Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space Science

First Privately Funded Manned Space Mission 131

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-profits dept.
Ragetech writes "CNN.com has a story about two Russian astronuts (yes, I say nuts) blasting off to dock with the Mir station to evaluate it, rescue and possibly operate it for profit. What I'm wondering, really, is why they don't pick up a few Iridum satellites while they're up there and really pick up the profits. I mean, that stuff is salvagable now, isn't it? "
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

First Privately Funded Manned Space Mission More

First Privately Funded Manned Space Mission

Comments Filter:

  • Re:Luxury hotel in space. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It did fly. You are sitting at a computer connected to the Internet and there are vast resources available to you if you just use them. I will make it easy for you. Here is some information on the Buran [nasa.gov], the Russian space shuttle. It had a lot of potential but was canceled due to lack of funding, and by no means technical difficulties.

  • Re:Luxury hotel in space. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I missed something. What Russian space tech does the US need to catch up on?

    Well they have run a space station for nearly one and a half decades. If you can't figure out the answer yourself then I'm not going to bother explaining it to you.

    "a very good safety record. There have been some near disasters, a crash and a fire"

    Ummm... What? No, re-read it three times. You'll have to explain this

    Ok. These were "near" disasters because nothing truly disasterous happened. That is to say, there was no loss of life and the damage was minimal enough that the station continued to function. I say the Mir has a very good safety record because although there have been some close calls, the expertise and professionalism shown by the Russian pilots prevented a "true" disaster from happening. This does not take anything away from the Americans. The Apollo 13 near disaster was handled with at least as much professionalism as was demonstrated on the Mir. I am glad that we didn't cancel the Apollo program out of cowardice and I couldn't expect the Russians to cancel their program because there have been some close calls. By the way, the crash of the supply ship with the Mir was caused by human error whereas the Apollo 13 explosion was due to faulty equipment. As was the Challenger explosion. Both sides have had bumps in the road but that can be expected with any technology of such tremendous complexity in such a state of infancy. There will be more problems with both the Russian and American space systems and the chances of loss of life will always be there for anyone venturing into space. To sum it up for you, I say that the Mir has a "very good safety record" because nobody has been killed or even seriously injured there. They know what they are doing due to lessons learned through the bravery and courage that some in the West have chosen to describe as foolishness. There is sometimes a fine line between courage and foolishness. Call it what you will, but the Russians have gained quite a lot of expertise because of it.
  • Andy Griffith, not Dick Van Dyke. And that was the late 70's IIRC.

    Started with a made-for-TV movie about going to the moon in a ship they build from salvaged bits to get all the old Apollo trash and resell it. The series had them wandering all over in their strangely-reusable Saturn-V-looking craft, getting into all sorts of interesting adventures. Great fun show for preteens of that era....


    --
  • Hey, why so nasty? Having a bad day?

    So - heavy boost is a bad idea... What about an ion engine? Light boost = no damage, high efficiency, slow adjustment of orbits, nice and easy.

    And the concept of a tranfer point for to change vehicles is valid - vehicles that are designed for takeoff, rentry and landing at 1G (with all the added equipment/mass) are simply not efficient for deep space and low-G landings. And fuel/consumables can be delivered to the transfer point with cheaper unmanned vehicles (like the Progress does for supplies for the Mir) this too is more efficient.

    Actually, continuing this chain of logic says that a second station in lunar orbit would raise efficiencies even more, but we were talking about the Mir here, and the first gives the biggest win.

    (Though I am not so clear about all the tradeoffs between LEO and a higher orbit. How much higher would be good? It's true that LEO has problems because of resudual drag, especally during solar maximums; but put the orbit too much higher and many launch vehicles (including the shuttle, darn!) would have trouble reaching it. Suggestions?)
    --

  • His name is Hagbard Celine, and he also also happens to own a golden submarine ...
    --
  • Well, it really seems that points 2) and 5) are largely in place not because the equivilent US technology is not capable of doing the job but because buying Russian equipment helps the Russian economy, and the West doesn't want to see Russia go back to a controlled economy. Plus, it keeps Russian engineers employed doing peaceful things, and not tempted to accept job offers in places like Iraq
  • It was Andy Griffith. Dick Van Dyke was a dentist in Arizona at the time.
  • "Matlock is not thin."
    Matlock wore those baggy suits. The Salvage 1 character wore snug flannel shirts. Andy Griffith's appearance changed considerably prior to the "Matlock" series due to a medical condition. Also, he got older.
  • > I missed something. What Russian space tech does
    > the US need to catch up on?
    >
    > "a very good safety record. There have been some
    > near disasters, a crash and a fire"

    1. Russians have the ability to put a sattelite
    into an orbit launched from a submerged submarine.

    2. Russian engine R-180, a descendant of the R-170
    rocket engine will power future US rockets.

    3. The Russian space shuttle is the only space
    shuttle capable of unmanned landing.

    4. The Mir space station is not in as bad of
    shape as you suggest, nothing a bunch of duct-tape
    rolls could not fix. That technology they can by
    from US ;-)

    5. Key components of the International Space
    Station are those which were originally destined
    for Mir-2.

    I wish you better luck in this catch-up game...
    I am all for progress, I just don't like these
    pissing contests, they wind me up for the rest of
    the day.

    Pavel.
  • It means:
    Several glasses of vodka. For the health! (The last sentence is a literal translation, it has no meaning in English).
  • U etogo yest' khorosheye nazvaniye - "Ruglish" (Writing Russian in English letters, as well as using English word directly in Russian is often called "Ruglish" language...)
  • That would be neskolkO stakanov vodkI. Na zdorov'ye!
  • but, being russian makes them cosmonuts, not astronuts.

    thanks. :P

    --
    blue
  • In response to your reason number 3.

