that we have the SRBs now and they work. (They work extremely well too! Over twice the power of the F-1 engines on the Saturn V!) It would be a waste of time for NASA to develop new hardware when they already have a solution.
I do like the fact it uses shuttle main engines for the upper stage though.
Actually, the SSMEs fire for the entire launch duration. The launch profile is very similar to the Space Shuttle, but with five SSMEs instead of three.
While you're true that they don't have any such vehicle in production
And it's still true. The Zenits flying today are heavily modified from their original design to be independent rockets, not strap ons.
namely, strap on boosters, AKA as Zenith
That's "Zenit", not "Zenith". "Zenith" is the translation, but it's never referred to as such in English.
BTW, it's interesting how NASA is now pushing for the system that Russians had 15 years ago - small/robust capsule/rocket for crew transport + super heavy cargo booster
I swear, the next person to say that to me is going to find his head rolling on the ground. NASA has done nothing that NASA has not done before. The ONLY element in the new CEV design that isn't distinctly NASA is the choice to ground land the craft instead of using sea landings. And that is simply a matter of practicality, not copying of the "Uber-Russian Design".
Cripes, people. All NASA is doing is reorganizing the Shuttle technology to pick up where the Saturn V program left off. If we can get our super-booster ducks back in order, we can do all the cool stuff we dreamed of in the 60's like going to Mars, flying a Mini-Orion, seeing Saturn, and having usable space stations.
The big problem with the Soviet lunar program wasn't their crew vehicle - it was the N1 booster.
Indeed. That was kind of my point about the "Moon Rocket" blowing up on the pad.:-)
Thank God they gave some other engineer a chance when they went to build the Energia. Otherwise half their crap never would have gotten off the ground. (Punctuated by the fact that half the crap that did get off the ground never got where it was going. Polyus anyone?)
Buran's energia booster had the payload capacity for a lunar launch in its heaviest configuration. However, they'd have to bring the program back from the dead; there's not too much actual hardware left that could be salvaged. Perhaps not as tough as the US trying to bring back a Saturn V, but still a major, costly task.
At the same time, though, Energia is only 15 years out of date, there hasn't been much aerospace change in that time, and Russia doesn't have any other super-booster hardware to work from like the US does. IMHO, it would probably still be easier for them to bring back the Energia than it would to build a new rocket from scratch.
Nuclear electric is a whole different thing, though. It's not really nuclear propulsion, but rather a small nuclear powerplant to drive electric propulsion. In other words, it's not really a new form of propulsion, but a natural evolution of an existing one.
The clipper design appears to be a shuttle-like space plane. Have there been any significant materials improvements that make a space plane built today more pratical and safer than the current shuttle deisgn?
Yeah, don't make it so damn big and complicated; don't tie the engines into the main craft; and DON'T use heat tiles when carbon-carbon shielding is available!
On point 5, the main reason for having a winged vehicle is that is the only way to get a capability to bring significant mass down from orbit
That's not the *only* reason. Wings are also safer for the crew for a variety of reasons:
1. Fewer reverse Gs. 2. Gentle touchdown. (Apparently, Cosmonauts often receive injuries when the capsule hits the ground.) 3. The ability to control the flight. 4. Aerobraking manuvers become possible.
Of course, wings add a great deal of engineering difficulty to the design, but the US already has a great deal of experience with them.
This press release doesn't say anything about the launch vehicle. Any information?
It was in point 7, under this link. Originally Russia was going to build a new "Onega" booster, but they seem to have settled on a Zenit.
Russia doesn't have any super-boosters left in production. Getting to the moon would require either a new super-booster design, or a LOT of very expensive staging.
Just to give you an idea of how difficult this is, the Delta-V to go from the Earth the the Moon is almost exactly the same Delta V required to get from the Earth to Mars Orbit. When you consider the difference in distance, that should give you a good idea of why many consider the moon to be a poor target. (Chart)
AFAIK, Russia never developed Nuclear Propulsion. On the thermal side of the equation, the engineering costs of starting from scratch are likely too high for Russia to consider. On the pulse propulsion side, Russia never really worked out the "micro-nuke" problem, and the Orion nuke designs are still classified.
