Energia Reveals New Russian Spacecraft 356
colonist writes "Russian space officials unveiled a full-scale model of the Kliper spaceship. If funding is provided, Kliper will replace the Soyuz space capsule as Russia's human space vehicle. The spaceship, designed by RKK Energia, is twice the size of the Soyuz and will carry a crew of six. It has two main parts: a reusable re-entry craft with a lifting body design, and an orbital module. Like the Soyuz, it has a rocket to pull the spaceship away from the launch vehicle in an emergency. See this photo gallery, Encyclopedia Astronautica and RussianSpaceWeb.com."
Re:The US's Space Program (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, take a look at those rockets (Score:5, Informative)
I got interested in the launch vehicles and found this site [astronautix.com]very informative, it has illustrations and information on various Russian launch vehicles. Its amazing how much smaller the Zenit is compared to some of the others, specifically the RLA-150 and Vulkan.
My heart still goes with the Saturn V though.
Don't forget India and private companies (Score:5, Informative)
India is also looking at lunar [cnn.com] and manned [spacedaily.com] programs and already has launched its own satellites [spacetoday.org], etc. Private entries from the US [scaled.com], Canada [canadianarrow.com] and the UK [starchaser.co.uk] (and other countries) can perhaps be considered separately from the goverment operations. There are now many players, some major (some declining, some expanding) and some minor (some expanding, some perhaps will never get off the ground). Exciting times ahead, I hope.
Re:Design vs. Function? (Score:5, Informative)
Things that get Really Fsking Hot are black because the only thing that will handle the heat is a carbon-carbon composite.
Things that get Not So Hot are white because it's either that or beige or black when it comes to high temperature ceramics.
There are other alternative coatings like metal, but given that the Russians have already flown a craft with shuttle-like tiles, it's probably the case that they'll stick with those.
Except, of course, that when the Russians coppied the idea of putting tiles on their shuttles, they made them a smidge sturdier.
Paint has undesirable properties, so you want to minimize it's use on the higher-temperature surfaces. If you look at the shuttle, except for small red maintenence markings, they pretty much stuck with that.
Re:Why would this thing not roll over? (Score:3, Informative)
The US is doing a lot of space exploration... (Score:5, Informative)
We have probes to many of the planets, Mars in paticular, we are going to smack a asteroid soon, and there are plans to a new space observatory.
Considering the costs associated with space I think the US is doing just fine. Hell, I like to wonder, where is everyone else?
Besides this is just a mock up, it is no more valuable to space travel than a brochure from marketing... actually that is what it is, an attempt to stir up interest in what they do.
RTA, Soyuz in use since 1966 (Score:3, Informative)
There have been some recent updates but essentially the design is almost 40-years old now.
Re:Earth to NASA. (Score:5, Informative)
Where the hell have you been?.
CEV [wikipedia.org], X-33 [wikipedia.org], X-34 [wikipedia.org], X-37 [wikipedia.org], X-38 [wikipedia.org], X-40 [wikipedia.org], X-43 [wikipedia.org].
Not to belittle this Russian effort which I think is terrific, but at this point, the Russian vehicle is no more than a concept and a full-scale mock-up.
NASA has been working on such projects for decades; whether or not they are funded is beyond their control...
Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Space Race (Score:1, Informative)
(If you didn't see the show, there's a lot of background Chinese influence evident in the culture.)
Re:Why?! (Score:3, Informative)
To help you out here - most people agree that at least taking off from a runway doesn't make sense for large launches. Getting to orbit takes a LOT of energy, typically more than 7 times the mass of the ship in the highest energy mass density fuel available (hydrogen)! So, in order to lift off horizontally, you need wings that can carry all that mass at takeoff. It turns out the wings are too heavy if strong enough to support the fuel mass. It can be done with staging (leaving the wings behind), but then you need an amazingly huge aircraft, that can lift multiple thousands of tons!
Landing is debatable, though. Wings weigh more than a parachute, but add a LOT of capabilities. The common fight here is retro-rockets (seen as having safety issues) verses wings (heavier, and not quite as capable as retro-rockets). For real examples of the various problems, the DC-X landed hard and broke, the Space Shuttle landed short (and would have been destroyed anywhere but in the Utah desert).
