Soyuz To The Moon? 426
colonist writes "The Americans won the first race, but the Russians might beat them back to the moon. The reliable Soyuz, currently the only means of transport to the International Space Station, may send tourists on a voyage around the moon (gallery of illustrations). Constellation Services International's plans call for the Soyuz spacecraft to dock with a logistics module and an upper stage. The upper stage fires to send the Soyuz on a free-return circumlunar trajectory."
503 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:503 (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:If you are tired of 503 (Score:4, Interesting)
Watch the karma burn!
Re:If you are tired of 503 (Score:3, Insightful)
You know that things are really going to hell (facing possible improvement? * ) at slashdot when complaints about the service get modded UP - and consistently!
ruh roh, raggy LOL
SB
* maybe we need a permanent slashdot bitch forum, with moderation, and I'm NOT talking about email or IRC.
Re:If you are tired of 503 (Score:5, Insightful)
But then again I'm not a subscriber, so it's not like slashdot owes me anything.
In fact, quite the opposite.
Still:
Worst... Slashdot week... ever!
Be sure to get... (Score:5, Funny)
Unspecified Fee (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:3, Funny)
KFG
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:3, Funny)
Can just imagine it: "My client is currently in a Schrodinger state"
--
Meh. This whole scenario is unlikely to happen anyhow. Looks to me like it's vaporware at this point. Not saying I wouldn't love to see it happen, just that I don't think it's likely they'll succeed - it's not quite the time yet.
I'm wondering at this point if we're not going to see a lot of startups riding Rutan's coattails? After all, the dotcomm bust was only a few years a
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't that somewhere near Utah?
skribe
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:5, Funny)
Liftoff: free
Trip to lunar orbit: free
Return to Earth: free
Re-entry: free
Deployment of parachutes: $100 million
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:2)
The mission is a complete lunacy. Their booster stage docks to Soyuz on its front and acceleration commences with the austronaughts hanging on the belts in their seats in the direction opposite to the normal. Even if the spacecraft survives, you will not. You will have your neck broken even prior to the "Return to Earth" phase.
These people really nead a clue.
Re:Unspecified Fee (Score:3, Informative)
How could anyone be so ignorant about human G tolerance?
People routinely survive 50-100 G impacts in the same direction as they're proposing. Car crashes, after all, usually r
Intresting... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Back?" (Score:5, Funny)
Fine... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fine... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to disparage the Sovs, they have their own problems. But the irony, both ways, is getting pretty thick at this point, and I'm not just talking about the cold war, either.
SB
yay me (Score:3, Funny)
in soviet russia, the moon circumnavigates you!
Re:yay me (Score:2)
Except the moon _does_ circumnaviate everyone in russia, and everywhere else on earth as well. About once every month in fact. It's not a good "in soviet russia" joke if it's actually _true_ :)
if i had... (Score:5, Insightful)
some people spend ten - twenty years training and going to school for just the chance to go to space.
fuck buying a big ass yacht or a stupid jet, you can fky to the goddammn moon!
It might be a step in the right direction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Radiation (Score:5, Insightful)
How many chest x-rays in a moon trip?
Re:Radiation (Score:5, Informative)
Basicly, the radiation dosage is small enough that you can do it once without any major side effects.
Re:Radiation (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, Soyuz would have been the Soviets' moon spacecraft, if things had gone a little differently. What worries me is this:
Soyuz has gone into Earth orbit a bazillion times and has had two lethal failures, both in the early days of the programme. As a space tourist, I'd accept those odds. But Soyuz has never been to the Moon, except IIRC as an unmanned Zond test flight... Apollo went nine times, one of which was very, very nearly a lethal failure. I'm not so sure of those odds, especially since an Apollo XIII failure would be very, very likely to become lethal due to the presence of an incompetent, untrained and panicking tourist in the capsule!
Re:Radiation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Radiation (Score:4, Funny)
If you're suggesting Aldrin never went to the Moon, a tinfoil hat won't help. I recommend a boxer's gumshield.
Space Race (Score:5, Informative)
Which first race?
Do you mean: (from Wikipedia's space race page [wikipedia.org])
The first artificial satellite?
