Let's see... 1 million Dvd's sold in a day at an average of $40 per set..
5 million sold since it has been released.
So, Fox has made somewhere around $200 million off that series so far..
Most companies consider $200 million a fairly decent amount to make off a series that has had a multiyear run.. For a show that was cancelled before it even got a run is pretty far removed from the norm.
You really need to do that math, but that would require a bit more processing than you seem to be able to manage.
This particlar vocal sub-group put a lot of money on the table.
Networks are in the "Make Money" business. Fox and a number of other networks now make more off the DVD sales on a series than on the broadcast of the series.
The first two aired were the last ones written after Fox gave its feedback as to what they wanted. The others were written *without* Fox direction.
ie, if the shows that aired were the bad ones, then it really goes down to Fox. The first episode aired was a rewrite of the pilot as Fox wanted a different type of story to lead off the series. One that showed that the team was good-hearted at their core.. The worst episode was the one where someone cracked a whip
It is very unusual to show to a general purchasing audience. Usually test audiences are culled from standard test groups and are targetted demographics. They will be doing that also.
I suspect that this is a new interesting marketting attempt. They get paid to show the movie in advance to a small group. That will raise interest in the film and awareness a bit. It is not even free marketting as the fanbase will pay for this. I seem to recall a couple other instances of this sort of thing, but they are rare.
I seriously doubt they would do this if they did not think they had something though. A lot of the flamebait on here is blathering about the fanboy base and *nobody* flames a franchise more than an upset fanboy.
A test audience signs non-disclosure agreements. They *want* people to talk about this. Not quite viral marketting, but they definately think that word-of-mouth will sell this. Since their dvd sales were pretty much all word-of-mouth and sold about 5 million set to date, there is a certain logic to that.
The CAIB did a fairly large number of risk asessments for returning the Shuttle to flight. That covered just basic flight and the risks involved. The numbers for Hubble would be essentially those numbers.
I rather suspect that the risk analyis for Hubble would be something along the lines of "For non-strategic flights on Shuttle, we have to have a 99.5% chance of success". Since the baseline Shuttle analysis for the risks on return-to-flight are already outside that boundry, then it makes zero sense to spend money digging deeper.
The main things to consider about this whole rescue shuttle thing..
1) That an emergency is spotted in time to allow for a stationary orbit to allow for docking.
2) That they have determined the cause of said emergency and it is a low probability of occurring to the rescue shuttle.
3) That the emergency occurs during the 2 least stressful phases of operation (launch and on-orbit) of the three phases of flight.
Probably the most important is the second caveat. Do you launch another Shuttle if you don't know if there is a systemic problem? Do you launch if it is low probability? Consider the foam impact issue. Foam impacts were more the norm than the exception. It's just none had led to vehicle loss before. What would the judgement call be in that situation? Launch now that you now know that the impacts can cause a loss of shuttle? To be honest, I am not sure that they would have launched a shuttle to rescue Columbia under the conditions at that time, even had they known fully in advance it would mean the loss of the shuttle and crew. At that point, many of the shuttle launches had been hit by foam, so the odds were the rescue one would be also and there was a demonstrated 1% loss rate related to foam impacts. They probably would have, but the possibility is there that a systemic problem could cause the loss of two crews and shuttles.
Not sure how much I buy into that invitation. There is no real chance of anything substantial happening. China is trying to cooperate with a lot of countries now, but only the European Space Agency has really moved forward with chinese cooperation on Galileo. China did buy a couple Soyuz to help with their design work.
The biggest red-herring is all that stuff about tech transfer. China gets more tech transfer every day from US tech companies moving to China than anything they can get from building equipment to spec for joint space ventures. Most space work is pretty basic and is only a subset of regular industrial processes. There isn't really anything that special about it.
So, basically, I can walk down to Radio Shack and buy a few jammers. Then design a system that will be triggered by such a jammer after a given time delay, then be nowhere nearby when it is set off by the security staff?
Actually, if you were looking at Venus, you might want to consider a bouyant vehicle that could maintain the elevation where the atmospheric pressure is close to Earth's. Stage down to the surface from it.
A number of the in situ fuel technologies developed for Mars would work quite well in the CO2 atmosphere of Venus and you could achieve a much higher launch altitude by the use of ballons than you could manage on Earth.