    I am sure it could make an unmanned landing but you have to put it in space first. There shuttle never flew.

    Don't forget the Russians just land there capsules in the snow not he ocean like we did.
  • Then again those satellites could well serve as spare parts for MIR, and heck it could certainly improve the communications systems onboard :)
  • some linux and solaris boxen up there and give it an internet feed, you've got yourself an untouchable censor-proof project

    You couldn't put a linux box up there since it wouldn't have enough hardware fault tolerance to be reliable enough. Also I belive you'll probably want a rad-hardened system if its going to be up there for a while. This means that whatever you put up there will not be off-the-self stuff unless you want to go up there and fix it after every solar flare and gamma ray burst that occurs.

  • I'm not a rocket scientist, but it occurs to me that they'd need to match orbit with every Iridium satellite they wanted to salvage. And if all the Iridium sats are in the same orbit at different places, that'd make the job even harder! It probably wouldn't be cost-effective if you add in fuel costs and flight time costs.

  • (Score:1)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 )
    As Mir is available for rent, when is the "Geeks In Space" transmission from Mir?

    [To answer your question, you can't pick up an Iridium because it's in a different orbit...if it is aimed to pass nearby it will vaporize your arm if you grab it. You'll have to launch a remote-controlled "space tug" to go grab the birds...and fuel tanks to keep refueling the thing.]

  • Quark

    With Richard Benjamin
  • They're russian. The only smell that would seem "funny" to them would be deodorant.
  • That's his backup plan.

  • I think WillAffleck is investing in MSFT at $80 share based on speculation that Gates funding of Mir and resulting technological, patentable, market cornering spinoffs.

    Actually, I'm just trying to make some bucks off of Bill G's misery. Plus, I figure that maybe he'll sell his house and I can use it to store my canoe in and for interactive MUD hosting. But I'm holding out for $74 1/2 pricing for my hostile takeover [grin].

    Then maybe we can hack Mir and reset the environment to make sure Bill G's nice and comfy at a balmy 65 degrees Celsius. After all, it's not a bug, it's a feature ...

  • You won't see ads on Mir, but anyone ever see edTV? There could be broadcasts from Mir, and advertisers could pay to have a banner ad on the screen somewhere during the broadcast. kinda like an orbital jenny cam?
  • I think this is tradition without any specific purprose or reason

    Sort of like the tradition of cosmonauts pissing on the tires of the ready trailer before boarding the capsule.
  • "White Sun of the Desert" is a film with very good sense of humour that made smart and not-transparent jokes about the whole revolution story and soviet era (although it was written and shown during the soviet era). It's one of the "cult" movies which are important part of Russian culture, independent of age. I don't think Russian cosmonauts were forced in any way to see this film - I think this is tradition without any specific purprose or reason - just a very very good film.
  • As mentioned, their radii of their orbits are radically different. FYI, here are the numbers and references.

    MIR orbits [nasa.gov] at an average of 333 km above ground, while Iridium satellites [apspg.com] orbit at about 780 km above ground.

  • One of the sources of revinue they suggested was sending up scientific experiments. Its already very hard, and takes a long time, to get anything sent up on the shuttle, there are companies doing research that would be willing to pay to get it up sooner.
  • Andy Griffith. You can have a look at the TV-Guide advert ABC took out here [crosswinds.net]. The POS spaceship he flew looked pretty much like Mir does; Hacked together from whatever garbage happened to float by.
  • They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything.
    I distinctly remember reading about pressure losses on Mir, and how the cabin had been refilled from the on-board supplies. Do you think the Russians have no idea how to do telemetry?
    --
  • In fact,
    but, why describes most of this hypothetical undertaking. The things are next to useless on the ground, unless somebody wants one for a museum.
    Iridium has already sent up a number of replacement satellites. This probably means that there are a number which have been built, but not yet launched. Think they'd make good collector's items? If I were eBay, I'd be trying to get those to auction on my site just for the publicity!
    --
  • It's only "ironic" if you consider the fact that capitalism out-produces command economies to be a surprise. A bankrupt economy will sell anything to stay afloat, and the Russians have spaceflights to sell. If the USA was in the same situation, you'd see a price schedule for Shuttle rides.
    --
  • The inability to get the boosters up in time and the inability to properly allocate resources and poor scheduling on the part of NASA led to the early demise of the kludge. It failed to meet the goals of the project...
    Reboosting it was never part of the goals of the project, it was just an idea that was considered but (obviously) never carried out. I'm not even sure if the third mission was part of the goals of the project, when it was launched. It wasn't designed to be re-provisioned or anything, so considering it a "failure" is silly.

    But you're being silly, 'cause you're a troll. Oh, something I missed:

    It may well be a "fixer upper" but that would be much more economically feasable than for a company to build one from scratch.
    I had to quote that. It was the only sensible thing in the entire post.
    I mis-read that and missed the word than, which reverses the entire meaning. I'm sorry I attributed one iota of sense to anything you've posted here. Mea culpa.
    --
  • The neatest idea ... give Mir a push out to about 20,000 miles up. Strap fuel tanks to it,and replace the damaged Spektr module or the ancient Mir Core Module with a new crew facility/dockink port. Tada! From here Mir can serve as a refuling/resuply station for travelers to the Moon.
    Problems with that:
    1. Mir is not designed to be boosted, period. It has things hanging off at all kinds of angles, and high thrust along any line would over-torque some of the junctions. This would rip the spacecraft apart at the joints. To boost it, you'd need to take it apart into modules, attach the modules to some kind of frame, boost the modules into the new orbit, and re-assemble the spacecraft. As long as you were doing that, you might as well junk the old Mir and use brand-new modules.
    2. 20,000 miles is inside the outer Van Allen belt, IIRC. This is not a healthy place for people to spend any length of time.
    3. It doesn't make any sense to pause at 20,000 miles on the way to the moon. Circularizing your orbit to rendezvous would take almost as much, if not more, fuel than going direct to Luna. Once you've spent that fuel to get there, you do what... re-fuel? Where does this fuel come from, if not from the spacecraft going up there?
    You would have known how silly these ideas are if you knew some orbital mechanics. It isn't that hard to teach yourself a heck of a lot about orbital mechanics from the twin principles of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum and a little bit of algebra. If you're unable to do algebra you're either not smart enough to be posting here, or you're wasting your time looking foolish when you could be spending the time needed to analyze concepts and actually have informed and worthwhile opinions.
    --
  • Hit the books, then use them to hit the problem! That's the spirit!

