Energia Reveals New Russian Spacecraft

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."

The US's Space Program

[Icarus1919]

There is nothing more depressing to me than listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates. It's as if America has lost its sense of humanity. It doesn't even really care about exploration anymore. Or apparently anything. All it wants to do is consume. Sigh....

Space Race

[RetroGeek]

And the race is on.

Again...

Maybe this time it will have some staying power. Na, the US government critters cannot see past the next election :-(

Earth to NASA.

[joshv]

This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago. Instead we have the shuttle debacle, and a NASA that is still trying to pretend that the shuttle program is viable.

Re:The US's Space Program

[ravenspear]

There is nothing more depressing to me than listening to how other industrial countries' space programs are flourishing while ours stagnates.

Especially considering that Russia has a mere fraction of the money available to us.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

It's as if America has lost its sense of humanity.

What has space exploration to do with humanity?

Re:Design vs. Function?

[Rhalin]

I would suspect that the selection of color for things like the special paints and reentry tiles is fairly limited. It's not like there's a SpaceShuttle Depot where you can color coordinate all the panels on your reentry vehical ;)

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way it was stagnating a long time ago when Russia put Sputnik up, put the first dog in space, the first man in space, the first woman in space, shot down your U2, etc....
I guess it takes a while for you guys to wake up.

Re:The US's Space Program

[Moridineas]

Wow, are you just deliberately being anti-NASA or do you not know what's going on?

Has the shuttle program been all it was cracked up to be? Probably not. But it does give us signifigant capabilities that other "industrial countries' space programs" still don't have.

Know any other countries that could send not one, but two different robotic rovers to Mars and control them for over a year?

Hell, for that matter, just which other industrial countries are even doing anything in space right now? Ok, Russia--let's see if they find the funds to put these things in use. China--ok, China is using borrowed Russian tech to get where we were 40 years ago. True they do show more nationalistic pride in space endeavours, but then again so did we--40 years ago.

I'm not a NASA apologist--I for one think the future of space exploration will be best served by private hands...but we're not there yet. I don't see the point of bemoaning how far behind we are, when no one actually competes with us anymore (Russians simply don't have the cash anymore).

Re:Earth to NASA.

[Planesdragon]

This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago.

They were. Even after the shuttle was built, replacements have constantly been at the same design stage this Russian thing is at.

Re:Incremental progress?

[drinkypoo]

From what I understand, the color scheme is pretty much mandatory. The black side radiates heat, and the white side reflects it; it's a matter of temperature management.

No.

[rhadamanthus]

What you have is a NASA forced to continue using the Shuttle since every other developing alternative gets cancelled and then restarted with differing politicians. E.g., OSP vs. Bush's CEV.

NASA is not guiltless in budget management, but you can only do so much.

Re:The US's Space Program

[rob_squared]

And in 5-10 years, when China gets to where we were, 30-35 years ago, they'll be tied with us today. Getting to the moon and the shuttle program have made us very complacent with manned space flight. China wants to actually DO something when they get to the moon, more than just plant a flag, collect some rocks, and shoot some pictures.

I love NASA, I really do, but they and the government as a whole need to set some long term plans, and a way to carry them out.

The Space unRace

[Mulletproof]

"Na, the US government critters cannot see past the next election"

Um, how many presidencies has US manned space flight endured again??? Yeah, too bad they axed that one after JFK. And what race are you talking about? I think we'll sit here a moment and take a breather while everybody else catches up.

Re:The US's Space Program

[magarity]

And you misspelled 'liberating'.

Re:The US's Space Program

[krayfx]

India, like Russia - builds rockets with shoestring budgets, as opposed to the average US ones - which cost way beyond.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/india-02i.html [spacedaily.com]
the difference is that while developing countries/ or financially contsrained countries go through extensive optimisation. several factors too exist which spirals the costs upwards:
1) US usually wants to dominate any sector it chooses - this will cost plenty.
2) bleeding edge technology involves taking huge risks, plenty of writeoff on obselete technology, and investment.
3) people in developing countries work for longer hours for cheaper wages - (which is why you can find plenty of indians in nasa! they prefer nasa for a better pay and recognition - unlike a scientist in india who is not financially rewarded as like in the US)
4) people are expendable in the lesser countries - so all those double check facilities that might be deployed by nasa might not be on an equal level in the financially constrained countries - at least not to that insane level of perfection carried out by nasa ( i could be wrong here)
5) this is the most significant - US were ahead in the game - and at one time - nasa was showered with so much money - * just to beat the russians*. after that they continued recieving money. while the rest of the industry were on diet - nasa enjoyed gobs of money to toy around ( not all of it went waste, a large percentage as in research for kevlar was useful)

Why more than three people?