The first animal in space?
The first fly by moon?
The first spacecraft on moon?
The first human in space?
They were the earliest space achievements - and all 'won' by the USSR.
The American's won the race to get the first man on the moon - no more, no less.
America did not win the space race.
America did not win the 'first' race.
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
Re:Space Race (Score:2, Informative)
In the first phase the CCCPians totally pwn3d j00.
Another hits were first woman in space in 1963, and first space station. Not bad at all for the "losing" team.
Re:Space Race (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, yeah, but at least we did win the Battle of Pearl Harbor and capture the Enigma machine.
KFG
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
Re:Space Race (Score:5, Informative)
America did not win the 'first' race.
Hmmm.
Some other firsts:
First *guided* and piloted (as opposed to launched on similar orbits passing somewhat close at 4k mph) rendezvous in space: America, Gemini 6/7, which achieved rendezvous via onboard thrusters, computers, and radar.
First men around the moon, first men *on* the moon: America (Apollos 8 and 11) - if anyone thinks that wasn't a win, you don't know what you are talking about - the Soviets simply couldn't match our determination and engineering)
First human in space to move around with a device made for the purpose: Ed White, America ( the Soviet space walk was tethered and non-propelled; we developed something to allow him to move around and attempt the first useful work in orbit)
First serious use of Geosynch communications sats: America; also first "spy" sats that could transmit via encrypted video and not rely on de-orbited film canisters.
First unmanned docking with a booster which was used to boost our manned spacecraft into higher orbits: America (Gemini, with the Agena)
First Human-guided landing on the moon: America (Neil piloting the LM down after the guidance computers failed - also, mind you, we essentially *boasted* that we'd land a man on the moon within ten years, and we did it - the Russians did not and still haven't. )
First space "station": Skylab (yeah, not permanently manned, but it was the first, and very profitable knowledge-wise.) The Sovs profited a lot from the knowledge we gained from Skylab. Note that they didn't launch Mir for many years afterward.
First reusable orbital vehicle that could deliver cargo: America - the space shuttle (yeah, it's a clusterfuck now - but blame the funders, not the engineers, at least not the original ones. We could do better, if the idiots in the many layers of "oversight" had got the hell out of the way in the 70s. )
The Soviets won a lot of the unmanned contests back then, and some of the manned. We passed them by in the mid 60s and went higher and a *lot* further. (Yeah, we stagnated after that. But that's politics for ya; thanks for nothing, Nixon; despite your public support for the space program, you did doodly to stop it getting shafted by Congress.)
What it comes down to, tho, is that the Soviets had no "firsts" in space after Leonov's space walk; and despite starting way behind them, we passed them and beat them hands down in the "space race". It wasn't until Mir that they did something we hadn't done - and if we'd taken advantage of the infrastructure we had at the point of Apollo 11, they'd not even done that.
SB
(apologies, I've just finished reading Chris Kraft's excellent book "Flight", and I recommend it highly.)
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
...and all thanks to Werner von Braun and the other Nazis that the US government welcomed, with open arms, at the close of WWII. Think of all those slaves who died in Werner's rocket factories, just so he could perfect his engines and pass the technology on to the US military...
Re:Space Race (Score:4, Informative)
Von Braun did a lot; but he was also somewhat of an obstructionist. His (and his team's) greatest contribution, late in the program, was the Saturn 1B and 5 rockets. Before that he was pretty well out of the picture, somewhat during Mercury, and totally out during Gemini and Apollo, other than his contribution to the launch platform.
Von Braun was often described as someone who'd work for anyone, and had no allegiance to any country. I find that simultaneously despicable and admirable. The guy was one helluva engineer, and knew how to drive brilliant people to accomplish things.
You should really read Kraft's book. There were many things in it that were an eye-opener.
You should also think on how hard it is to work for someone you detest - Braun detested the Nazis, but he had little choice during WWII. We're just damned lucky that the Soviets didn't capture him first (IIRC he and his team *chose* to be captured by the Americans. THINK on that)
SB
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
Slaves indeed! The Nazis used slave labour in their factories -- Google is your friend if you wish to learn more.