    The only way anything gets done is for people to push and poke at the problem, to see where it's vulnerable. Not everybody finds a soft spot, but you've just started toward being part of the process. Congratulations, and may you go far.
    --

  • Where do they plan on placing advertising?

    On the shuttle [gcfl.net]? If they do something interesting enough (save mir, go to Mars [nw.net], etc), the public will be watching. And reading the newspaper. And talking to each other about who is sponsoring the mission (remember the EDS "herding cats" ad during the superbowl?).

    --

  • > Maybe America will catch up.

    I missed something. What Russian space tech does the US need to catch up on?

    "a very good safety record. There have been some near disasters, a crash and a fire"

    Ummm... What? No, re-read it three times. You'll have to explain this.

    Jon Sullivan

  • I have already seen one ad last year that was partially filmed on MIR. Unfortunately it was for Australian Rules Football so most here probably haven't seen it. It actually wasn't too bad.

  • Not much sense. I'm prety sure he could figure out telecomuting.
  • So you'd rather have the price higher so that Bill Gates is the only person on the planet that can go for one night? That doesn't make sense.
  • I wish i could buy stock in them! I think this kind of thing should continue to happen!

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
  • link clicker

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
  • According the CNN article, it says that the government launched this on private funds.(Hence the government) Russia doesn't exactly have a great reputation as far as business and money are concerned. They are behind on their section of the new International Space Station due to lack of funds. They killed the Mir program because of lack of funds. Who is to say that they aren't using this program to get private funds to do government stuff with. What it to keep them from saying, "You put $xxxMilloin into fixing out space station and now we want it back. Oh, by the way, thanks for mopping the floors." ?

    Maybe they are going to once again screw the US and start up Mir again rather than work internationlly.

    Time will tell.

  • Two points here.
    1. They are going back to Mir for National Pride purposes, not any real reason.
    2. Iridiums are in a different orbit, so can't just "Be picked up along the way to Mir"


    CSG_SurferDude
  • I saw the premier, but blew off the rest of the series. Totally implausible but fun. Griffith builds a moon rocket in his salvage yard while hiding it from a suspicious FBI agent, and flies two people to the moon to salvage equipment from the NASA moon landings. I liked the way they gave a semi-plausible scenario for doing this with simple technology and little fuel, yet didn't actually follow the scenario in the script.
  • >selling advertising space
    You mean they put a brzzzing neon sign up there that sez 'Jury's all-you-can-eat Diner' (featuring the pan-galactic gargle blaster) or have the guests watch anti-gas commercials while we dimwits down here are obscured by clouds? Jeez...

    How about making it the next peace talk hotel (where contrahents are only released after signing on that dotted line) or the next Big Brother show environment?

  • hm...a privately funded mission? you'd think that with the russian economy doing so poorly as it has been, that hardly anyone would have money to fund so expensive a venture...
    -------------------------------------- ---------
  • According to the bottom of the story, Miles O'Brien contributed!

  • I can't see how anyone could possibly think that this is a bad move... we need to see A LOT more of this happening to really get the space program moving... I would pay whatever price it takes to goto Mir. Think about it for just one second... how many times does the average (rich) person get to go stay in space...?!?!?!?!!?!?? Boo to all you naysayers...
  • What are you talking about... DISAPOINTED?!?!?! He gets to travel into space!!!!! I say for the price you are getting quite the deal... How often does that happen? Never. We need more of this type of business to get the space program properly funded. So we can reach the glory of the Apollo days.
  • How in the world are they going to do this for profit?

    You could make a profit by:

    (1) leasing "space" for scientific experiments requiring zero-gee and/or without the interference of Earth's atmosphere.

    (2) like you mention (and as they plan), advertising revenue.

    (3) tourism. According to the story some guy is willing to shell out 15 million to visit Mir. The total amount of venture captial put into the project currently is only 20 million. Remember the old rich guy in Contact?

    (4) use it as infrastructure for training your own astro/cosmonauts, for future private ventures. Gives you a big head start on your competitors if you already own and operate a space station.

    (5) if you are an evil genius planning to take over the world, Mir may make a nice orbital weapons platform :)

  • Isn't it ironic that the first private commercial manned launch is russian?

    No, it's not ironic. It's symmetric. The first man in space was Russian, so it's only fair.
  • I'd almost be willing to wager that this privately funded space flight may have something to do with the reason Richard Garriot left Origin last week (see previous /. story). Richard has been pushing to be on a space shuttle for years, even going so far as to bribe mission astronauts to take scraps of stuff up for him, or so legend has it...
    ------
    WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
  • So... exactly what happens if the people who pay $600,000 each day run out of money? So I present to you:

    Top 5 Things To Do With People on Mir Who Run out of Money

    5. Tickle them until they either cough up more money or die.

    4. Send them on a spacewalk and then cut the tether cord to the suit while jeering them through the radio.

    3. Tell them that you're sending them home to Earth because they have no money. Then put them into the escape pod and aim it towards the sun.