Landing mass is very important, because it has to be lifted up, accelerated (using 7 times its mass in propellant), and decellerated (requires your shielding to handle more energy disipation).
Re:The US's Space Program (Score:4, Informative)
NASA should do what they're best at: research. Unfortunately, we've been making them fly a research craft for the past 2 decades (the shuttle). A research craft which was given half the budget it needed during design time, at that, leaving it with an aluminum cold frame and solid rocket boosters instead of liquid drop tanks and a titanium hot frame. We wouldn't have had any of the major problems that we've had with the shuttle if we'd gone with the original design, and maintainance costs would have been far smaller. We really need a next gen craft that takes advantage of what we learned from the shuttle (and the massive amount of reentry research that has gone on, too). It won't be as expensive now, either - titanium doesn't cost nearly what it used to, although it is still quite expensive.
Also, I used to agree that a moon base wasn't that great of an idea - until I started reading about exactly why He3 fusion is so nice: you can contain it electrostatically, instead of magnetically like current fusion devices. In short, there would be no containment problems, the principal problem in conventional hydrogen fusion methods. And while it takes a lot of lunar regolith being heated to produce a little He3, a moon base will be heating it anyways when it refines regolith for building materials (although not nearly enough of it for a large quantity of He3 to be produced). Transport costs back to earth are a fraction of the He3 total value, although the big question will be whether processing 10 million tons of regolith for 1 ton of He3 (worth over 1 billion dollars, so it'd be about 100 dollars per ton of regolith processed) is viable. Of course, there are other potential, non-natural sources of He3 on earth (for example, high energy neutron bombardment of lithium in fission reactors to produce H3, which will slowly decay to He3), so it's really too soon to say.
Nonetheless, I'd like to see off-earth refining equipment developed and put into use at the very least.
Re:Peaceful spaceship or weapon of war? (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. These are the mount points for the emergency escape system that is supposed to sit on top in the launch configuration. This, like the Soyuz, and unlike the Shuttle, features an escape system which is operational in every stage of launch all the way from launchpad to orbit insertion.
Re:Back to Reality... (Score:4, Informative)
http://flightprojects.msfc.nasa.gov/faq.html
It carries 27,500 kg payload to LEO. So, 16k$/kg. Compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5, and 7k$ for a Proton rocket. However, the shuttle has many advantages to them (much larger payload capacity for larger satellites, the best safety records of any manned rocket with a large number of launches under its belt, much greater in-orbit maneuverability and other in-orbit capabilities), etc, so the extra cost is justified in *some* circumstances. Also, the space shuttle itself doesn't really cost 450 million dollars per launch; that number is arrived at by looking at the annual budget to the shuttle, and dividing by the number of launches. However, the shuttle's budget also goes toward research on and improvement of the craft, among other things (some projects are even barely related to the shuttle). A more realistic number is around 13k$/kg.
> The shuttle is a piece of shit
The safest man-capable spacecraft in the world is a "piece of shit"? It's expensive, but it's not a "piece of shit".
> isn't quite so good at killing astronauts
A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.
> go back to expendible vehicles such as the Saturn V
We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.
Addendum: If we'd given the shuttle development the budget that it needed (instead of *halving it* without cutting scope), it'd be a titanium hot frame craft with no SRBs, and consequently not had any of the problems that have plagued it and increased its maintainence costs.
Re:Moscow is Mocking NASA (Score:5, Informative)
Ever heard of Shuttle-Buran? Yeah, it looked very much like a US shuttle about 20 years ago this is the same group (Energia was the name of the group and of the booster that was used to launch Buran,) only the Buran flew once and without a human on board, it was totally automated.
So first of all, they don't need to copy the US shuttle, they can just reuse some of their research from Buran. Secondly the color scheme? The color scheme has specific physical properties - white reflects radiation while black stores it. Besides, the compounds for the reentry shield tiles are never painted, and the silica based compounds are black, while carbon based compounds are gray.
Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets (Score:3, Informative)
And it doesn't matter because you can launch a mars shot in two or three launches of a shuttle derived booster [astronautix.com] anyway.
Re:Stupid question, maybe one of you know (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The US's Space Program (Score:3, Informative)