Slashdot Log In
EU and Russia Show Off New Lunar Spacecraft Design
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jul 26, 2008 11:52 PM
from the it's-only-a-model dept.
from the it's-only-a-model dept.
schliz writes "Space flight planners have unveiled a new spaceship design for a joint EU/Russian trip to the Moon. The EU will be building the crew capsule, using technology developed for the automatic cargo system used to supply the International Space Station." First one to link to decent pics (the article has none) wins undying gratitude and a warm feeling inside.
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
About time (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly, from TFA it sounds like they will NOT use the separate landing craft approach of Apollo.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
About time someone (and not the US since the Iraq war has sucked up all our money) went there.
That's funny, if the US has run out of money, how can they afford to stay in Iraq?
The war is costing $720 million/day. I say they scale that back to $700 million/day and give the rest to NASA. That should be more than enough for them to work with!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Where do you get your figures from? According to nationalpriorities.org (which given its bias would tend to overestimate, if anything), it 'only' costs $340e6 per day.
(You may be amused to know that that would pay off my mortgage in slightly more than 30 seconds.)
Too soon (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been there, and picked up enough rocks to last a while. What else is there to do...?
Until we can build largely self-sustaining colonies and prove them on earth the fuel and resources would be better spent launching probes, satellites, telescopes, etc. - not sending people on moon vacations.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus it can only help the people running the show to do a few relatively simple missions before trying anything ambitious.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We could start gathering/refining He3. It shows a lot of promise as a fuel source. [wikipedia.org]
We could use the moon as a last refining step to the habitat equipment we plan on sending to Mars.
Let us not forget the real reason we went the first time: Prestige. We could use a bit of that right now, sure it would be better to improve America's reputation by once again being a leader in Human Rights, education, and freedom; but w
Re:Too soon (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Different times, same reasons (Score:4, Informative)
And it would be interesting to note that the US stopped the Apollo moon project in the 1970s in part because the Vietnam war was sucking up all their money.
Parent
Looks to me like another space race (Score:2)
Not here (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Links to pics and the BBC article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Links to pics and the BBC article (Score:5, Funny)
More pictures here [slashdot.org]. It's a Slashdot article from Thursday entitled "First Images of Russian-European Manned Spacecraft".
Parent
Link to further discussion of this vehicle (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Undying gratitude?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:5, Informative)
"...The EU will be building the crew capsule, using technology developed for the automatic cargo system used to supply the International Space Station..."
I thought it is important for Slashdotters to know that when it comes to automatic docking of spacecraft in outer space, Russians have been doing this for decades without much fan fare!
I just do not understand why we in the west always appear to get "full of it" when it comes to technology issues. Why?
Even when we 100% relied on the Russian Soyuz technology not many years ago, this fact did not capture headlines in Russia. If it were the other way round, I am sure CNN, ABC and FOX would inundate us with the story as if nothing else mattered.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing against the Russians, but their technology is still not a match for our own. Even thoug
Examples (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
<p> and </p>. Please learn to use them so we don't have to be subjected to a garbled mess.
Re: (Score:2)
instead. But I passed them up in this one case.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Last time i checked Russian rockets and space capsules didn't explode on take off or re entry killing all the astronauts. Might want to reconsider what you just said.
Re:Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nor is their lift capability anywhere near ours.
Sort of like saying "My bicycle never careens into a wall at 100mph killing everybody riding it".
The Soyuz module with a crew of 3 delivers about 1 ton of cargo. The Shuttle with a crew of 7 can deliver 57 tons of cargo. That means a Soyuz rocket would have to make 57 trips to do what the shuttle does in one. Something tells me even with a 2% failure rate for the shuttle I would say it out performs the soyuz. Unless your metric is number of millionaires launched into LEO.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry I'm calling bullshit on myself. It's too late.
Divide Shuttle numbers by 2 I was operating on a nice easy 1000 pounds to a ton.
Shuttle can take about 25 tons into LEO with 7 crew members and the Soyuz can take much less than a ton with 3 crew members.
Re:Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
24 tonnes to LEO, actually. And if you want to lift cargo, you're hardly going to use a Soyuz. Use a properly designed heavy-lifter instead, such as a Proton or an Ariane 5, and launch your astronauts seperately in a Soyuz; that way you don't have to man-rate your heavylifter, which saves you vast amounts of money. The Shuttle's main problem is that it's designed to be a man-rated lifte
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well they do explode on takeoff sometimes and they do fail almost catastrophically on reentry even more often. They however have a simple enough design that allows for enough safety features/margins to not kill the crew in the process. Some of the crew may get permanent injuries and never fly again (from the G forces) but they live.
Re:Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:5, Informative)
*sigh* The AC above me was trying to link to the List of Space Disasters [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia. Which speaks of two major incidents resulting in the loss of crew. The first was a parachute failure which led to the death of the astronaut on board. The second was a valve failure that resulted in depressurization of the capsule and a loss of all crew members.
Score Card
==========
Russia - 2
U.S. - 2
Seems to be a parity to me. Also, there is the issue that the Soviet Union didn't always tell everyone when an accident happened. It's difficult to tell if there were further incidents that have gone unpublished.