    2. Stuff them into an airlock and suck all the air out of the airlock. I won't go into what happens next.

    And the #1 thing to do with a person on Mir who runs out of money is...

    1. Use them as an electrical conduit when something (inevitably) breaks.

  • Well, it did say in the article that they were currently 'in talks' with advertisers and with a 'potential space tourist' who would pay them $15 million to take him/her up.

    However, this makes me wonder two things:

    1) Where do they plan on placing advertising? It doesn't seem like billboard-type ads on the side of the space station would get much exposure to our mostly earth-bound consumer market.

    2)How many people can they find who are willing to pay $15 million for a trip to Mir? I think that market would dry up fairly quickly.

    They had better come up with some long term revenue generating plans, and quick, or Mir just might meets it's fate of burning up in the atmosphere on the way back to Earth!
  • It seems that a great many of the slashdoters are un-ware of the profit potential for space. I don't know about what kind of profits Mir could turn, but I do know that our own shuttle could turn a profit.

    It is estimated that if a private company owned a space shuttle, it would see profit within the first 18 months of operations. Missions would be launched at a rate of four missions a year.

    So why hasn't anyone done this yet? Well, it is rumored that a certain shuttle operating company [unitedspacealliance.com] looked into this possiblity. They even had the funds neccessary to acquire a shuttle. Apparently all went awry because they failed to talk to the right people. When a few key people found they were bypassed, they decided to axe the attempt. Apparantly this is the real reason the CEO is no longer with the company.

    Wigs
    --Support better legislation for the privatization of space. Visit Pro Space [prospace.org] today.

  • Iridium built 77 satellites but then launched 66. Hence the name, Iridium is element number 77. Somehow Dysprosium (66) doesn't sound as good.
  • From what I've heard (say from my parents) they say that White Sun of the Desert is the best Russian movie ever made. It's kind of funny and there is no communist propaganda in it (apart from superficial stuff). It also has some deeper meaning, etc. Me personally, I like the Russian movie Kin Dza Dza, which involves wooden spaceships, and an alien language having only two words (Ku and Kyu IIRC). Yeah, and I'm not Russian, but I speak the language.
  • I'm sure that they'll make you sign a waiver of your rights to sue. For example when you go for a simple vaccination you have to sign a statement that you realize being vaccinated may result in death in rare cases and you/your relatives will not sue the person who administers the vaccine in such cases. At least they make you sign in this country (US), I think not in other countries, because people are not as sue-happy as in the US.
  • I claim Mars for Gravis. Finally a place big enough for all my stuff. I will let the Hilton set up a hotel in the red district zone. I will make my money off of saleing advertisements that are viewable from Earth (with the Hubble on a REALLY clear day). For a mere (or a Mir) amount of money that would pay off the US debt 100 times over, you can be the first advertiser. I will use that money to set up "away missions" to start building structures. There will be research done as to make spacesuits suitable to working on Mars be less bulky so we can accomplish more. Now, you can be the first to hike Olympus Mons or the ancient pyrimids. Futer advertisements will go to fund Terreforming activities. Even futehr research will go to research on suspended animation, and to make launches cheaper, so we can get people there and back. Oh, it will no longer be called Mars, it will be called Planet Gravis. I will buy the trademark from Kingston or whoever owns Gravis now, and then sue anyone who says the name Gravis without paying me royalties. I will be in total control of this, so I will set up my own government. Christiananity will be the state-supported relegion, but they cannot tell you how to worship. We will set up Massive servers to mirror all Internet on Earth (since a signal takes 4 minuets to get tehre and 4 minuets to get back). They will all be Linux and Amiga servers. Age of consent will be 14 (anything younger is icky, older is a bit restrictive, unless you are like 60, then you shouldn't even be around 21 year olds). Maybe age of consent should be set to seeing anyone within a 10 year age span of yourself, as long as it does not go below 14. Ah, we got to get people there first, will worry about this later. Whatever it is, someone is going to throw a fit about it. Censorship will not be as heavy on Planet Gravis, but there will be a line drawn, because if you don't people are going to abuse it. Main line that will be drawn is with porn, where does it turn from being art to being errotic, to being illegal. Art can be viewed by anyone, errotic by people of a certain age, and illegal as in sex with minors and such. One would hope that people would be able to conduct themselves reasonably where you do not have to draw lines, but we all know where that leads. Now, when NASA gets board of the Hubble, I will purchase that as well. I will then rotate it and use it to take pictures and spy on you on the earth. An X-Ray lense will be used to see what you are doing in your house and such. Some material may be posted on a pay voyerism site. Some will be sold to companies who want to know about you. The rest will be handed over to Microsoft (at a price) so they can kill all Linux users. No, I don't like that. Oh well, surely you can have some fun with Hubble if you turn it arround and look at the earth with it. Well, later guys, and remember, don't mess with fake memory implants. If you truely want to visit Planet Gravis, just book the next flight out.
  • Cosmos (kosmos) is a Greek word for "Order" or "Harmony",
    and Astro - (Aster) is Greek for "Star".
    The space missions don't go to stars, why
    call them Astronauts?
    travelling in "Order" not travelling in "Stars"
  • Every single astronomer I talk to (Michael Allan of UofT for example)
    is happy to tears that IRIDIUM satellite network is going down.
    YEAH, BABY, DOWN IT GOES, IT'S GONNA B-U-R-N in HELL!!!
    IRIDIUM is not only using its own radio bandwidth given to them for use but they are blocking other bandwidths as well, for example the 18MHz OH bandwidth and even coming close to 21MHz cold hydrogen wave.
    This really screws up SETI observations and many other astronomers' observations too. I mean, don't you think it is more important to find intelligent life in the outer space than trying to dial 1800biteme on your IRIDIUM telephone?
  • No, it came from Greek "Kosmo" - Order
  • Sure, they'll have banner adds streaming accross the outside of the station. For every minute of adds you whatch, you get a minute in space. :)
  • Anyone remember Quark? From late seventies...maybe early 80's? Richard Benjamin as a garbage scow captain, twin clone hotties, some guy that was a plant, and the Conrad something-or-other---the guy that played Mindy's dad on Mork and Mindy. Or did I hallucinate that?
  • Leia: You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!
    Han: Nice.