Add a healthy dose of Chernobyl fears and you've got a country that has no intention of pursuing nuclear propulsion.
I thought it was a dupe, but I couldn't find the link. Seems they used the Russian name "Kliper" in the original article rather than the Anglecized name, "Clipper".:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so none of those were exactly the most memorable films. But still, it makes the point exquisitely. Anyone who thinks that Firefly is a ripoff of anything needs his head checked. This "genre" (really just a combination of two genres) has been around forever.
Have you all forgotten Galaxy Rangers?A year later, the cartoon BraveStarr was released. I don't know if there was anything earlier, but it wouldn't surprise me. Kids growing up in the 50's and 60's had two competing loves: Cowboys and Spaceships. It was only natural that someone would combine them eventually.
Dunno. The screens just show the spaceship landing and Yoda in the doorway. I imagine the rest is still left to the imagination.
FWIW, I think the whole "exile" thing was one of the worst handled parts of Episode III. Yoda failed to dispatch the Emporor. So what? Suddenly, he MUST go into exile? No one is going to question the decision? No one thinks that they should regroup and attack the Emporor in force?
I can understand the idea behind the exile, but the execution needed a lot of work.
True enough. I completely forgot about the MOL. Still, the Dynasoar project was not cancelled due to technical difficulties, but rather political ones. As your own page states, the problem with the Dynasoar was that the government didn't have any actual plan for it other than to deliver weapons. It was determined that this was just as doable with the Gemini program, making the Dynasoar redundant.
The design is still changing and they obviously have not settled on the rocket they want yet. Your link even states as much.
Regardless, that is the plan for now. Unless they come up with a new idea in a hurry, they won't have a booster ready for the planned 2010 (apparently now 2011) operational period of the Kliper.
There is a Russian government policy not to rely on foreign suppliers of potentially hostile countries for parts with possible military uses, and this includes launch vehicles.
Well then, you had better tell the Russians that, because they say they're using the Zenit.
One of the reasons both these vehicles were shelved, and indeed why the Shuttle configuration was picked decades after the Dynasoar debacle was precisely because of aerodynamic instability caused by the wings during launch.
Monsense. The Dynasoar program continued right up until Shuttle development when the president forced the Airforce to accept the Shuttle program as an alternative. The Titan IIIc with its revolutionary SRBs (later to be used by the Shuttle) was the rocket intended for the Dynasoar. (Yes, they were that close to completion.)
Seriously, even the Soviets weren't fucking stupid enough to use SRBs on manned launches.
Whoa, time out. What's you're big problem with SRB's? Other than the O-Ring failure (a failure that wouldn't have happened if we didn't use sectioned SRBs) the SRBs have been surprisingly reliable.
And it's not like the Shuttle was built without an understanding and experience with SRBs. The basic launch configuration had been well explored by the Titan IIIc before the Space Shuttle was mated to SRBs.
Optimally, the Space Shuttle would have been an SSTO and never have needed the SRBs. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, so we have the SRBs and they work. No other single engine has the raw thrust to weight ratio these suckers put out.
thought the main reason for using lifting bodies to to have greater crosstrack.
The word is "cross-range", and yes, winged vehicles excel at this.
The deceleration from a capsule landing should be in the same direction as the acceleration during launch.... but for a lifting body the directions are different... which, to me, implies more problems with reverse g's for lifting bodies.
You might want to think about that again. In a capsule, you are going upward during ascent and downward during descent. During both manuvers, your nose is pointed up. (An oversimplification, but you get the idea.) During a winged landing, your descent is more gentle, and the nose of the craft follows the gentle slope.
You do have the ability to control the flight with capsules (Apollo did this)
This is where the cross-range ability comes in. Cross-range means that you can put your ship anywhere within thousands of miles of the intended landing zone.