Regardless of that issue, there are more than enough near-fatal space accidents on the Russian side listed in the Wikipedia article to question whether the Russian space program really is safer. The truth is simply that space travel is risky business. It will continue to be risky business for a long time, unfortunately.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's only fair if you also include the Russian deaths on the ground. Who had the dubious honor of having the first space-related death? Why, the Russians with a training exercise in a pure oxygen environment. (Same issue that killed the Apollo astronauts.) Except that was 1961. Apollo wouldn't repeat that mistake until 1967. (Which was a perfectly avoidable mistake, and was a huge wake-up call to the NASA of the time.)
Don't even get me started on the number of near-fatal collisions and separation failures
Re:Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:5, Informative)
You know -- sadly what you are referring to was the Apollo-Soyuz mission of the mid 80's. The Russian KURS automated docking system is used all the time on the space station now, and it has worked flawlessly every time.
It also worked perfectly on the Mir. They did have a docking mishap on the Mir, but that as when they tried to do a manual docking.
Thad
Parent
Re:Russia is the pioneer here... (Score:5, Interesting)
And lest you think manual docking is safe, don't forget the incident where an ISS crewman took manual control of the docking of a Russian cargo ship and ended up smashing it into the station, fortunately at low enough delta-v to cause only superficial damage.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1975, actually, the last American flight until the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981.
capsule (Score:3, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7519723.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Space Unity (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, large joint missions to space tend to inspire unity in disparate peoples. I think it's great that East and West are working with one another to see the moon again. And I was thinking that we in America really need to rethink our economic system to work when we're all just getting what we need, rather than what we want. Really, even with prices rising, everything is as cheap if not cheaper than it's ever been in history. And not just in America but world-wide. A family of four can eat like kings in America for under $200 a month, which is only 11 percent of their annual income (at the povery line, 20,500).
We could easily go to the moon again. Things cost much less than the estimates when people actually care. That's the thing about the past 30 years, and especially the past decade in America. We all knew that we were going to work and really producing nothing meaningful. Perhaps we might do some sort of creative service, but were we really fulfilling any useful cause? NO! And it was all for selfish reasons. A COLLECTIVE goal, like space travel, inspires people to do more work than what they are paid for. That means more productivity and a lower overall cost for the same work.
In fact, why not OPEN SOURCE the entire lunar thing to colleges and universities, high schools, geeks everywhere. Using version control systems you could allow everyone to put in a patch, and of course it would all be reviewed before anythign was built but why not? The real problem with space travel in America is NASA, because they are so convinced they are the only people who know how to do it. But guess what, it's all old military people mostly (there's some good science, I'm not going to deny that) in the administration, a vestige of the cold war. It's still run like a branch of the military, and the contractors know how to exploit that for maximum profit. What we need is the contractors to ACTUALLY COMPETE, rather than consolidate. We need people to actually care, to bill 10 hours and put in 20, not MILK THE SYSTEM. Actually care about what you're building.
That goes beyond space, to the country itself. It's a radical idea, actually caring. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you. And be persistent.
Simply not true (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention gas prices, and other things as well.
If you call that "as cheap as it has ever been", then if I were you I would pull out my calculator and start re-figuring.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't really see the "dollar price" of things as being relevant, since it's been drastically diluted by, well, the government printing money. By "Cheap" I'm talking in terms of Time (work hours) and Energy (joules). Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
Try telling that to the grocery store clerk.
If you take the average price and subtract the average raise increase then you have a very very precise way of measuring the cheapness of something.
In this case the cost is +.5 and the wages are +0 (.5-0)= +.5
Unless you live in a fairy land costs adjusted for inflation and wage changes is an excellent means of determinig the cheapness of things in real life. Especially when the currency is practically tied to the cost of energy (Joules).
By your own admission the
Re:Simply not true (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but you're not thinking about the big picture. The ACTUAL cost to produce the food, house, clothing item, whatever, in energy and time (human time), is lower than ever in history. Because of the free market, the focus has been on efficiency. Tractors pretty much drive themselves nowadays on the big corporate farms. And they use less energy because their engines are more efficient. I can think of a thousand examples. I generalize it into basically robotics. A robot can give you time, in return for energy. Now we are at a point where a robot can do the work with less energy than a comparable human. Because they are efficently turning energy into pure work, not wasting it playing Gears of War or soemthing.
What you're seeing is a temporary disruption in the free market because of lack of confidence in the paper we use to exchange. It doesn't change the fact that it is, physically speaking, cheaper. I understand that prices are higher, but the underlying physical concepts that "money" is just an abstraction of have changed for the better, and will continue to do so every year. It's a great leap to make, I understand, but I'm not a crackpot. I'm a scientist.
Parent
Re:Simply not true (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't the government printing money that is causing inflation. In fact, we aren't printing any more then enough to replace the damaged money anyways. It is the cost of energy that is causing it. You have it right when your said "Especially when the currency is practically tied to the cost of energy (Joules)". Everything from growing things to using electricity to transporting products is going up. That causes prices to increase which gets us to where we are now.
