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Russia to Build New Spacecraft by 2020
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 10, 2007 02:34 AM
from the shouldn't-we-have-ftl-by-2020 dept.
from the shouldn't-we-have-ftl-by-2020 dept.
Tech.Luver passed us the word that Russia is now working on a new generation of spacecraft, presumably to help fuel its renewed space exploration ambitions. The Space-based industry is still one of the few areas in which Russia is intentionally competitive, and they intend to exploit that in the coming years. Even still, the new technologies are not expected to see use until 2020. ""A tender to design a new booster and spaceship has been announced," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov as saying ... Perminov did not give further details of the tender, but said TsSKB-Progress from the Volga city of Samara is likely to bid with its Soyuz-3 design of spacecraft, as well as Moscow's Khrunichev centre with Angara 3P and Angara 5P. The United States beat the Soviet Union in developing multiple-use Space Shuttle rockets, which form its current fleet of manned spacecraft. Russian space officials have said single-use spacecraft like the Soyuz-TM currently used are cheaper and more practical."
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Space Shuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States beat the Soviet Union in developing multiple-use Space Shuttle rockets, which form its current fleet of manned spacecraft.
The Space Race is a Rich Nation's Game (Score:3, Insightful)
The Russians need to stay focused on modernizing their economy and political system. Russia still has considerable poverty, and the money wasted on the space race would be better spent on welfare programs and the education system. At the same stage of development, the Japanes
Re:The Space Race is a Rich Nation's Game (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, Russian economy is much bigger than Polish - so $10000000 for space program take less than $1 from each citizen.
GDP per capita is very misleading: Luxembourg currently leads with $81511 (against measly $43223 in USA). So should USA just stop all scientific programs and channel all money to welfare?
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The problem is: it doesn't scale well.
Let's not rule that out just yet. There are other nations like Sweden, Switzerland, Finland or Denmark that can boast similar achievements in a much larger scale. Though in principle I personally tend to prefer the archetypal freedom and self-determination mantra which is so prevalent in every way of life in the US, it must be acknowledged that there are certain lessons to be learned from other nations. At humanity's present technological level, almost all developed nations could in fact provide a minimum
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That's why I said that it doesn't scale
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Besides, this is not fantasy, those countries I mentioned have implemented schemes that mostly work. I don't see 20-30% unemployment in Sweden.
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Hell, if I had to be in the poorest segment of the population, I'd rather be in Russia than the USA. Healthcare may be relatively crappy in Russia, but at least it's free, and I (or my 7 year old son) won't be left to die in the gutter from common flu if I can't afford a doctor or buy prescription drugs.
Not necess
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You do realize that if you or your son (or anybody else) is "dying in the gutter" from anything, you can wander into the nearest Emergency Room in the US and get health care that isn't based on your ability to pay. Not that the system is perfect, mind you. Not that you will appreciate the rather largis
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Maybe you should try that before you suggest others do it. That law doesn't exactly get enforced, and you probably won't get treated if you are, say, dying from cancer or have something that won't kill you tomorrow.
Perhaps if they (and everyone else) got guaranteed six figure incomes, things woul
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I think it's a shame that Russia had to pretty much shelve their Klipe
intentionally competitive? (Score:5, Funny)
"Comrade, production is too high! You must reduce performance to the planned levels or we will succeed."
Practical Space Access (Score:3, Insightful)
If they want to be practical about getting to space, the old X-15 program had it down pat. Three vehicles, 200 flights in less than 10 years. One fatal crash. You launched the thing from a plane or a balloon. No waste, no fuss. And because you're not constantly throwing something the size of a young apartment building into orbit, a single accident doesn't effectively knock you out of space for years. It couldn't carry much more than the pilot, but only an idiot would doubt that by the third generation (the original RFP's went out in the mid-50's) it would have carried a reasonable payload.
I think it all started to go wrong for NASA when politicians were allowed to their poke their long, ratlike noses into the business of scientists and engineers. If not for the damned shuttle program, there'd be a crew drinking beer on Mars by now.
Re:Practical Space Access (Score:5, Informative)
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I think you may have misunderstood me a bit. My point wasn't what the X-15 did then, but what the X-15 approach would have yielded by now. The X-15 program was intentionally limited as part of the decision to use adapted ICBM's for launching manned space vehicles.
At least some (maybe all) X-15 pilots have their astronaut wings because the higher flights achieved altitudes defined nationally and internationally as "space" (The service ceiling is officially reported at 67 miles). The pilots were given ve
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Nonsense. The X-15 program was never intended to go into orbit - it was built to do exactly what it did do, explore hypersonic and high altitude flight. (Though it could only do one or the other on any given mission.)
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The only device that could pack the kind of punch needed to launch useful payload to LEO with a X-15 sized vehicle would be a nuclear-thermal device. NERVA and ROVER had problems of radioactive exhaust and would be
Intentionally competitive (Score:3, Interesting)
Russia wins the spam gap too (Score:5, Funny)
Spam comes to mind.
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If you take some time (Score:3, Interesting)
beat Soviets as well in wasting money (Score:3, Insightful)
The United States (together with Europe) have also beaten the Soviet Union in wasting countless billion of dollars on an International Space Station of very limited research value. Basically they just trying to try to stay alive up there and do 30 minutes of research projects per day. The Shuttle is currently also just a pork-barrel project. Those funds need to be spent in different ways (such as next generation planetary rovers).
The Russians have managed to keep their total costs for development and launches lower over the decades, by having at least some sort of "mass production" economies of scale.
Their MIR space station managed to get along for years against increadible odds, for a fraction of NASA money.