Re:Space Race (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, the moon lands on YOU!
Sorry, I couldn't resist
Re:Space Race (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course we could, a year or two later. But coming there second was pointless in a purely political contest.
And as much as I admire american achievements in space, I don't think your supercilious tone is proper. It's not like Gagarin got up there by pushing a cart.
Re:Get your facts straight, moron (Score:2)
Skylab [nasa.gov] was up a lot longer, and accomplished a lot more (especially given the engineering problems the first astronauts up encountered - and SOLVED.
Mr. AC, you might want to read a bit about the history of NASA around and after the Apollo 11 flight; you are woefully uninformed about the impact the budget cuts for NASA had on the skilled and trained engineers who were there.
You might also want to peruse some of the budget history from the late
Re:Get your facts straight, moron (Score:2)
The ISS has so many parts and pieces that if its manned component had to leave for several months or years, the ISS would have to be abandoned. When the Skylab 3 crew left, they deliberatly "left the lights on" so it could be used as a "lifeboat" for space missions that got into trouble, a.
Re:Get your facts straight, moron (Score:3, Insightful)
But my point remains. you are just arbitaruly changing the definition of "spacestation" so that Salyut would not qualify whereas Skylab would. Couldn't I then just as well say "Mir was alot more than what Skylab was, therefore Mir was the first spacestation."?
Again: Why is Skylab a spacestation whereas Salyut is not? If it's "Salyut wasn't inhabited long enough!", then I have to ask: how long do you ha
Re:Space Race (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
Re:Space Race (Score:2)
True.
$ links -dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_race | grep first | grep USSR | wc -l
9
$ links -dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_race | grep first | grep USA | wc -l
5
USSR:USA - 9:5. Oh, and USSR gets another 3 points which I missed due to "as above" thingy. 12:5.
Re:Space Race (Score:5, Interesting)
The first race to the moon:
The sentence is clearly referring particularly to the effort to send a manned mission to the moon, since it is predicated on the thing that the Americans did first.
It's interesting to note that the US also nearly lost the race to be the first to circle the moon, as revealed here [astronautix.com]. Evidence suggests that the Soviets tried to beat Apollo 8 by mere days by launching a mission profile similar to this current tourist scheme. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the new Proton booster required to launch the unmanned half of the mission was still problem-prone at that time:
This is basically the whole story of the "space race". The Soviets were first with everything that they could achieve with their outstanding R-7 booster (which was used to launch Sputnik, and evolved into the Soyuz booster still in use today). However, they had problems scaling past that in either size or complexity, and the Americans were first to do most things outside of low earth orbit (with the exception of their moon probes and their way-cool Venus landers).
Re:Space Race (Score:3, Interesting)
The real problem was that Korolev, the Soviet chief designer has died in 1966, and his exceptional skills and willpower that drove the early Soviet space program were gone.
Short Memories (Score:5, Interesting)
All of that said, the world is better off because of the existence of the US. People accuse Americans of having a short memory, but that seems to be a human condition, not just an American condition.
If you recall 60 or so years ago there was World War II. Now it can be easily argued that the US stirred the pot for that war in its own way, though, if you are talking about Germany (Japan being a much different story), you can place the blame pretty squarely on Europe, and give the US credit for trying to prevent World War II. The US was one of the few countries not to demand 'reparation' payments from Germany over World War I, and in fact the US even made an attempt to pay off some of Germany's debt. A large hunk of the rest of the world did not take this approach and led Germany to complete and utter economic ruin, giving rise to fascism.
We could talk a long time about World War II, but I think it can be summed up by saying that Russia would have fallen without a second front, and the second front would not have existed unless the US hadn't pumped resources to those brave Brits and eventually joined the fight themselves.
On to the an interesting piece of history, the Cold War. First, the US saved West Berlin. Without the massive airlift effort in the face of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin would have had the option of starving to death or surrendering to the Soviets. Zooming back a little further, it should be realized that the US spent the entire Cold War acting in the defense of democracy. It is naïve to think that the rest of Europe could have held back the Soviet Union on its own. Hell, half of Europe was already taken, and you can be certain they at least wanted the rest of Germany.