There is a man named Mitch Clapp who made a very good case for an atmospheric colony as most of the issues with going to Venus are reduced greatly by not insisting on all parts having to deal with all the negatives of going to the surface.
That depends on what your expectations are. Right now, manned missions might cost 10 times as much as unmanned missions, but there is a reasonable expectation that a manned mission could return as much as 100 times as much science, depending on what you are researching.
It took Spirit and Opportunity days to cover the distance that Armstrong did in the first couple minutes of the very first manned landing.
We've been working on AI somewhere around 40 years, give or take. We've been working on electronics for centuries. But, it would require almost the same investment in terms of money as a manned mission from this level of technology forward to get probes roughly equivalent to what a manned mission could do now. Not sure if that is clear. Assess the capacity of a person to grasp patterns and concepts along with the degree of autonomy available with mobility. What would it cost to develop unmanned vehicles to operate on other planets to that level of functionality? I would argue that it would be roughly the same as just sending people.
They could use unmanned probes to answer specific questions fairly cheaply, then send manned missions. It's really not an either/or situation. Unmanned probes are nothing but tools. Some of the answers need to be pointed more towards that concept of joint operations.
I would hesitate to even make a blanket statement about manned vs unmanned. My money for the Moon and Mars would be manned. But, Mercury and Jupiter are extremely hostile regions where it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain life, so the balance tips towards unmanned.
Yes, I applaude the way our ancestors settled America using unmanned prairie probes..
It is common knowledge that Neanderthals also used unmanned probes to locate food and heat sources while the less technically proficient homo sapiens had to risk life and limb to explore for resources for their basic survival..
The point isn't exploration for just exploration sake. Everything we do in terms of exploration has a core fundamental human motive that is only partially satisfied in exploration by proxie. And, a lot of that motivation is that people want to *go*. How many people go to a movie and see some great feat or life and say "I want to be an actor and play at that" as opposed to having a desire awakened for what is depicted?
The whole argument about manned vs unmanned usually misses the point that all of it is manned. Every single part is made, manufactured, assembled, monitored, and other wise overseen by humans whether the hardware is for an probe that will be working remotely, or for basic life support of a manned mission. The core underlying drive is a human desire to explore and there are limits to how much of that can be done by proxie because the unmanned vehicles will *never* answer the core human need to actually go and see new sights, or live on new worlds.
XCOR'S test pilot is Dick Rutan, the brother of Burt Rutan, the guy behind Scaled Composites.
Talk about interesting family dynamics..
Everything related to RLV development is still very much in the cooperative phase, like homebrew computers in the early 1970's. Not enough money in it yet to really sharpen the competition.
Nice to see Mercury getting some action these days.
A rover is an interesting idea, but it's pretty complicated to actually achive. Mercury is not rorationally locked to the Sun, so if you land something on the shade side, it'll rotate into sunlight within a month, or so.
The big difference between Mars and Mercury when it comes to rovers would be that a rover on Mars is facing towards Earth every 24 hours, or so. (One Mars day is just a little over 24 hours). But, the Mercury orbit and rotation period means that the rover would only directly be able to point at Earth for a period of a week, or two, every few months. It would require retransmission from an orbitor to extend the mission beyond the initial viewing time. That is quite possible, of course. They do it with Mars all the time. It's just more significant with Mercury because of the lack of direct line communication for most of the time on the surface.
The main driver is really the batteries. They have to maintain a certain level of heating during the night cycle to get the rovers viable. Otherwise, there is some pretty nasty thermal cycling as the electronics ramps up in the day cycle as the solar panels. That requires a certain percentage of the electronics to run all night. It was the battery failure that immediately preceded the other landers and rovers major hardware problems.
Kinda funny what the press latches onto. In February, the issue was "Oh, my god. The solar panels are collecting dust which will shorten the mission". ehhh.. Nope. Doesn't look that way, does it? As long as the panels are able to provide power to the batteries, they can keep extending this. They just have to slow down their power discharge during the days to allow the rover to store up enough energy to make it through the nightcycle. Eventually, that means immobility, but they don't really need that as much after a certain point.
Heck, I make 5-6 times the salary my father pulled down at the factory where he worked from just being a white color worker instead of a blue color one.
It's the nature of the beast. Some jobs pay more. The question here is simple: Are they paid accurately for the value to the show?
In relative terms, Cameron Diaz just got paid $10 *million* for one days work on Shrek 2. And it will gross a fraction of what The Simpsons have pulled in overt the years.