    Astronaut: You DOCKED with that thing? You're braver than I thought!
    Cosmonaut: Spasiba!

  • ...Is apparently the story of a Red Army officer during the Russian Civil war (I presume they mean the early days of the revolution). The article said that watching this film is a pre-launch tradition.

    This is not available at your local Blockbuster. Apparently it is available at Boston University (http://www.geddes.bu.edu/). So, if you understand Russian (I assume they haven't dubbed it) you can probably go there and capture some of the cosmonaut experience.

    These days, I wonder what these guys will feel like watching this Soviet era film. I can only presume the tradition started to inspire the cosmonauts that they were working for the "glory of the revolution". Can anybody else offer further insights into this?

  • ...Is apparently the story of a Red Army officer during the Russian Civil war (I presume they mean the early days of the revolution). The article said that watching this film is a pre-launch tradition.

    First, Civil War happened after the revolution -- after taking the power in the capitals communists still fought for few years with various forces that opposed them to actually establish their power over the country.

    Second, "White Sun of the Desert" is nowhere close to being about a glory.

  • Yes, for the low low price of $50,000 US you too can own your very own e-copy of War and Piece (Iridium modem not included).

    For merely $100,000 US/month you can have access to our huge pr0n library, circumvent any information restrictions your government might have! (check or money order only please, not responsible for government interception of your money at the border.)

  • You don't need an Earth-Moon refuel poit dude, it's not nearly far enough away that fuel is a problem. Going from an Earth orbit to the moon doesn't require a bunch of energy, just a few minutes of delta-v in the right direction (you do the calculus) and coast the rest of the way. What is needed is a more efficient mode of travel from the Earth's surface to orbit. Launching something on the shuttle costs about 10,000$/lb IIRC, that is a bit much to make lots of trips up to a space station. It'd be billions of dollars cheaper to build a space station if a Earth-to-orbit method was cheap and efficient, if there was such a system orbital platforms would abound overhead.
  • Cold hydrogen emits 21cm not 21Mhz, I'm estimating but 21cm is somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3Ghz. Iridium used 1.8 and 2.1 Ghz, not Mhz by the way. SETI searches around 1.3-1.5Ghz so 1.8 and 2.1 don't interfer per se but they can feasibly interfer if a device isn't tuned correctly or the astronomers decide to up the frequency a little bit.
  • The major error here is that Russian space travelers are Cosmonauts and not Astronauts. That makes these gentlemen Cosmonuts and probably related in some strange way to Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld.

    Of interesting note concerning Cosmonuts is the first Cosmoanimal. Many of us might remember that the Russians were the first to put an animal in space back in the 50's - Lieka the space dog. A few years ago I came to sudden realization... Lieka was put into space in a modified Sputnik! A spacecraft that had no means of reentering the Earth's atmosphere.

    MY DOG! IT'S FULL OF STARS!

    What the Hell happened to Lieka? How come nobody ever mentions what happened to that damn dog!?! Did he burn up in reentry, starve to death, or become one with the "Space Baby" from 2001? He can't possibly be in orbit can he? Or maybe he is still circling the earth at thousands of miles per second along with Gene Roddenbury and Timothy Leary.

    Forget rescueing Mir! SAVE THE DOG!
  • It's not quite as dumb as it sounds. I recently saw a History Channel show on the Russian space program. Apparently they were occasionally using Mir for filming TV comercials (you know, the kind where there's little balls of milk floating through the air, etc). So, when they talk about advertising deals, I don't think they are talking about slapping giant bumper stickers on Mir.
  • > CNN.com has a story about two Russian astronuts (yes, I say nuts)

    Last time I checked, Russian astronauts were called cosmonauts.

    Wouldn't that make them cosmonuts? (yes, I say nuts)
  • Isn't it ironic that the first private commercial manned launch is russian? It is very disappointing. We should have been doing this 20 years ago with skylab.
  • How in the world are they going to do this for profit? I've thought about this over the course of the past few seconds, and have come to a conclusion. Without significant government subsidies, the only way would be: advertising revenue.

    Or, it could just be the old "give the space station away, sell the transport shuttles" thing.

    -JD
  • Certainly you won't be able to make out details (like advertisements), but you can see mir; according to Visual Satellite Observer's Home Page [eu.org] mir is normally about magnitude -0.7, and if you're at just the right angle, you'll get a reflection reaching magnitude -3 off of the solar panels.

    That aside, sometimes the purpose of an advertisement isn't to be seen, but just to be known about. I for one would greatly respect anyone who'd pay money to help keep Mir in space. Anyone. Microsoft, McDonald's, anyone (okay, maybe not Phillip-Morris, but anyone short of that). All of those wannabe-geeks who think it'd be a "tragedy" if those silly Iridium satellites came down need to get their priorities straight. Satellites, no matter how much money was blown on them, are a dime a dozen, but space stations are something different altogther. If I were to make a list of reasons why the human race isn't a complete waste of time, keeping Mir manned and in orbit for over 14 years now would probably be near the top of the list. Look! There! *points up*. People!