[reality-bytes]

That could well be the case but I can't see the reason behind the pre-occupation with cramming more people into the launch vehicle.

If you need more than three, the obvious solution is to launch twice.

Depending where you look, the cost of a Soyuz manned launch is between $20million and $30million. For that money, you can launch one crew, then another, then another, then another.....

And eventually, you will arrive at the cost of one $500million, 7-seater Shuttle launch.

Re:The US's Space Program

[saider]

Remember that NASA received a complete change in direction from the rather useless ISS to a return to the moon (equally useless?). It will take them some time to complete the change as steering a government organization is like maneuvering a loaded oil tanker.

If you ask me, NASA should provide funds to organizations like the XPrize and let man's natural motivations (greed, glory lust, etc) provide the drive to get to the moon. NASA could also facilitate things by making things available (wind tunnels, computer modelling time, etc) to the public at a much reduced cost. This would allow individuals and small companies to test their ideas more fully and attract private funding if their ideas have merit.

/end "if I were king" speech.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

Sure, now it might be time for a change, but I'd say the current shuttle has served it's intended purpose pretty damn well.

Well you'd only say that if you were ignorant. It costs almost 500 million dollars to launch a shuttle, hardly affordable. The shuttle isn't really reusable as it has to be reassembled by a team of thousands of technicians every time it comes back to earth in preparation for the next launch. NASA was originally talking about seven day turnarounds for the shuttle, that never happened and if the shuttle is so fucking great then why is it that we started building Titans and Deltas again after the Challenger disaster?

The shuttle is a piece of shit, it should be cancelled immediately and the money should be used to build something that doesn't suck, doesn't cost an arm and a leg and isn't quite so good at killing astronauts. If that means that we go back to expendable vehicles such as the Saturn V, fine, let's do it. But let's scuttle the shuttle now!

Re:Wow, take a look at those rockets

[m50d]

Too bad about the blueprints. The Saturn V probably had enough power to assemble a mars shot in two or three flights.

(tinfoil hat time): Of course, if they still had them we'd know whether it could have really got to the moon

Re:The US's Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia - yes they lack the cash but they have the know-how and they aren't the ones with a grounded manned launcher
China - catching up fast, they have the cash and and the desire
EU - lack the manned capability but as far as robotic craft they're right up there
Japan and India both launch their own satellites too

The USA is still ahead because of the cash they spend and the years of experience, however the shuttle design wasn't capable of matching the shuttle concept and sticking with it has put back the US space effort by a decade.

Re:I Agree

[cmowire]

The problem with half of the possible shuttle missions was that they were presupposed upon the shuttle launching every week.

Repairing a satelite doesn't make sense when the repair mission costs more than a replacement satelite.

So this design makes sense until you get launch costs down. But that's OK, because if you got launch costs down enough, spacecraft construction will be a booming business.

U.S. fund Kliper? Maybe that's the idea.

[Latent Heat]

You don't suppose the "here is Kliper, our next-generation spacecraft" and the scuffing of feet and "gee, we don't quite have the funds to build it" isn't a solicitation of some sort? It looks like they are casting about for partners.

As to "NASA's culture is far too arrogant to do something that smart", there is a lot more to the story. That James Oberg fellow who wrote one of the linked articles worked for NASA a long time ago but has been an independent author and consultant on these matters. It is safe to say that James Oberg is not NASA -- he has been as critical of NASA as he has been of the Russians, and he has been NASA's biggest, biggest critic for doing what you say they have been unable to do -- cooperate with the Russians.

Oberg is one of these uber geeks who has made it his life work to understand as much as anyone in the West about the Russian space program. As to why his interest in the Russians, it is kind of like a Trekker who is into Klingon gear rather than the Federation.

While Oberg knows more about the Russian space program than anyone outside Russia, he is not one of these guys who has "gone native" or has ungrudging admiration for their work. He is a true geek who calls it as he sees it, has travelled to Khazikstan just to see what kind of shape things are in, and the Russians get nervous when he wants to know what is in that junkyard just over the fence.