That's the job of the range officer. :-)
There's nothing wrong with the SRBs (other than a lack of control once ignited). And in a vertical stack, not even the O-Ring problem would have caused a loss of the craft. (A problem, which I may mention, didn't have to occur.) With an escape tower, the top part of the stack (where the humans are) could be saved even in the event the SRB is lost.
Bah. They can deal with it. Not even the Nuclear Test Ban treaty was enough to stop the Saturn-V launched Mini-Orion concept. It was the cancellation of the Saturn-V program itself that had that effect.
Darn, I was looking at the wrong numbers on the Atlas 5 again. Thanks for the correction. :-) (It still maintains the order, though.)
:-(
The Titan doesn't count, BTW, because it doesn't fly any more. The final launch is on Oct. 19.
Of course they do. Point 5, though, was me lamenting the fact that the US wasn't going to use wings.
Umm the leading edge that failed was carbon-carbon. The tiles have never caused a shuttle fatality.
:-/
Indeed. But that wasn't a failure on the part of the carbon-carbon shield. The fragility of the shield is highly overrated. i.e. You could walk up to it with a sledgehammer and you'd have a hard time getting through. The area of failure had experienced a variety of foam hits and had never failed before. That's why NASA didn't concern themselves with it.
The real problem was the use of a side mounted orbiter as opposed to an inline stack. The side mounting meant that any debris thrown about during launch (and there's plenty of that) would fall near the orbiter. In an inline configuration, you don't have that problem.
Also carbon-carbon is not as light as the tiles.
True, but the carbon-carbon requires almost no maintenece and makes a better heat shield.
Bringing back the engines was a good idea and will be used again if we ever get a SSTO craft which I hope we do someday.
If we ever get there again, I agree. The problem is that the Shuttle was NOT a SSTO craft, and as such the compromises made were the wrong ones.
Big and complicated are not problems if it is reliable. A 747 is big and complicated.
Allow me to rephrase: "The Shuttle was too big and complicated for its otherwise simple mission of bringing five people up and down."
Guess which is the highest-payload rocket in the market right now? That is right, the 10 ton Ariane 5 ECA.
Really? I could have sworn that was the Atlas V Heavy with 25000 kg to GTO. The Delta IV Heavy comes in next with 13,130 kg to GTO, leaving the Ariane 5 in third with 10,500 kg to GTO.
Russia's past experience with Buran TPS was allegedly less than stellar, with the thing returning with a lot of tiles blown off and the chassis warped from the temperatures at reentry.
*cough*Bullshit*cough* That was a rumor started on Usenet years ago. It has since been tracked down and squashed.
This will most likely need a new rocket,
It will use the Zenit booster.
new launch facilities
Is there something wrong with the Russian Cosmodrome?
and then you will have to put a winged vehicle on top of a rocket
<sarcasm>No!</sarcasm>
which to the best of my knowledge no one has got working yet.
You know, the Space Shuttle didn't just appear out of nowhere. The idea came from the Dynasoar program which was able to trace its roots back to the original German rocketry done during WWII. No one has yet used inline wings because of reentry problems with the vehicle, not launch problems.
I do not like the fact that the shuttle-derived launch vehicle uses solid rocket boosters.
I'm sure NASA would love to obtain more control over launches by reengineering a kerosine rocket like the F-1s on the Saturn V, but the fact of the matter is that we have the SRBs now and they work. (They work extremely well too! Over twice the power of the F-1 engines on the Saturn V!) It would be a waste of time for NASA to develop new hardware when they already have a solution.
I do like the fact it uses shuttle main engines for the upper stage though.
Actually, the SSMEs fire for the entire launch duration. The launch profile is very similar to the Space Shuttle, but with five SSMEs instead of three.
While you're true that they don't have any such vehicle in production
And it's still true. The Zenits flying today are heavily modified from their original design to be independent rockets, not strap ons.
namely, strap on boosters, AKA as Zenith
That's "Zenit", not "Zenith". "Zenith" is the translation, but it's never referred to as such in English.
