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Europe's Automated Cargo Shuttle Docks With Space Station
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Apr 05, 2008 11:20 PM
from the drones-what-can't-they-do dept.
from the drones-what-can't-they-do dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A successful docking of the Automated Transfer Vehicle dubbed 'Jules Verne' occurred earlier this week. The first of its kind, the crewless ship reached orbit and lightly touched up against the international space station on Thursday. By now astronauts on the ISS will have opened its doors and begun air circulation in preparation of offloading the nearly 7.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, food, clothing and equipment they need to survive. The EU Space Agency sees this as a historic journey for the program: 'The Jules Verne, named after the visionary French science fiction author, is the first of a new class of station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles. The craft was built by the nations of the European Space Agency as one of Europe's major contributions to the international station. "The docking of the A.T.V. is a new and spectacular step in the demonstration of European capabilities on the international scene of space exploration," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency.'"
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The important question (Score:4, Funny)
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The Canadian robot manipulators! We've got tons of them! The arms on the space shuttles, the twin-armed contraption on the space station, numerous smaller manipulators on many rovers...
It's too bad any new ones won't be Canadian anymore with MDA selling out =( Not that MDA Space Missions / MD Robotics / Dynacs / SPAR were "all Canadian" to start with, but at least it had that "built here!" feeling to it.
Aikon-
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One-use European robot transport vs Russian Soyuz spacecraft
IIRC, so far the Russians have been lifting the majority of supplies to the station, because the Shuttle hasn't been going up regularly. Not to mention they've been getting paid but the USA for the privilege.
Re:The important question (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The important question (Score:5, Insightful)
details [amsat.org]
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Re:The important question (Score:4, Insightful)
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And on to the stars! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Remember, NASA and the vast majority of the space community are still stuck in the von Braun vision: station, shuttle, Moon, Mars.
Re:And on to the stars! (Score:5, Insightful)
If NASA followed von Braun's strategy, by now we would have a permanent moon base already. Instead NASA went for a big-bang project, after initial success, scaled it down very quickly and abandoned everything for a flawed plan and left us with a shuttle which would truck stuff to nowhere. Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. I wouldn't be this bitter at least they had something replacing it.
Europeans (inc. Russia) will have to step up and replace NASA when they completely abandon ISS in a couple of years and ATV is a step in this. The Chinese and Indians might come aboard pretty soon as well. The world will not need USA for space exploration any more and NASA's current plans are doomed with the budget cuts and everything - all it needs is a pretty failure in one of the first flights and that's it, USA won't have access to human spaceflight anymore - they hardly succeed with their current fleet of vehicles.
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Even if NASA wasn't a bureaucratic mess and got the funding it needed, all we'd have is "science" on Mars.
Does it really make sense to drag yourself out of a gravity well only to throw yourself into another?
Re:And on to the stars! (Score:4, Insightful)
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You couldn't be more wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no. NASA was ordered to do the big bang project by the Kennedy and subsequent Administrations. NASA originally planned to go to the moon possibly sometime in the 70's, maybe.
Um, no. Of the landing sequence NASA planned (through Apollo 20), two flights (what would have been 15 and 19) were cut in 1967 and
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Asteroids come with retroreflectors preinstalled [esa.int]? Asteroids provide such a predictable environment that the exact same approach can be rehearsed countless times in a lab beforehand?
IMHO, the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge moved the science closer to unpredictable real-world mining than this. (though admittedly, both relied heavily on laser rangefinders)
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The first of its kind, the crewless ship... (Score:2)
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Re:The first of its kind, the crewless ship... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why no gyros? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:The first of its kind, the crewless ship... (Score:5, Informative)
Kindly separate what some inaccurate media summary says and what the ESA itself states. Where exactly does ESA claim to have "the first automated transport spacecraft?". They say it is the first of its kind, i.e. one that navigates and docks fully automatically, which is neither a lie nor an overstatement. And quoting from the Smart-1 (probe with ion drive) site:
I haven't bothered checking your "first 3-axis stabilized spacecraft to be operated without any gyro" example but frankly I'm sure I'd not find an "outright lie" here or even a overstatement either.
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Typical ESA over-statement (or outright lie).
Depends on how you interpret the meaning of the word "first of its kind". It is definitely not the first automated space craft, you are right. But this is probably not what was meant. In fact, the words "first of its kind do not even appear in the NY Times article, it is the words of the "anonymous reader" who submitted this to Slashdot.
The New York Times article states:
"[It] is the first of a new class of station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles"
And it definitely is a new class of suplly sh
ATV? (Score:2)
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Face it, every reasonable length acronym has been used at least once by now
Original manuscripts on board? (Score:3, Insightful)
7.5 Tons (Score:3, Funny)
Thursday ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thursday ? (Score:5, Insightful)
If not, it will probably be re-kindled in about 6-7 years, when china puts a man on the moon, with the obvious intention of building a base there. Just as sputnik spurred America, I think that the realization that China has about 1.5 times the number of ppl working on their space program of what America had in total during the Apollo program will cause nations to re-think their priorities, and how to work together.
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Space Shuttle (Score:2)
Why still dock front on ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why still dock front on ? (Score:5, Informative)
Read Bate, Mueller, & White, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics", (Dover Books). (Caution: Math required.)
Imagine two coplanar circular rings, of very slightly different diameter, with a common center. They're concentric. Tilt one slightly with respect to the other, retaining the common centering. The rings now cross at two diametrically opposed points.
Those rings represent non-coplanar orbits. Objects traveling along the two orbits appear to be in parallel course at widest separation, then they start coming together, collide, and start moving apart again.
The cheap way to do rendezvous is get the two spacecraft onto the SAME orbit, with some separation, and then GRADUALLY maneuver one of them to bring it closer. It is extremely touchy work. (This is why Project Gemini spent so much time learning how to rendezvous the Gemini spacecraft with the Agena target: they had to be able to do rendezvous to do the Apollo moon landings.)
Read "Carrying the Fire", by Mike Collins, for some interesting insight into the problem. (Mike Collins was Apollo XI Command Module Pilot.)
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Thats an expensive, and not very efficient... (Score:4, Funny)
Seems to me they could use human waste propulsion to offset atmospheric drag, so long as its directed at the earth.
put the waste under pressure and release it in a directed manner.
Ok, so that's a shitty idea.
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Parent link is Rick Roll Muppets Version (Score:3, Funny)
Rick Roll - the new MyMiniCity. Gah!
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In Soviet Russia, lame memes take *YOU* back to ebaumsworld!
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*--Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss [wikipedia.org]
Re:Video? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Video? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Video? (Score:4, Informative)
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Or at least accumulate a useful scrap yard (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately the ISS is in too low an orbit for that, ie. a scrap yard at that low altitude would reenter pretty soon. The space station itself needs to be reboosted up periodically (a really daft design decision).
There's no reason why the transport couldn't boost itself much further out once it has delivered its cargo though. The
Re:Or at least accumulate a useful scrap yard (Score:5, Informative)
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Full Article (Score:2, Informative)
Only Russia has previously achieved a successful automated docking in space, Dr. Griffin said in a statement.
I wonder what kind of system the Russians were using and are still using? It took this long for others to catch up and, from the article once again, they had to use GPS and other systems. I'm sure the Russians had it much simpler.
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You certainly need to find out who's actually behind much of the success of U.S. space exploration,
start with these
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Gr [wikipedia.org]öttrup
Just to mention two and leaving out too many to list here. Make sure you understand why von Braun
was so important to NASA and U.S space race with Russians, even though he had Nazi background.
Many of the great engineers of 19th and 20th century came from Germany and from Europe in general
as in many