His big cause was trying to put the brakes on NASA when "let's use Russian hardware" was the solution to everything NASA was trying to do with the International Space Station. The Russians obviously had the most experience with their Mir space station, but their industrial base was imploding, and Oberg was concerned that the return on the dollar for buying Russian hardware wasn't going to be there -- things were in such bad shape it wasn't clear whether they could deliver on their committments.

NASA's big problem is they keep going in different directions that don't pan out. One direction was X-33/Venture Star. Another direction was co-develop with the Russians -- while I don't think it was quite as bad as Oberg made it out to be, I don't think NASA has been left with warm fuzzy feelings about the Russians.

Re:Back to Reality...

[multiplexo]

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.

You trust NASA's accounting figures? How charming. I have some great stock in Enron to sell you, it's going to make a big comeback. Firstly the Shuttle's capacity to LEO is only 24,400 kg (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm, this was reduced after the Challenger disaster). So if we use your numbers the cost is actually 18.4k$/kg. Secondly this still sucks compared to the Delta IV Large. The Delta IV Large can put 25,800kg into LEO for 170 million a launch, for a cost of 6.6k$/kg. (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm) So it would seem the sensible thing to do to use the Delta IV large to launch components of the ISS, except that if we did that the need for Shuttle launches would drop to zero since no one but NASA uses the Shuttle, which would pretty much eliminate the need for the Shuttle program.

As for the Shuttle's capabilities most of them are wasted. The capability to take satellites out of orbit is wasted, the cross range landing capability is unneeded and if you don't need to launch human beings then why are you risking them with Shuttle launches? An F-22 Raptor has a whole bunch of really neat capabilities that a 747 doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that it would be the right plane for FedEx or UPS to buy for their airfreight needs.

As for the Shuttle's scientific missions most of them are a joke. The Russians learned more about the effects of weightlessness on human beings on Mir than the Shuttle will ever teach us (Hell, we learned more about the effects of weightlessness from Skylab) and most of the experiments that are done on the Shuttle are the kind of thing you'd find at a junior high school science fair.

A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.

As opposed to the Saturn V which had a failure rate of zero percent in flight.

We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.

No, we could actually make something better, instead we're stuck funding the Shuttle, which is used to launch stuff to ISS. And we need ISS because if we didn't have ISS then the Shuttle wouldn't have anywhere to go and a bunch of aerospace contractors would be out some large sums of cash.

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.

Yes, and if frogs had pockets they'd carry .38 specials and wouldn't get eaten by snakes. Fantasizing about what the Shuttle might have been has nothing to do with what it is, a bloated, wasteful, stupid means of getting things into orbit that should be replaced immediately.

Re:A we back to tiles and long-re-entries?

[reality-bytes]

Our only present yard-stick for costs on re-usable vs single-use systems is the US Shuttle and the Soyuz system.

Currently, a Shuttle launch would cost circa $300m to $500m against a Soyuz launch at circa $30m so to all intents and purposes, the Soyuz is already a 'budget' system.

It would be very suprising if this new vehicle came in cheaper 'per seat' than Soyuz. After all, it requires a larger rocket and is more technically complex.

Re:The US's Space Program

[cheekyboy]

1. Dude, follow the money, no one does anything without any monetory benefit, and its all about cash, big cash, for decades to come, its an insurance policy, for when the worlds oil supplies start to go down hill, why do you think USA isnt in any hurry to suck up as much oil as it can now, since it rather save that for itself much later when its needed, and buy ALL it can from everyone else, so by 2012, you'll have everyone elses reserves going low, while iraq will have plenty left, and Alaska too will be ready to reap for the benefit of USA while the rest of the world goes on declining stocks/rising prices. No one gives a hoot about so called Librartion, its only benefit are 45m new costomers to USA products. There are plenty other countries without oil that need liberating, but USA dont give a crap because there is NO MONEY IN IT.

2. No one in the administration complain about saddam BEFORE 1990 did they, they even liked him and sent him weapons/trade. Ofcouse because the iranians were the real enemy, now look where we are.

Overall, Yes, I do think its good Saddams evils are stopped, he was a prick that should have learned from past dictators, RULE with a soft fist, keep the subjects busy parting/working having fun, he should have made his people too busy enough to care about whos running the show.

3. re killings, its legal for the govt of USA to kill its own citizens, ie the death penalty. Any law that is not 100% active for all peoples, but has exeptions is bolony.