The US spent countless trillions of dollars fighting the Soviet Union on every front. I don't think people understand what a large fraction of the US productivity and wealth was sacrificed in the Cold War simply to hold the Soviet Union back. That doesn't even begin to touch on the thousands of lives that were given up in places like Korea and Vietnam to fight them directly with guns and bullets. The world IS a better place because South Korea is not the festering pit of despair that North Korea is. The world IS a better place because West German remained free of Soviet oppression.
The US fought the Soviets with a level of fanaticism that makes your average terrorist look mild mannered. The US had a finger leveled over the button to wipe out both the USSR and the US if it came down to that. The US was fully prepared to wipe itself out if that was the only way to hold the Soviets back. During the Cuban missile crisis, many Americans expected the end of the world. That moment where Kennedy brought the US to near nuclear oblivion over a stupid symbolic stand against the Soviets is revered in American history and made Kennedy a hero. Threatening to utterly wipe out the Soviet Union, and thus commit to having the Soviet Union wipe out the US is one of the prouder moments in American history.
Love or hate it, the US has been fanatical for democracy and freedom since World War II. They have been fanatical enough to wipe themselves off the face of the earth in nuclear oblivion if it meant protecting the rest of the world from the Soviet Union. In that fanaticism more then a few horrible mistakes were made. The US has help more then its fair share of lesser evils to keep the greater evil at bay. Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden come to mind as people the US backed simply because they looked to be the lesser of two evils at the time. To say the US has never made a mistake would be silly. The
Re:Short Memories (Score:4, Informative)
On to the an interesting piece of history, the Cold War. First, the US saved West Berlin. Without the massive airlift effort in the face of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin would have had the option of starving to death or surrendering to the Soviets. Zooming back a little further, it should be realized that the US spent the entire Cold War acting in the defense of democracy. It is naïve to think that the rest of Europe could have held back the Soviet Union on its own. Hell, half of Europe was already taken, and you can be certain they at least wanted the rest of Germany.
Yay, American distortion of the truth yet again. During the Berlin Airlift, flights were flown from 9 airfields into Berlin (mainly landing at Templehoff airport and Gatow RAF airfield - I lived at the latter in the 1980s). 6 of those airfields were in the British sector of western germany, dispatching mainly British aircraft carrying mainly British supplies. The US made up just slightly less than half of the effort right up until the last few months of the effort, when Truman authorised a 200% increase in the effort on the American side, right before the Soviets capitulated and reopened supply routes.
Also something to think about is the fact that the US was NOT 'protecting' Europe out of altruistic feelings, it simply saw that a Soviet occupied Europe would pose a huge and imminent threat to the US if the Soviets ever decided to attack. Thus the effort and monetory value put into 'protecting' Europe made sense because it was infact protecting the US. Its interesting to note that if you look at history from the late 1940s to now with a objective eye, the US comes out as more aggressive than the USSR. It was the US hatred of the Soviet way of life that fueled the cold war. Fair enough, Soviet Russia may not have been a non evil country, but the arms race was born more out of the US view of the Soviet thinking than of Soviet aggression.
The rules are simple... (Score:5, Funny)
And you've won. I'll be waiting.
Re:The rules are simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Russians at one point considered proposing to JFK that they share resources with the Americans regarding a moonshot to help spread the expenses a bit, this obviously failed when JFK got the bullet. The Soviets didn't want to send a manned mission to the moon, it was too much expense for far too little return, they were content to let the US go there and plant a
Re:The rules are simple... (Score:2)
I am NOT American.
Re:The rules are simple... (Score:5, Informative)
This is complete bullshit. Kamanin's diaries prove [astronautix.com] this is untrue.
Re:The rules are simple... (Score:2)
"Red team has the flag."
"Red team has the flag."
KA-BOOOM!!!!!
"Blue team flag returned."
gg
Not a stretch, the Proton is made for this (Score:5, Insightful)
The Proton was soviet man-rated in the 1960s, and the design has been extraordinarily succesful over the past 30+ years, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that this process could be completed again.