    It's a pity we haven't gone further ..we SO need to go back to the moon, if just to check Tycho for magnetic anomalies :) ...but at the very least there's Mir.

    *whine*I wanna be a cosmonaut! *whine* *whine*
    --
    "HORSE."

  • "The space station has been empty since it was placed on autopilot seven months
    ago."

    I feel sorry for those guys... You know it's got to
    smell real funny in there.
  • Sorry.. New webhost policy, I guess..

    Here [crosswinds.net]

    I gotta start checking my links again.
  • There have been some near disasters, a crash and a fire
    Plus the failure of the attitude-control computer which nearly left the whole station without power, plus chronic leaks in coolant lines, plus...
    I know of no problems associated with either it's design or age.
    This is a joke, right? (04:13 PM April 4th... definitely a bit late for that sort of thing.) Let me put it this way: your ignorance isn't shared by either the Russians or NASA.
    Could it be the sour memories of Skylab? That was a failure due to defective design and technology.
    Actually, Skylab was a phenomenal success and was only allowed to crash because the Shuttle program had so many delays (there were no Saturn boosters due to cancellation of the Saturn program to make way for Shuttle). Skylab's crash was due to the inability to send up a reboost mission, and had nothing to do with Skylab itself.
    It may well be a "fixer upper" but that would be much more economically feasable than for a company to build one from scratch.
    I had to quote that. It was the only sensible thing in the entire post.
    --
  • Hey, why so nasty? Having a bad day?
    Sometimes I forget how easy it is to mis-read the tone of a posting. I guess you forgot too. ;-)
    And the concept of a tranfer point for to change vehicles is valid - vehicles that are designed for takeoff, rentry and landing at 1G (with all the added equipment/mass) are simply not efficient for deep space and low-G landings. And fuel/consumables can be delivered to the transfer point with cheaper unmanned vehicles (like the Progress does for supplies for the Mir) this too is more efficient.
    That's true to a point. However, to support a system like that takes a minimum level of traffic. Further, for separate delivery of vehicles and fuel, fuel must generally be storable for considerable periods of time, and the most mass-efficient fuel mixture (LH2/LOX) isn't considered storable by the people in the know. If your vehicle's LEO departure mass is mostly fuel anyway, it makes a heck of a lot of sense to fuel it on the ground and launch it full; it doesn't start making sense to launch the fuel separately until the cost of new vehicles outweighs the cost of running a fuel depot, plus losses, plus the opportunity costs of having to schedule your launches around orbital rendezvous requirements, etc. We're nowhere near that.
    (Though I am not so clear about all the tradeoffs between LEO and a higher orbit. How much higher would be good?)
    For the transfer vehicle and the ground-to-LEO vehicle, lower is generally better for a number of reasons:
    1. The ground-to-LEO vehicle can carry considerably more mass to lower orbits than higher ones. This is especially true when the vehicle is burdened with wings and landing wheels.
    2. Lower orbits move faster, so the transfer vehicle can burn its fuel from a higher starting speed. Energy is proportional to speed squared, so this actually gains you performance when you factor in the larger fuel deliveries.
    If it were worthwhile to have such a fuel depot, Mir would be in a reasonably good spot... for traffic from Baikonur. For Canaveral launches, it's at far too high an inclination and limits the payload of the vehicles sent to it. However, Mir is a maintenance nightmare, leaky, and has no fuel-storage facilities worth talking about. It makes no sense to try using Mir for any purpose, and if the Russians were serious about this they'd have launched a new Mir core years ago.
    --
  • (2nd:I realized this after you mentioned the Van Allen Belts...you don't put people up there for long amounts of time. So i changed my idea:Mir could be mostly unmanned except for ocassional maintnence crews who would only stay for a week or so,and the station's critical electronics could be shielded...
    Okay, you're talking about re-engineering all of the critical electronics for radiation resistance, and incurring all the costs of installing these new electronics on-orbit. On top of this, you want to have a station which already consumes most of the crew's time doing critical maintenance, and leave it almost entirely unmanned? Plus, you want to put it far, far beyond the range of the Progress freighters used to resupply it. Sooner or later you're going to have a "<SMACK> WHAT was I thinking!" moment. The sooner this happens, the quicker you can move on to something more useful. ;-)
    3rd:Ok,push it up to the Earth-Moon liberation point."
    It's a "libration" point, no "e" in the word. Since you haven't mentioned which libration point you mean (there are 5 in the Earth-Moon system) I'll assume you mean L4 or L5. If I recall correctly, getting to either one of them requires more fuel than going directly to the Moon; on top of this, you'd have a trip of considerable distance (roughly equal to the Earth-Moon distance) from either L4 or L5 to Luna, and unless you were going to burn a lot of fuel it would be a lot slower than the trip from Earth. This isn't good for your radiation exposure.
    As for fuel,this project would be delayed until a light,fairly effecient fuel to be created or discovered...again,as I stated before,this whole project would take time to come to fruitition...,then you could stick it on any boster and send it to Mir.)and one could plot an orbit that was arc like,similar to what Voyager 1&2 did.from there,take the most fuel efficient path to Luna.Future moon missions would need to be timed as accurately as Apollo missions.
    The Voyagers used gravity-assist maneuvers at Jupiter, and they are on one-way trajectories out of the Solar System; the required heavy body is lacking in the Earth-Moon system, and you want to come back in any event. If you want some data for calculating Hohman ellipse trajectories, you can derive them from conservation of angular momentum r1*v1 = r2*v2 (for the apogee and perigee conditions) and conservation of energy (v^2 - 2GM/r = constant, G = gravitational constant, M = mass of the primary body, Earth in this case). A little bit of algebra applied to this lets you plug in r1 and v1 and get r2:
    r2 = v1^2 * r1 / ((2GM/r1) - v1^2) (plug r2 into the angular momentum equation and solve for v2)

    From differences in velocities you can calculate the fuel-mass required at each burn from the rocket equation, Mfinal/Minitial = exp(-Vdelta/Vexhaust). Even for H2/O2, Vexhaust is only about 4500 m/sec; the mass required to push something around quickly becomes a frighteningly large (and expensive-looking) value.