Good voice over talent gets paid about the same as comp science. You're talking about shows and ratings a fraction of what the Simpsons manages.
I know. Let's just outsource this to India rather than pay the people relative to what their market share is.
Face it, for these actors, this is it. None of them are break-out stars. None have any real expectation of much of a career after this.
Most actors are in a position of having one shot at making enough to live off of for the rest of their lives. There isn't any pension plan for most of them from their acting work.
They don't get a large cut of the spin-off merchandizing as their images are not being used. And, it's hard to say what their cut is on the syndication, which is where the money is for the Simpsons.
How many people out there would sit back in a situation where they have 10 years, or so, to make every penny they need to live on for the rest of their lives and then work at a base scale? Wouldn't most people try to maximize it? Face it, we're talking about Fox here. It isn't like any show is assurred renewal. Fox is raking more money off the canned shows with no new expenditure than on new shows and it's just a matter of time before the Simpson's gets axed for "Who Wants to Marry and American Idol Millionare on Temptation Island".
In terms of greed, I put them a lot further down any list than a lot of people I knew in San Jose in 1997. And, these guys actually are producing something of value.
GPS is launched into an orbit some 12,000 miles above the Earth's surface. That orbit has a grand total of about 50 satellites split into 6 different, non-overlapping planes and slightly different altitudes. There are very, very few satellites that go out that far and none have a circular orbit within a few hundred miles of the GPS satellites. Very, very little chance of a collision.
Also, from that height, the satellites lack enough fuel to deorbit or be sent into the sun. In 1992, my Univ of Colorado aerospace engineering lab went down to the control center and we had a nice tour. I asked the officer giving the brief if they intended to establish some sort of parking orbit for dying satellies as they get phased out. He indicated that it was something they would consider as the constellation gets built out.
Secondly..
Paying the bill.
GPS was encrypted from Day 1. The lower resolution receivers we use just are allowed to decrypt the satellites. It is very difficult to get the higher resolution channel.
The US government is perfectly willing to let the other countries contribute to the costs associated with running GPS.
But..
You might want to consider why the other countries are willing to spend billions on a redundant system rather than pay into GPS or use it for free.
When someone spend billions rather than use a free service, something is up.
The US military adamantly refuses to free any of the control of the system up. It is a US *military* asset. As such, it has military utility. They have completely thrown off the commercial channels in the past while engaging in military activities in a region by jiggering with the output to cause the locations to be off. (They can also turn off all the commercial channels on satellites flying over Afghanistan, then turn them back on before the reach the US, for example).
The rest of the world seems to have some qualms about handing the world's major navigation system to a single provider, for some reason.
I am not sure they are bluffing for the reasons you state.
They had always expected Energia to do double duty as an expendible launcher and they still have the pieces.
But, one the other hand. There was a huge caveat "If the government can fund it". Not really seeing that, but space and launch tech is the one thing they have that can compete against the US and anyone else.
The US has been buying Russian engines for several years. We simply have nothing along similar lines and the RS-84 program has been cancelled. SSME is the main engine out there now, but it has a few major weaknesses, IIRC. At the top of the list would be cost.
If I were Russia.. Yeah. They are overdue on the Kliper (Clipper) design. But, I suspect that the major push there is simple. The US is projecting about 10 years to get CEV up and working. There is going to be a gap in manned flight in 2011 except for what the Russians have going. They need to position themselves to assume the weight of ISS or any successor stations. And, I think that is the real aim here. Russia can develope a shell of a station and launch it will a HLV like Energia. 660 tons is about the weight of a decent sized station. With a decent capacity for crew rotation and access, they have something that could be marketable, if they can keep their costs down. Even without a new station, Russia will be it as far as keeping ISS viable in terms of keeping it manned.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox had a 10 year broadcast contract. That expires in 2011.
Fillian might have been referring to the actor's contracts. That would be a different deal, but I do not know the terms of those.
Let's see... 1 million Dvd's sold in a day at an average of $40 per set..
5 million sold since it has been released.
So, Fox has made somewhere around $200 million off that series so far..
Most companies consider $200 million a fairly decent amount to make off a series that has had a multiyear run.. For a show that was cancelled before it even got a run is pretty far removed from the norm.
You really need to do that math, but that would require a bit more processing than you seem to be able to manage.
This particlar vocal sub-group put a lot of money on the table.