The economical way to do this would probably be to man-rate it as part of a commercial launch. It wouldn't be free, but it would certainly be cheaper then developing a new heavy lift rocket or buying Titan IVB, the only other rocket in use with equivalent throw. Of course, this is complicated by the Titan IVB assembly line shut down, so you'd probably want to look at the EELV, but that's not flying yet.
The Soyuz is built for the high-g reentry that a lunar return entails, they just need to pull their old heatshield design out of mothballs and modernize it.
Re:Not a stretch, the Proton is made for this (Score:2, Informative)
The Ariane 5 can easily compete with a Titan 4B in terms of throw, as you put it...
Recycling spacecraft (Score:3, Interesting)
Which brings up a question that has been bugging me for ages: why isn't this done with other spacecraft?
e.g. I guess the spaceshuttle's main tank (the big brown thing) is designed to resist immense pressures, and is mainly hollow after the fuel as been burned. why not fill it up with air, water or whatever (after cleaning), and use it as some form of emergency spacestation? or at least as a scrapyard in space?
Of course there would be problems like the delta-v to escape velocity, etc. but with those immense costs of getting stuff into space, i'd suppose i'd still pay off, and it might spark of a "dirtier" kind of space-industry, (now that we are at the verge of being able to go to space completly privately), where companies recycle stuff in space for whatever...
Re:Recycling spacecraft (Score:2)
The other problem is that human time in orbit is incredibly valuable right now. Until we lower the cost per pound to orbit, astronaut time is just too valuable for these sorts of things.
Plus, we don't have the spacesuits nor the tools for that kind of project right now.
Re:Recycling spacecraft (Score:3, Informative)
One problem I can think of is that L1 isn't stable; any spacecraft parked there will go off station over a timescale of around 20 days, unless it receives corrections to its orbit around the sun. Having to put an orbital control system on each piece of hardware you park there would make the cost unattractive.
Besides, the L1 is already used for scientific purposes -- amongst others, SOHO [nasa.gov] and ACE [caltech.edu] are in halo orbits around the Lagrange point, and I'm sure the scientists who rely on them (including some o
Great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to discredit or disrespect the dead but Jesus Christ, get on with it!
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Just wait until we're talking about a few lost space tourists, and see how much longer this craptacular scheme lasts. On the other hand, I guess if a group of plutocrats with something to prove decide they're willing to pay millions for a moon ride, the Russian taxpayers won't have quite so much of their money wasted on manned spaceflight.
Given the already insane rates of executive compens
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Why don't you and those of your ilk just go away. If you have no sense of adventure fine, don't stop the people who want more than back yard barbaques and NASCAR.
Re:Great! (Score:2)
I'm fine with adventure. However, people who want multi-billion-dollar adventure should pay for it themselves, instead of soaking taxpayers. The role of the federal government should not be to keep you entertained. Otherwise, we might as well just make NASCAR a federal agency.
It's not like I'm some raving libertarian either; I'd have no argum
Re:Great! (Score:2)
--
Then start donating whatever you have (time, money, posts) to private space efforts, rather than bitching about how the government spends money (more or less useless bitch, at least on this site)
Right now, the fact is that we need *both* NASA and the private efforts. Maybe more people need to realize that they could compliment each other. For all it's faults, NASA has a lot of trained and experie
Obscene (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Where did you get the 'hundreds of millions of $$' figure?
Re:Obscene (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, your estimate is way off. Trips to the space station are $20 million. This trip will require two or three launches. Since those are the expensive part, we can naively multiply by two or three and arrive at a decent estimate of about $40-60 million per trip.
Even if it were a couple of billion, people spend something like $600 billion a year on tourism just in the US. It would be a dro
Re:Obscene (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously everyone, get real - if those people don't want to help themselves, it doesn't matter how many philanthropists throw billions in food, medical, educational and technological help.
Look at Africa - its a humanitarian disaster. South Africa - Highest crime rate in the world. Zimbabwe, Sudan and many others no one ever hears about - ethnic persecution, humanitarian disasters, hate crimes, cannibalism, rape. Many do-gooders feel some craving to go over there and "
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Some days I think the parent has it right. Fuck the rest of the world. Pull out of all aid programs, stop using the US military to feed people
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Remember that it isn't the small green pieces of paper that are un
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Secondly, the station is already bought and paid for. That funding was justified on the basis of the supposed benefits of the station, and didn't account for any dollars recouped through tourist flights. So any money from the tourists is just gravy at this point.
