Slashdot Log In
Russia To Build an Orbital Construction Plant
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Apr 13, 2008 07:30 PM
from the all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace dept.
from the all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace dept.
jamax writes "Russia plans to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft (link to sketchy Google translation of the Russian original) that are too big to build planetside, or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built. Presumably these are the ships we would fly to the Moon and Mars. Plans seem to be rather sparse at the moment, with the tentative construction date set for 2020, after the ISS is scheduled for decommissioning."
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This discussion has been archived.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.
on-orbit assembly, finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:on-orbit assembly, finally (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:on-orbit assembly, finally (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Well, lets get real. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well, lets get real. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Well, lets get real. (Score:5, Insightful)
This project, like any fantastic one proposed in the past, has very little chance of, pun intended, ever flying.
Parent
As they say in Wikipedia .. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:As they say in Wikipedia .. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:As they say in Wikipedia .. (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, as an engineer I understand the 'if it works...' thinking, but the only thing the agency is producing of any utility is more Soyuez crafts.
Parent
One small step... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The tricky bit is that said government must be able to afford it. Russia is not currently on that list.
makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure this will work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not sure this will work (Score:5, Insightful)
That completely explains why successful businessmen are staking their money and reputation on a "handful of billionaires". Too bad they haven't figured this out yet.
Russia does have the experience. Money always is a problem with them so you might be right there. I don't understand the desire for a "standards body". Everyone doesn't need to take part. Everyone doesn't need to get in on toilet seat design. Everyone doesn't need "a nasty bit of work" in charge.
Sorry, but I'm annoyed by the airchair astronauts who know better than anyone else what's to happen in space. You seem to fit that mold quite well with your groundless pronouncements. Maybe it'll turn out that that building things in space are indeed "horrendously complex and expensive", that commercial projects will flop, and that we need some sort of global effort to do this sort of thing in space. But none of this has been demonstrated.
Parent
Vaporware (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not to say that the Russians aren't advancing the state of the art in space--they are. They are also excellent builders of launch vehicles and spacecraft. BUT. That doesn't mean that proclamations like this are to be accepted without a huge dose of skepticism.
I would be much more willing to believe that Russians would fund a new launch site, a SSTO or similar projects. This smacks of unreality.
SEI/Space Station Freedom anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
DS (Score:5, Funny)
How about (Score:4, Insightful)
Notice how people come up with fantastic plans to do space stuff in the year 2020? Bush did a similar thing with his plan to go back to the moon.
Whatever date it is, it's a date that the current people in office, will no longer be in office, or if they are, no one will remember what the plans are.
This is just an attempt by politicians to make themselves look "visionary" while actually doing nothing. If, 70 years from now when someone actually gets around to going to mars, no one is going to remember what kind of plans a bunch of jokers with no intention of providing funding pulled out of the ass in 2008.
Implies they aren't depending on "heavy lift" (Score:3, Insightful)
One reason that the US doesn't have a plan for an orbital assembly infrastructure is that NASA is working towards a "heavy lift vehicle", the Ares V which will lift somewhere in the order of 130 tons to low Earth orbit. The things NASA has in mind take only 1-3 launches of the Ares V to put up. So the only assembly one would need under those circumstances is docking.
Now my opinion on the matter is that Russia has a superior approach. NASA's Ares V is planned to launch around 2-4 times a year, but it has high fixed costs, and as far as I know, there are no plans to increase the launch rate of the Ares V significantly. That means there are unexploited economies of scale. An orbital assembly station is a cleverer approach in that it means one can use a smaller rocket to launch the material. They can either use existing rockets like Proton or Soyuz or future designs like Angora (which is intended to launch up to 25 tons into orbit, assuming they build it). That means the Russians can substitute frequent launches of a smaller vehicle to build things of comparable size (OTOH, I've been unable to determine how much mass or volume this station would be able to manage at once). My take is that the Russian approach, all else being equal including labor and ground-based infrastructure costs, will result in a lower cost per kilogram of payload. That is the primary metric for the cost of a launch vehicle.
There are tradeoffs between the two approaches. The Ares V has high operation costs and high costs per launch. The Russian approach will result (IMHO) in lower launch costs, but then one must add in assembly costs and R&D costs to make space equipment that can be assembled in space. I hope the Russians are serious about this assembly station and make it happen. If it works, it'll open up space in a way that larger launch vehicles cannot.
Well, if the Russians are smart (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Impressive...If It Works (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Impressive...If It Works (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obamas_nasa_plan_gets_little_p.php [cjr.org]
It looks like the Russians or Chinese are our last best hope to find a way off this rock.