Networks are in the "Make Money" business. Fox and a number of other networks now make more off the DVD sales on a series than on the broadcast of the series.
No. Those are not random. The people go out with a checklist. X number of a certain type of person to see a movie.
The source of the people is somewhat random. But, not the composition of the people.
Which first couple episodes?
The first two aired were the last ones written after Fox gave its feedback as to what they wanted. The others were written *without* Fox direction.
ie, if the shows that aired were the bad ones, then it really goes down to Fox. The first episode aired was a rewrite of the pilot as Fox wanted a different type of story to lead off the series. One that showed that the team was good-hearted at their core.. The worst episode was the one where someone cracked a whip
It was 1 million pre-orders. It would have been higher, except that was the entire production run.
It is very unusual to show to a general purchasing audience. Usually test audiences are culled from standard test groups and are targetted demographics. They will be doing that also.
I suspect that this is a new interesting marketting attempt. They get paid to show the movie in advance to a small group. That will raise interest in the film and awareness a bit. It is not even free marketting as the fanbase will pay for this. I seem to recall a couple other instances of this sort of thing, but they are rare.
I seriously doubt they would do this if they did not think they had something though. A lot of the flamebait on here is blathering about the fanboy base and *nobody* flames a franchise more than an upset fanboy.
A test audience signs non-disclosure agreements. They *want* people to talk about this. Not quite viral marketting, but they definately think that word-of-mouth will sell this. Since their dvd sales were pretty much all word-of-mouth and sold about 5 million set to date, there is a certain logic to that.
The CAIB did a fairly large number of risk asessments for returning the Shuttle to flight. That covered just basic flight and the risks involved. The numbers for Hubble would be essentially those numbers.
I rather suspect that the risk analyis for Hubble would be something along the lines of "For non-strategic flights on Shuttle, we have to have a 99.5% chance of success". Since the baseline Shuttle analysis for the risks on return-to-flight are already outside that boundry, then it makes zero sense to spend money digging deeper.
The main things to consider about this whole rescue shuttle thing..
1) That an emergency is spotted in time to allow for a stationary orbit to allow for docking.
2) That they have determined the cause of said emergency and it is a low probability of occurring to the rescue shuttle.
3) That the emergency occurs during the 2 least stressful phases of operation (launch and on-orbit) of the three phases of flight.
Probably the most important is the second caveat. Do you launch another Shuttle if you don't know if there is a systemic problem? Do you launch if it is low probability? Consider the foam impact issue. Foam impacts were more the norm than the exception. It's just none had led to vehicle loss before. What would the judgement call be in that situation? Launch now that you now know that the impacts can cause a loss of shuttle? To be honest, I am not sure that they would have launched a shuttle to rescue Columbia under the conditions at that time, even had they known fully in advance it would mean the loss of the shuttle and crew. At that point, many of the shuttle launches had been hit by foam, so the odds were the rescue one would be also and there was a demonstrated 1% loss rate related to foam impacts. They probably would have, but the possibility is there that a systemic problem could cause the loss of two crews and shuttles.
Not sure how much I buy into that invitation. There is no real chance of anything substantial happening. China is trying to cooperate with a lot of countries now, but only the European Space Agency has really moved forward with chinese cooperation on Galileo. China did buy a couple Soyuz to help with their design work.
The biggest red-herring is all that stuff about tech transfer. China gets more tech transfer every day from US tech companies moving to China than anything they can get from building equipment to spec for joint space ventures. Most space work is pretty basic and is only a subset of regular industrial processes. There isn't really anything that special about it.
Interesting article. But, I am not quite sure that they understand the rationale many people have for not using striping on their desktop.
.01 seconds off the time it takes to write out the document you just wrote?
1) Does it matter if you cut
2) Does it matter if you have a disk failure and lose all your data on all partitions in the stripe? Everyone at home makes daily backups.
If you want to live up to the whole "There is more than one way to do it" slogan, you have to give someone a swiss army chainsaw..
So, basically, I can walk down to Radio Shack and buy a few jammers. Then design a system that will be triggered by such a jammer after a given time delay, then be nowhere nearby when it is set off by the security staff?
Or, am I missing something here?
Actually, if you were looking at Venus, you might want to consider a bouyant vehicle that could maintain the elevation where the atmospheric pressure is close to Earth's. Stage down to the surface from it.