Thirdly, the tourist flights were respo
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Re:Obscene (Score:2)
Also I disagree with your assessment of costs to an extent. I think the respective trips can be a factor of ten less or more using current technology. Frankly, the amounts that were being spent getting the two tourists into ISS, 12-15 milli
Won which race? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully the Soviets got Sputnik up there, though, huh? Otherwise, no Internet for us!
Crap. (Score:5, Informative)
First satellite in space: USSR Sputnik
First Dog in space: USSR Laika
First Man in space: USSR Yuri Gagarin
First Woman in space: USSR Valentina Tereshkova
First Space Station: USSR Salyut
First Earth Orbit by a human: USSR Yuri Gagarin
First Space Walk: USSR Alexei Leonov
First Woman Space Walk: USSR Svetlana Savitskaya
Who won?
Re:Crap. (Score:5, Informative)
First Earth-orbit docking: USA, Gemini VIII, 1966
First lunar soft-landing: USA, Surveyor 1, 1966
First manned circumlunar flight: USA, Apollo 8, 1968
First lunar-orbit docking: USA, Apollo 10, 1969
First manned lunar landing: USA, Apollo 11, 1969
The USSR made an impressive first showing, no doubt, but they fell short when it came to reaching the moon...
Mod parent up (Score:2)
How about some important ones? (Score:5, Funny)
First wheeled vehicle to be kicked because it wasn't working on another planet or moon: USA, Apollo 15, 1971
First mutant space fungus to be grown entirely in orbit: Russia, Mir, 2000. Bonus points to the USA for bringing the original strain up with them on the space shuttle.
First zero-gee sex in orbit: Still waiting for confirmation on this. Suspect a government cover-up of some kind.
Re:Crap. (Score:2)
Columbus wasn't first across the ocean either. Leif Erickson beat him.
Race Back? (Score:2)
space gapers (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope with every fiber of my being that space tourism will ignite a new interest in space exploration, but it's more likely to fuel a new interest in space 'development'. There's a big difference.
What we need are leaders and entrepreneurs who are interested in exploring space for its own sake...just because it is there.
I would love to be an astronaut, but who wants to be a tour guide?
~j
39 years ago (Score:2)
The Space Race will be won by Russia and China... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, the Russians had the stomach to abandon a dog in space. No way Americans would've stood for that.
Re:The Space Race will be won by Russia and China. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with NASA is it isn't being done the American way. The future of the American space program/space industry will be with groups like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites, not with "government" run projects like NASA. Americans can stomache deaths and accidents (look at the deaths of people who do base jumping in the USA). The problem is that it is very difficult to convince American taxpayers to foot the bill to allow people to do that kind of silly stuff.
This is not to say that I think that India or China isn't welcome in space... far from it. Indeed, I see an Indian presence in space to be much more like the new American approach over time, if for nothing else than the fact that it will be the only way that India can afford a space program.
China will be more like the traditional government run programs, but China has a tendancy of being even more cautious than the USA for doing things of that nature. This is not because they value life more or less, but the Chinese government will not want to appear to be a failure and it will affect the Chinese political heirarchy harder when failures do occur.
BTW, the Americans used chimpanzees instead of dogs for the early spaceflights, precisely because they felt that the American people could stomache losing a chimp. Also, by using a chimp they could "test" response situations more accurately than could be done with a dog. If you want to see what Americans will support with tax dollars, just go to any animal shelter to see what is done when they get overcrowded. One method of euthenasia is death by suffication in a vacuum, no different than leaving a dog in space. Yes, I do know other methods are used like injection of lethal substances.
The Space Station is in the wrong orbit (Score:5, Informative)
The reason it's not useful as a lunar stop-over base is the same reason that Columbia could not have docked at ISS. Changing from one orbit to another is extremely costly (in terms of fuel), and any lunar mission has to be essentially on the equatorial plane.