Parent
Re:Impressive...If It Works (Score:5, Insightful)
First: Space is not the bonanza we thought it was in the 1950's and 1960's. Part of the formulation of our space program was the terrible arms race with russia, but part of it was the modernist notion that we would remake space in our image and reap the dividends. Surprisingly this mindset not only impacted the laity but also the technological priesthood (engineers, scientists). We were going to have colonies on mars and the moon within 50 years, no question.
Second: We greatly underestimated the challenges we face. Here was an underestimation made by the public but not by the engineers. We saw that we went from heavier than air flight to being on the moon in inside 70 years and assumed that continued progress would follow the same track. As a matter of fact it couldn't (not least because of diminishing marginal returns but also because of the huge change in challenges between getting to LEO and getting to the moon). Once we got to the moon we realized that the next step wasn't right around the corner. This happened to coincide with a number of social changes that demystified the space race and caused people to be less inclined to pay for large government projects.
Third: We confused lack of public progress with lack of progress and we confused public achievements with scientific achievements. In the time between Apollo 11 and now, we have sent out Cassini, Hubble, Chandra, DS-1, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager, the mars rovers, the Venus probe, and hundreds of earth satellites. We have become much better (in many, though not all ways) at building spacecraft as a country and a species. But we have also glorified achievements that haven't been so monumental. The Space Shuttle wasn't as good a vehicle as it should have been and it should have been phased out long ago. the ISS, for all its good points, does not advance the state of the art as much as DS-1 did.
As a result, we have both an unrealistic expectation of space flight and an underestimation of our progress in the past 25 years. I think we need to be prepared to wait another 25 or 50 before we are talking about the Moon or Mars in any serious, consistent fashion. But we will also not be there in the same way. Corporate space flight WILL be a mainstay of the future and it probably will bring more people into space in the 21st century than government space flight.
So dont look at 4 year timelines. Look further down the road. Also, the 4 year comment of mine was snarky. The OP was complaining about Barack Obama's wish to cut nasa funding as though it would forever doom the US space program. I was pointing out what we happen to get a new president every so often and 4 years isn't the end of the world.
Parent
Re:Impressive...If It Works (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the engineers were far more on the ball than this. They really did envision a grand space program with colonies across the solar system. To make it happen, they designed quite a few incredible machines. The Saturn V was only the herald of many amazing advancements in spaceflight that were to come. Artificial gravity, Single-Stage to Orbit, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, Nuclear Thermal Engines, and other amazing designs were drawn up, prototyped, and in some cases even built.
Rockets were going to diversify into craft that were smaller and cheaper for manned space flight as well as craft that were larger and similarly cheaper for launching massive payloads like space stations, moon base supplies, interplanetary craft, raw materials, foundries, whatever you could imagine.
So what really happened? Well, there's no question in that respect. The space race was 98% politically motivated. The US and the USSR couldn't lob nukes at each other due to that pesky MAD thing, so they lobbed space technology breakthroughs at each other in the biggest pissing contest in history. Both sides developed incredibly expensive crash programs to bring advanced space technology to fruition. The result was the development of new materials, new engines, new electronics, new physics, new logistics, just about every area of science and technology was pushed to the limit of what these post-WWII economies could muster. (Which was quite a bit given the breakneck pace of WWII technological development and modernization.)
Each side tried to out-muster the other, with the USSR handily keeping one step ahead of the US in every development. So the US set its sights on an incredible goal: Landing a man on the moon. The USSR tried to beat the US to the punch on this task, but when they failed, they didn't take the loss lightly. Rather than admit defeat, the USSR buried any information on the fact that they had even tried. The official line to the public was, the USSR was not in a race to the moon.
Where did that leave the US? Ultimately, with a very expensive space program that had outlived its political usefulness. Lunar missions were scaled back and eventually canceled. The SkyLab station was put in a parking orbit and eventually allowed to reenter and burn up. The grand plans for a small space shuttle, a large Saturn V, a "jumping off" space station, a moon base, and interplanetary mini-Orion missions were scaled back to a single spacecraft. President Nixon demanded that both NASA and the military fly one craft, and one craft only. So they hatched a grand plan for the future, put all their eggs in one basket, and asked the impossible of their engineers: They wanted the Space Shuttle.
Now there's an interesting economic issue with trying to create a machine that is everything to everyone. Unless you have a strong history of both successes and failures from which to understand every nuance required to design and build the all-in-one wonder, you are almost guaranteed to produce a machine that is jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. Which is exactly what happened with the Space Shuttle.
* Cargo capability was too small for military sats
* Launch cost was too high for commercial sats
* Satellite return capability was unnecessary
* Extreme cro
Parent