    You'd be much better off to crunch numbers for things that don't involve expending large amounts of reaction mass. For instance, if you're going to the Moon, there are possibilities for moving stuff with massive rotating tethers; as long as you move about the same amount of mass in both directions, they operate more or less for "free". This is a field that is far more worthy of study than keeping a creaky, leaky, flaky old space station in service for emotional reasons. Maybe slapping an ion engine on a Progress and boosting Mir up to a safe parking orbit, deactivated and emptied of atmosphere and fluids, would be attractive to somebody who wants to preserve it for some far-off museum display. Trying to bend other missions to fit Mir just so you can say it's being used doesn't make much sense.
    --

  • WAIT! This corporation is perfect to try out the big SEX IN SPACE experiment.

    Shoot, they're sending two Russian men this time.... uhhm.....

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

  • Skylab was a hack, made from Apollo components (I believe, the upper stage of a Saturn rocket) after the last three scheduled moon missions were canceled.
  • Iridium satellites are in polar orbits; Mir orbits at an inclination of around 55 degrees or so. And at a different altitude. The change of orbit would be really expensive.

    I thought Iridium's orbital inclination was 86.4 degrees. Not quite a polar orbit.

    And let's not forget that all of those satellites are in different orbital planes than Mir.

    Perhaps when he have massive energy reserves available (like on Start Trek) we would be able to change orbital plane and inclinations and perform such a salvage. But not yet.

  • Of course I'm the guy who thinks NASA should have a Lottery, drawn yearly, for a free 7 day trip into space. Providing the winner can meet minimum training requirments. If they can't, just give them 10% of the 'pot'. Also give people the option to choose between space and the cash. A 20 min space walk would be a nice touch as well

    Hell yah! I never play the lottery becuase I see it as a waist of money and time, but this is something worth buying a few tickets for! Who doesn't want to go into orbit?
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • All correct. Also, there is no salvage law in space. There should be, but there isn't -- in fact, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes it almost impossible. For more see Glenn Reynolds & Robert Merges, "Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy" (Westview, 1998). As far as I know, it's not on the web but there are some good space law resources at

    http://www.permanent.com/archimedes for those who are interested.

  • OK, I know you are joking, but (a) the Iridium statlites aren't that useful anywhere other than right where they are now and (b) they weren't that useful anyway.

    Why do you think Iridium went out of business? I took too long to get going, cost to much to run and hence too much to attract any customers. Reading all this stuff about re-using the satalite network for something else makes me laugh too. Do you know that there was no data call facility on Iridium? The thing was designed in the '80s before anyone considered mobile datacoms.

    I did read a story about a guy that was going to fly his airplane to the north pole and make an internet connection from there, but since Iridium had no data mode he was going to have to use an accoustic coupler! 300 baud here we go!
    --
  • I was thinking it was Andy Griffith. I knew it was one of them, but the guy was thin. Matlock is not thin.

    Is this life imitating art, or art just being thought of first.

  • Is this a real news story? It sounds more like a '80s (1980s, not 2080s) TV Show.

    It was Salvage One with Dick VanDike. Their base was a junk yard. In one episode, they picked up some satelite (irridium?) that was about to fall from orbit. It was on the way back from saving some people from a Space station (Mir?).

  • I hate to tell everyone, but ummm you really can't see mir I mean even with a telescope ..
    Actually it's pretty easy to see, looks like a fast moving, bright dot.

    Every couple of weeks I grab the latest Orbital Elements [nasa.gov], run some pass predictions, and see how it is doing. When it was manned, it was always cool to think how there were people living on that little dot in the sky. It gives me a thrill to think about it!

    Nasa has a java applet [nasa.gov] which will do tracking and pass prediction, but you can find some normal software [nasa.gov] to do it as well.

  • Where they'll make their money (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @12:14PM (#1151220)
    Incase you were wondering how they plan on making a profit off this, I have a solution for them - we should buy it. Yes, and put a bunch of servers in Mir. Think about it - if you mount a few satellites up there and put some linux and solaris boxen up there and give it an internet feed, you've got yourself an untouchable censor-proof project.. just build a little transmitter and you can download anything any government ever censored.

    Screw Iridium, BUY MIR!

  • A bit late, guys... (Score:3)

    by chazR ( 41002 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @11:51AM (#1151221) Homepage
    The BBC has been covering this story for a few days. There's a good story here [bbc.co.uk]

    The cosmonauts have almost no idea what they're going to find. The station has been unmanned for about six months. They have no idea whether it is still presurrised, whether the hull has been compromised or anything. Mir also needs to be *flown* by using it's gyros to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun. How well this is working now is anybody's idea. Rather them than me.

  • Bill G's new hideout - Mir (Score:3)

    by WillAffleck ( 42386 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @11:50AM (#1151222)
    What's not mentioned in the CNN story is that MSFt has a majority interest in the corporation that's funding the space mission. They plan to retrofit Mir for Bill G to live in, move MSFT's corporate HQ there (to avoid the DOJ reprisals) since it's extra-national, and use all the satellites to bombard their enemies with.