Of course, the idea could still work, but the Soyuz would have to be launched to an equatorial orbit from a suitable launchsite.
Earth-Moon L-1? Riiiiight (Score:4, Informative)
Libration point mission are hard. Manned libration point missions - if we ever do one - would be harder, since they tend to be much more susceptible to last-minute changes in trajectory. Then add the complications of trying to do proximity maneuvers, let alone rendezvous-and-docking, in such a complex dynamic environment (the cutting edge in L-point research right now is formation flying - not close maneuvers, but just trying to maintain any kind of coordinated trajectory between multiple spacecraft). Finally, throw in the fact that the Earth-Moon libration points are tenuous at best, with dynamics that are seriously warped by the Sun's gravity (libration "points" are an artifact of three-body dynamics, such as Earth-Moon-Spacecraft), and you have a recipe for a severe difficulties or a serious cost explosion. Not to mention the propellant costs incurred by attempting to station-keep for any appreciable period of time in the vicinity of their "depot". As I said, it makes me wonder about the quality and/or depth of their analysis...
Slightly OT (Score:3, Interesting)
Each shuttle has a flight cost in the order of 500 million dollars (source [wikipedia.org]) and each soyuz launch has a cost of 20-25 million dollars (cant find a source, however the spacetourists that paid 20 million dollars paid covered the launch costs IRC). So when the soyuz is 25 times cheaper than the space shuttle (ok, if you want to launch humans and payload, you need 2 soyuz launches, but its still cheaper) - why dont Nasa simply buy human/payload launch services from the russian agency, that would be much cheaper for Nasa.
I'll Soyuz on the Dark Side of the Moon (Score:4, Funny)
Cosmic ! Or merely Brain Damage...
The Russians 1st & Gene Cernan (Score:3, Interesting)
Gene, in my mind, is perhaps the best astronaut the US ever had. He made the hardest spacewalk in US history on Gemini 9, flew (and nearly landed) on the moon on Apollo 10, and was the last man to walk on the moon when he commanded Apollo 17.
In his book, he points out that the Russians did land (Luna 9 in 1966) on the moon before the US, and up to Apollo 8 (the first Apollo to fly around the moon, included Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 fame) there were serious fears that the USSR would land a manned mission to the moon first.
-Markvs
Re:subtle joke (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Atlantis tragedy made economicly possible?... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the old systems have been pretty reliable. In the two shuttle disasters we've had, neither has been the result of equipment breaking down because of age. NASA took very good care of the shuttle, but the culprit of one disaster was a design flaw and the other disaster was caused by an accident. There's a big difference between a piece of foam damaging the leading edge of wing on take-off and a wing not working correctly because of lack of maintenance and care.
Re:Atlantis tragedy made economicly possible?... (Score:2)
Second, the tile repair kit was considered infeasible because there's simply no place for the repairer to hold on to underneath the shuttle. This means that the astronaut is just as likely do more damage to the shuttle while attempting to repair the tiles.
Re:Clip-On (Score:2)
Re:great idea (Score:2)
Re:All hail the mighty USSR (Score:2)
US soldiers (god bless everyone of them) dye all the time for people they don't even know
No, that was 50 years ago, when the USA wasn't bent over by corrupt politicians and corporations and repeatedly fucked up the arse. Nowadays, US soldiers invade other countries in senseless acts of agression, bomb wedding parties and torture people in prisons. I'm not going to forget any of that in a hurry, matey.
Illustrations are RIGHT (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh* No. You sound like the Apollo-fakers that try to pin all sorts of claimed "oddities" in the moon photos on the lack of atmosphere. Ever notice that here on Earth that shadows from the sun don't have a penumbra either? (at least, not big enough to notice)
Go read up on "soft shadows" in any CG text. Soft shadows, or penumbras, are not due to atmosphere. Soft shadows are due to the light source being an area and that some points on a surface only "see" part of the light. These areas form a gradient on the surface from fully-lit to full-shadow.
Presumebly you are referring to picture 6? That fade-off doesn't even have anything to do with soft shadows. That's simple diffuse lighting. As the surface turns away from the light source, it emits less light.