We have far more money recycled on credit then we have printed. The big problem is that in the late 90's, we removed regulations that were put in place during the 1970's oil crisis and now speculators can buy contracts for oil that have no capabilities whatsoever at all to take delivery of it. This takes oil off the market and causes the spot prices to drop to almost the same amounts as the contract prices. There used to be around a 10-20% differences in prices, this is down to less the 3% in most cases now. Currently it is going at a 42 cent loss. But to give an idea of how much of the market is given to speculation, we were at $147/bbl and dropped to $124 or so on the mention of a government report that we are using less oil. That's about a 15-16% drop all the sudden and it is still shrinking. Now even with this, people are still expecting to make money which means that speculation is still driving the costs to some degree.
Combine that with low dollar values and poof, there is the problem.
Parent
If Kings Eat Nothing But Steamed Rice (Score:2)
family of four can eat like kings in America for under $200 a month, which is only 11 percent of their annual income (at the povery line, 20,500).
Eat like kings for under $200 a month!?
That's just over $6 a day for 4 people. No. Fucking. Way.
Let's see you live on $1.60 per day for food. Get back to me on how that works out for ya'.
You can barely buy an apple for $1.60.
I would debunk the rest of your crazy ass bullshit but that sentence alone illustrated just how dellusional you truely are.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've worked with a large aerospace company's Advanced Research Group before. There is a LOT of waste involved. You will have no argument from me on that one. It's largely a question of management though not inspiration. They were all really excited about what they were doing... but completely lacking in focus. The Manhattan project succeeded because it had incredible leadership and a very clear directive. The amazing leadership directed a large number of theoretical scientists to focus their eff
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's sort of what I'm talking about. Perhaps not doing actual calculations and stuff. People could contribute in any way they could. Some people might just make a logo for the craft, others might help write some code.
I understand what you're saying; there's a lot of space travel that can't be done by ordinary people, and bringing those extraordinary people together safely is expensive. But there is a vast untapped reserve of undiscovered genius in this country, who don't think they will ever get a cha
Re:Space Unity (Score:5, Insightful)
People simply working for a common goal is "Communism"? EVERY great advance in history is a result of people sacrificing for a common goal. Take the Manhattan project, as a for instance. The inspiration, in this case, was a horrible war. Why, if someone mentions the mere possibility of doing something together, NOT because of a war, but because we're HUMANS and WE CAN, it's branded as "communism"? That couldn't be further from the truth. Your mindset is the result of brainwashing by the people who REALLY benefit from the so called free market. There isn't a free market here anymore.
I call for a FREER market, where anyone who is willing or able can contribute, rather than sitting on our thumbs and watching our tax dollars flow into the pockets of the space oligarchy. History only proves what HAS happened, not what can. Free society works because people are rewarded for merit. What I'm saying is that people are discouraged because they are NOT being fairly rewarded for their merit. And a collective success, for all humanity, would be a mental reward, a turning point in human history. For money, yes, but also for everyone's livelyhood.
We sit at a time where the basic necessities in life, WORLD-WIDE are less expensive in time and energy than ever before in history. The reason for this is technology. We HAVE time, especially in America, to spend thinking about the greater goals of humanity because we don't have to spend all of our time worrying about food, shelter, medicine, etc. This is a direct result of the free market, not because we all decided to collectively create a better standard of living. A FEW men, GREAT men, made these things possible through their hard work and ingenuity.
The competing and crawling we are all doing now is simply to make more waste, not produce anything. To get more luxuries that are basically made by robots nowadays. And so people are discouraged. They are not seeing anything INSPIRING anymore.
So there are two ways to go about it. Rally everyone around their fears, their unseen enemies, their negative emotions OR rally everyone around their hopes, dreams of peace for all, their positive emotions. That is not COMMUNISM. That's humanism at it's finest. Capital, human capital, money, rewards for those who succeed; these are all essential to the goals of humankind because you're right--people want to compete. But will it be a friendly game or a war? It seems to me that you have given in to the dark side, and no longer recognize that we--as humans--are all one, stuck on this planet with nowhere to run except together. In the melting pot that is America, there is no greater concept.
So, why don't you stop looking at the past and start looking at the future and stop giving in to your fears (which were probably created by some newspaper anyway)?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Space Unity (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Deregulation of what killed who?
I hope your not talking about Enron. It wasn't deregulation there. Enron was manipulating prices and scamming the system in ways that were already illegal. The so called deregulation in California which was only partial deregulation only exposed Enron's illegal activities and caused the bankruptcy.
The EU type of regulation costs on average of 30% more to the consumer then American energy does before you add in taxes depending on where in the Eu you are. Average costs can be c [doe.gov]
Soyuz ACTS origin (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz_acts_origin.html [russianspaceweb.com]
Re: (Score:2)
// use a pic view smudger here...
Yes, we heard this, but they never returned in quite awhile despite the promise of unprecedented wealth of resources.
Aha! It's not the Kliper it's the CSTS! (Score:3, Interesting)
This fact was mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for the Kliper [wikipedia.org] which in turn mentions the Crew Space Transportation System [wikipedia.org].