A number of the in situ fuel technologies developed for Mars would work quite well in the CO2 atmosphere of Venus and you could achieve a much higher launch altitude by the use of ballons than you could manage on Earth.
There is a man named Mitch Clapp who made a very good case for an atmospheric colony as most of the issues with going to Venus are reduced greatly by not insisting on all parts having to deal with all the negatives of going to the surface.
That depends on what your expectations are. Right now, manned missions might cost 10 times as much as unmanned missions, but there is a reasonable expectation that a manned mission could return as much as 100 times as much science, depending on what you are researching.
It took Spirit and Opportunity days to cover the distance that Armstrong did in the first couple minutes of the very first manned landing.
We've been working on AI somewhere around 40 years, give or take. We've been working on electronics for centuries. But, it would require almost the same investment in terms of money as a manned mission from this level of technology forward to get probes roughly equivalent to what a manned mission could do now. Not sure if that is clear. Assess the capacity of a person to grasp patterns and concepts along with the degree of autonomy available with mobility. What would it cost to develop unmanned vehicles to operate on other planets to that level of functionality? I would argue that it would be roughly the same as just sending people.
They could use unmanned probes to answer specific questions fairly cheaply, then send manned missions. It's really not an either/or situation. Unmanned probes are nothing but tools. Some of the answers need to be pointed more towards that concept of joint operations.
I would hesitate to even make a blanket statement about manned vs unmanned. My money for the Moon and Mars would be manned. But, Mercury and Jupiter are extremely hostile regions where it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain life, so the balance tips towards unmanned.
Yes, I applaude the way our ancestors settled America using unmanned prairie probes..
It is common knowledge that Neanderthals also used unmanned probes to locate food and heat sources while the less technically proficient homo sapiens had to risk life and limb to explore for resources for their basic survival..
The point isn't exploration for just exploration sake. Everything we do in terms of exploration has a core fundamental human motive that is only partially satisfied in exploration by proxie. And, a lot of that motivation is that people want to *go*. How many people go to a movie and see some great feat or life and say "I want to be an actor and play at that" as opposed to having a desire awakened for what is depicted?
The whole argument about manned vs unmanned usually misses the point that all of it is manned. Every single part is made, manufactured, assembled, monitored, and other wise overseen by humans whether the hardware is for an probe that will be working remotely, or for basic life support of a manned mission. The core underlying drive is a human desire to explore and there are limits to how much of that can be done by proxie because the unmanned vehicles will *never* answer the core human need to actually go and see new sights, or live on new worlds.
But since it relies on dihydrogen monoxide, it'll never make it through congress
talk about redundant. how do i delete this message?
It's more of a family affair than you think..
XCOR'S test pilot is Dick Rutan, the brother of Burt Rutan, the guy behind Scaled Composites.
Talk about interesting family dynamics..
Everything related to RLV development is still very much in the cooperative phase, like homebrew computers in the early 1970's. Not enough money in it yet to really sharpen the competition.
Nice to see Mercury getting some action these days.
A rover is an interesting idea, but it's pretty complicated to actually achive. Mercury is not rorationally locked to the Sun, so if you land something on the shade side, it'll rotate into sunlight within a month, or so.
The big difference between Mars and Mercury when it comes to rovers would be that a rover on Mars is facing towards Earth every 24 hours, or so. (One Mars day is just a little over 24 hours). But, the Mercury orbit and rotation period means that the rover would only directly be able to point at Earth for a period of a week, or two, every few months. It would require retransmission from an orbitor to extend the mission beyond the initial viewing time. That is quite possible, of course. They do it with Mars all the time. It's just more significant with Mercury because of the lack of direct line communication for most of the time on the surface.
The main driver is really the batteries. They have to maintain a certain level of heating during the night cycle to get the rovers viable. Otherwise, there is some pretty nasty thermal cycling as the electronics ramps up in the day cycle as the solar panels. That requires a certain percentage of the electronics to run all night. It was the battery failure that immediately preceded the other landers and rovers major hardware problems.
Kinda funny what the press latches onto. In February, the issue was "Oh, my god. The solar panels are collecting dust which will shorten the mission". ehhh.. Nope. Doesn't look that way, does it? As long as the panels are able to provide power to the batteries, they can keep extending this. They just have to slow down their power discharge during the days to allow the rover to store up enough energy to make it through the nightcycle. Eventually, that means immobility, but they don't really need that as much after a certain point.