  • Harrrr Maties! (Score:3)

    by Dr Caleb ( 121505 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @11:58AM (#1151223) Homepage Journal
    That's the way it should be!

    Space, and rural roads should be governed by the salvage laws of the sea!

    You abandon it, it reverts back to the chapter of law defined under "Finders Keepers caveat emptor".

    Wanna leave that nice new Expedition stuck in a ditch by the side of the road? No prob! Me and the boys have some winches!

    Wanna leave that space station unlocked? Well we'll just move in and squat!

    Wanna leave a few satellites unattended? Fine! We need the Sci-Fi channel up here too!

  • damn, just broke my irony meter... (Score:4)

    by kevin lyda ( 4803 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @02:20PM (#1151224) Homepage
    a former communist country which has switched to the much touted capitalist sytem and is now mired in economic misery is the first nation to take a major step towards privatizing their space program.

    er...

  • Wooden ships and iron men (Score:4)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @01:13PM (#1151225) Homepage Journal
    A few years back, I read an autobiographical book called "Two Years Before the Mast". The author was an 1830s Harvard student who dropped out for a few years to become a sailor -- not an officer but a regular tar. It really opened my eyes to how different our attitudes towards safety are than our relatively near ancestors.

    When they sailed around the tip of South America in July, they knew they'd have to make men climb up into rigging during a raging gale to wrestle bare handed with frozen rigging -- you simply can't control the ship without sending men aloft. It was no unusual thing to lose one or two sailors overboard during a voyage.

    And this was routine travel. Exploration was an order of magnitude more dangerous.

    In a sense, the "comsonuts" really have a more normal view of risk and safety than our own, when viewed against the backdrop of human history. I'm not saying they're right, but it's something to think about.

  • Mir + Iridium = Data Haven (Score:4)

    by Rantage ( 96467 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @12:12PM (#1151226) Homepage
    Pipe dream? Of course. Humor me.

    Refit Mir to be an orbiting data library, free of any national jurisdiction. Utilize the abandoned Iridium satellites so users worldwide can access it. Charge for Iridium-based net access, use profits to pay Mir operating expenses.
    Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org [steelmaelstrom.org].

  • Various Issues (Score:4)

    by Captn Pepe ( 139650 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @12:07PM (#1151227)

    As far as I know, MirCorp (the Holland-based consortium backing the mission) is mainly planning to make money by selling advertising space and by taking people up for a few days. The figure I've heard bandied about is around $600K/day. Although, they're being very tight-lipped about who, if anybody, is signed up to go ... which I tend to suspect means that they don't have any committed clients. That is why the RSA is being circumspect about the role of the cosmonauts up there right now - they might just fix some things and come home having prepared the Mir to go swimming in the Pacific, or they might stay up to get the place ready for guests.

    Another thing that troubles me is that Energya is one of the largest members of MirCorp. As we all know, Energya (which has very tight connections to the Russian government) has significant motives other than profit to see the Mir stay in orbit, i.e. national/corporate pride, plus the possibility of revenue from a continuing stream of resupply missions to the station. In short, it's worth a lot to them for political and economic reasons, regardless of whether MirCorp ever succeeds in getting people up there.

    I've seem lots of complaints about the safety of Mir, here and elsewhere. I might point out that, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with Mir that a good fixing-up and a regularly changed crew wouldn't solve. Yes, it leaks air, but not as fast as the Shuttle; plus, it doesn't leak corrosive volatiles like hydrazine, which the shuttle does. I heard that Energya, in fact, had considerable safety concerns with docking the shuttle to Mir for just these reasons, out of worry that the assorted stuff the Shuttle puts out might damage the station. As for the fire, etc, this mostly had to do with ancient equipment up there, which should certainly be replaced - and will be, if MirCorp can come up with the kind of money it seems to believe it can.

  • URL for MirCorp (Score:5)

    by rogerbo ( 74443 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @01:34PM (#1151228)
    havne't seen this here yet.

    MirCorp is at www.mirstation.com

    They do confirm backing by the eerily named Gold and Appel Transfers Fnord. I really wonder if that is a complete coincidence or just a very rich baby boomer with a sense of humor.

    They also have some info on the the crazed fools (or visionarys) backing Mir Corp. Why does everything about this remind me of Heinleins 'Man who sold the moon'?

    Good luck to em, personally if it gets things happening in space sooner I don't mind even if mir ends up plastered in golden arches and windows logos.

  • Oh and by the way ... (Score:5)

    by Captn Pepe ( 139650 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @12:18PM (#1151229)

    Yes, I'm sure Hemos is aware of the fact that "picking up some Iridium satellites while they're up there" is a silly idea. But for the humor impaired, here's why -

    • Iridium satellites are in polar orbits; Mir orbits at an inclination of around 55 degrees or so. And at a different altitude. The change of orbit would be really expensive.
    • Iridium satellites are big. The mass of a craft capable of carrying "a few" of these things back to Earth would be substantial. We're talking a Shuttle-class mission, at best. You could change their orbits with some kind of tug, I suppose ... but why?
    • In fact, but, why describes most of this hypothetical undertaking. The things are next to useless on the ground, unless somebody wants one for a museum. After all, I could build a ground-based device with pretty much the same capabilities as an Iridium satellite would have on the ground (i.e. a solar-powered microwave relay). And in space, they're not any more useful than they already are if you move them (arguably, they'd be less useful due to reduced coverage).

    Conclusion: why bother? It would be a very expensive, very silly operation. Though now that I think about it, Red Hat might be interested. Rearrange their orbits just right, and they'd flash "LINUX" in the evening and morning sky every 90 minutes around the world. I envision Redmond being the first target. :-)

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Close