BTW, it's interesting how NASA is now pushing for the system that Russians had 15 years ago - small/robust capsule/rocket for crew transport + super heavy cargo booster
I swear, the next person to say that to me is going to find his head rolling on the ground. NASA has done nothing that NASA has not done before. The ONLY element in the new CEV design that isn't distinctly NASA is the choice to ground land the craft instead of using sea landings. And that is simply a matter of practicality, not copying of the "Uber-Russian Design".
Cripes, people. All NASA is doing is reorganizing the Shuttle technology to pick up where the Saturn V program left off. If we can get our super-booster ducks back in order, we can do all the cool stuff we dreamed of in the 60's like going to Mars, flying a Mini-Orion, seeing Saturn, and having usable space stations.
The big problem with the Soviet lunar program wasn't their crew vehicle - it was the N1 booster.
:-)
Indeed. That was kind of my point about the "Moon Rocket" blowing up on the pad.
Thank God they gave some other engineer a chance when they went to build the Energia. Otherwise half their crap never would have gotten off the ground. (Punctuated by the fact that half the crap that did get off the ground never got where it was going. Polyus anyone?)
Buran's energia booster had the payload capacity for a lunar launch in its heaviest configuration. However, they'd have to bring the program back from the dead; there's not too much actual hardware left that could be salvaged. Perhaps not as tough as the US trying to bring back a Saturn V, but still a major, costly task.
At the same time, though, Energia is only 15 years out of date, there hasn't been much aerospace change in that time, and Russia doesn't have any other super-booster hardware to work from like the US does. IMHO, it would probably still be easier for them to bring back the Energia than it would to build a new rocket from scratch.
Nuclear electric is a whole different thing, though. It's not really nuclear propulsion, but rather a small nuclear powerplant to drive electric propulsion. In other words, it's not really a new form of propulsion, but a natural evolution of an existing one.
I almost forgot: DON'T use a side mounted stack!
The clipper design appears to be a shuttle-like space plane. Have there been any significant materials improvements that make a space plane built today more pratical and safer than the current shuttle deisgn?
Yeah, don't make it so damn big and complicated; don't tie the engines into the main craft; and DON'T use heat tiles when carbon-carbon shielding is available!
Does that answer your question?
On point 5, the main reason for having a winged vehicle is that is the only way to get a capability to bring significant mass down from orbit
That's not the *only* reason. Wings are also safer for the crew for a variety of reasons:
1. Fewer reverse Gs.
2. Gentle touchdown. (Apparently, Cosmonauts often receive injuries when the capsule hits the ground.)
3. The ability to control the flight.
4. Aerobraking manuvers become possible.
Of course, wings add a great deal of engineering difficulty to the design, but the US already has a great deal of experience with them.
This press release doesn't say anything about the launch vehicle. Any information?
It was in point 7, under this link. Originally Russia was going to build a new "Onega" booster, but they seem to have settled on a Zenit.
/Me shakes head.
Russia doesn't have any super-boosters left in production. Getting to the moon would require either a new super-booster design, or a LOT of very expensive staging.
Just to give you an idea of how difficult this is, the Delta-V to go from the Earth the the Moon is almost exactly the same Delta V required to get from the Earth to Mars Orbit. When you consider the difference in distance, that should give you a good idea of why many consider the moon to be a poor target. (Chart)
AFAIK, Russia never developed Nuclear Propulsion. On the thermal side of the equation, the engineering costs of starting from scratch are likely too high for Russia to consider. On the pulse propulsion side, Russia never really worked out the "micro-nuke" problem, and the Orion nuke designs are still classified.
Add a healthy dose of Chernobyl fears and you've got a country that has no intention of pursuing nuclear propulsion.
Parent is correct.
:-)
I thought it was a dupe, but I couldn't find the link. Seems they used the Russian name "Kliper" in the original article rather than the Anglecized name, "Clipper".