Heck, I make 5-6 times the salary my father pulled down at the factory where he worked from just being a white color worker instead of a blue color one.
It's the nature of the beast. Some jobs pay more. The question here is simple: Are they paid accurately for the value to the show?
In relative terms, Cameron Diaz just got paid $10 *million* for one days work on Shrek 2. And it will gross a fraction of what The Simpsons have pulled in overt the years.
Good voice over talent gets paid about the same as comp science. You're talking about shows and ratings a fraction of what the Simpsons manages.
I know. Let's just outsource this to India rather than pay the people relative to what their market share is.
Face it, for these actors, this is it. None of them are break-out stars. None have any real expectation of much of a career after this.
Most actors are in a position of having one shot at making enough to live off of for the rest of their lives. There isn't any pension plan for most of them from their acting work.
They don't get a large cut of the spin-off merchandizing as their images are not being used. And, it's hard to say what their cut is on the syndication, which is where the money is for the Simpsons.
How many people out there would sit back in a situation where they have 10 years, or so, to make every penny they need to live on for the rest of their lives and then work at a base scale? Wouldn't most people try to maximize it? Face it, we're talking about Fox here. It isn't like any show is assurred renewal. Fox is raking more money off the canned shows with no new expenditure than on new shows and it's just a matter of time before the Simpson's gets axed for "Who Wants to Marry and American Idol Millionare on Temptation Island".
In terms of greed, I put them a lot further down any list than a lot of people I knew in San Jose in 1997. And, these guys actually are producing something of value.
There are multiple bits of information buried in the data.
g ps /gps_f.html
There is the carrier frequency.
Then each satellite has a specific identifying signal for each channel called a psuedo random number.
Then, it layers in a telemetry data packet as part of the actual data transmitted
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/
First.. Space Junk.
GPS is launched into an orbit some 12,000 miles above the Earth's surface. That orbit has a grand total of about 50 satellites split into 6 different, non-overlapping planes and slightly different altitudes. There are very, very few satellites that go out that far and none have a circular orbit within a few hundred miles of the GPS satellites. Very, very little chance of a collision.
Also, from that height, the satellites lack enough fuel to deorbit or be sent into the sun. In 1992, my Univ of Colorado aerospace engineering lab went down to the control center and we had a nice tour. I asked the officer giving the brief if they intended to establish some sort of parking orbit for dying satellies as they get phased out. He indicated that it was something they would consider as the constellation gets built out.
Secondly..
Paying the bill.
GPS was encrypted from Day 1. The lower resolution receivers we use just are allowed to decrypt the satellites. It is very difficult to get the higher resolution channel.
The US government is perfectly willing to let the other countries contribute to the costs associated with running GPS.
But..
You might want to consider why the other countries are willing to spend billions on a redundant system rather than pay into GPS or use it for free.
When someone spend billions rather than use a free service, something is up.
The US military adamantly refuses to free any of the control of the system up. It is a US *military* asset. As such, it has military utility. They have completely thrown off the commercial channels in the past while engaging in military activities in a region by jiggering with the output to cause the locations to be off. (They can also turn off all the commercial channels on satellites flying over Afghanistan, then turn them back on before the reach the US, for example).
The rest of the world seems to have some qualms about handing the world's major navigation system to a single provider, for some reason.
I am not sure they are bluffing for the reasons you state.
They had always expected Energia to do double duty as an expendible launcher and they still have the pieces.
But, one the other hand. There was a huge caveat "If the government can fund it". Not really seeing that, but space and launch tech is the one thing they have that can compete against the US and anyone else.
The US has been buying Russian engines for several years. We simply have nothing along similar lines and the RS-84 program has been cancelled. SSME is the main engine out there now, but it has a few major weaknesses, IIRC. At the top of the list would be cost.
If I were Russia.. Yeah. They are overdue on the Kliper (Clipper) design. But, I suspect that the major push there is simple. The US is projecting about 10 years to get CEV up and working. There is going to be a gap in manned flight in 2011 except for what the Russians have going. They need to position themselves to assume the weight of ISS or any successor stations. And, I think that is the real aim here. Russia can develope a shell of a station and launch it will a HLV like Energia. 660 tons is about the weight of a decent sized station. With a decent capacity for crew rotation and access, they have something that could be marketable, if they can keep their costs down. Even without a new station, Russia will be it as far as keeping ISS viable in terms of keeping it manned.