The Russians have very good and practical aerospace engineers. This illustrates the difference nicely: during the space race NASA spent money and effort in developing a pen which could work in weightlessness. The russian astronauts instead of pens used pencils in space.
NASA Space Pen urban legend (Score:5, Informative)
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Mod parent down Urban Legend (Score:2)
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The Russians have managed 'cheap' spaceflight because they inherited an already developed craft and launcher, and all the infrastructure, from the Soviet Union - for free.
MIR managed to get along for years beca
Exploration wins in the end (Score:3, Insightful)
Russia to Build New Spacecraft by 2020... (Score:2)
That trick never works. (Score:2)
Seriously folks, I suspect that this is just latest in a long line of paper spacecraft created by the Russians.
What happened to Kliper? (Score:2)
One wonders what happened to the Kliper [wikipedia.org]? It was touted as being practical and reliable. Russian space architecture seems confused.
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But to summarize, the project was offered for bids in 2006, and none of the bidders could meet the specifications. Then European space agency came along and offered to work together on something else (KK Soyuz and ATV) and that was technically achievable. So the Klipper project got postponed until 2010-2015, and the resources reassigned to the ESA work. We don't have technology yet to build Klipper with planned capabilities and for planned cost (reusability strikes again, probably.)
Re:rockets vs shuttle (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and you always use a 16-wheeler to drive your kids to school, right?
The vast majority of space launches which currently use the shuttle, transport people or regular vital supplies (food, water, etc) to the ISS. The shuttle was not designed for, and cannot do any missions other than low-earth orbit (ISS, Hubble, etc).
In those cases where you really need large cargo (such as lifting components of the ISS), you can use other rockets, such as Delta V or the upcoming Ares-IV (which, by the way, intends to replace the unreliable shuttle in the first place).
The shuttle was nothing but an attempt to appease the moronic treehuggers by creating the illusion of "recycleable" craft, even though (1) the difference in price between launching a shuttle and a light rocket could pay for reducing emissions in other areas that would bring much greater net benefit to the ecology, and (2) consuming the fuckton of fuel to launch a heavy-ass shuttle that carries two people negates any "cleanliness" achieved by just throwing 75% of the shuttle (boosters go, remember?) instead of the ~95% when rocket goes, capsule comes. In an effort to appease the same treehuggers we were periodically stuck with forced solar panels on rovers instead of nuclear power, which among other things forces our Mars rovers to hibernate through the winter instead of working as usual. Thank God that with New Horizons and further nuclear-powered missions we finally got over the yoke.
Parent
Revisionists unleashed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another attempt to blame a bunch of rare and disorganised hippies with no political power at all at the time for some dubious political decisions mostly about spreading the pork. The shuttle design is most likely a lot older than the poster and "moronic treehuggers" don't even have the political clout to get Kyoto signed now let alone sabotage a space program decades ago.
Parent
Re:Revisionists unleashed! (Score:5, Informative)
reconnaissance missions) which to put it mildly was not thought out, and which was not challenged sufficiently by NASA.
At the time, reusable rockets were widely seen in the space establishment as the way to cut the cost of on-orbit delivery. What people hadn't
thought through was the cost of ground support, which is very high for the Shuttle. Even if the Shuttle flight hardware was free, it still wouldn't be economical to operate compared to Soyez. Realistically, as soon as the shuttle launched we should have started designing the next version, taking into account what we had learned from the first attempt. We are now 20+ years behind the curve now, and it shows.
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And, to be fair, it's hard to blame NASA. They had just gone to the moon, and were basically convinced that they could build anything. The space shuttle was a perfect storm of hubris, mish-mashed design goals, pork politics, and a dozen other
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Thank God that with New Horizons and further nuclear-powered missions we finally got over the yoke.
Quoth Wikipedia: "A common application of RTGs is as power sources on spacecraft. Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power Program (SNAP) units were used especially for probes that travel far enough from the Sun that solar panels are no longer viable. As such they are used with Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini and New Horizons. In addition, RTGs were used to power the two Viking landers and for the scientific experiments left on the Moon by the crews of Apollo 12 through 17 (S
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The drivers for making a reusable space launcher were economic, engineering idealism, the desire for a big fancy "proper" spaceship, and in the background a large expensive project to fund lots of aerospace work. I doubt environmental considerations were even mentioned excep
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There are plenty of cheaper, expendable rockets that can lift larger or similar payloads as the Space Shuttle.
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yeah wow so the rocket is cheaper... pity it carries a fraction of the shuttles payload
Shuttle's payload? Russia did develop the Energia rocket to launch their Buran Shuttle (which was launched once unmanned). This rocket had a 100 ton payload which is just about the bare minimum needed for reasonable lunar exploration. But more importantly they were also developing the Energia II shich would have had the ability to reenter the atmosphere and glide to a landing at an airfield making it completely reusable. They also had a 175 ton rocket under development.
Though to be fair, NASA still win
Re:rockets vs shuttle (Score:5, Informative)
The Ariane 5G [wikipedia.org] can lift 17.6 tons into LEO for a cost of about $165 million [corwm.org]
While not mentioned in TFA, the Soyuz 3 [russianspaceweb.com] would be able to put 17.8 tons into LEO. If they can get the price comparable to the Ariane, they'll have a winner.
Don't count the Russians out of the race just yet.
Parent
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Yeah... And in the mean time, NASA will continue working on the Ares V, which can put 145.0 tons into LEO.
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100 tons to LEO is nice, it's a pity 70% of it is useless.
More practical ways for nations to compete? (Score:3, Insightful)
If every dollar George spent in Iraq had gone to space instead, we'd all be better off.
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It's the only way to be sure.
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