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Space News

Europe to Join Russia Building Next Space Shuttle 279

Posted by samzenpus from the hope-they-do-a-better-job dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Development agreement takes shape during the Paris Air Show It's all but official--Russia and Europe will soon embark on a cooperative effort to build a next-generation manned space shuttle. Speaking at the Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, France, in June, Russian space officials confirmed earlier reports from Moscow that their partners at the European Space Agency would join the Russian effort to build a new reusable orbiter, dubbed Kliper."
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Europe to Join Russia Building Next Space Shuttle More

Europe to Join Russia Building Next Space Shuttle

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  • partners at the European Space Agency would join the Russian effort to build a new reusable orbiter, dubbed Kliper.

    ...the European Space Agency does not join the Russian effort in destroying the unusable road-vehicle incidentally not referred to as "Kliper".

    Heck, maybe I got it wrong, but it's Friday evening and I'm almost done with my 12pack. *hic*

  • I know those guys up north built the space arm and some drilling equipment that will be sent to mars in the near future, seems like those guys have a knack for tiny/specialised space projects.. hope they get a contract or two. Unfortunately they may be too politically tied in & stuck with our our crumbling space program :-(
    • Well, Canada does have a strong partnership agreement [esa.int] with ESA, so I wouldn't be surprised. I imagine that we're as frustated as all the other nations (including, most significantly, the States) investing in the ISS with the lack of process on the station to this point.
    • Actually that's a good question. I listened to an interview recently on CBC with the head of the Canadian Space Agency, Marc Garneau. He said that Canada really wants to be a part of the successor to the space shuttle, but at this point it wasn't looking like there would be much of an opportunity to contribute. If the CSA feels like they will be left out of the next American project, maybe they will be more inclined to seek a partnership with this new venture. The CSA and Canadian aerospace companies have q

  • The World Catches Up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @08:47PM (#13359699)
    If this goes like other discussions on this and similar topics about advanced technologies appearing in various parts of the world, it will split into two camps. One camp that thinks it will be cool because new tech is always cool. The other camp will lament that North America is falling behind. To the latter I say that it is not North America falling behind, but rather the rest of the world is catching up. That's inevitable and that's good. Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too. The the other camp. I say this new shuttle will be cool. It will be interesting to see what approach they take in designing it based on years of observing the North American program.

    • Re:The World Catches Up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @12:40AM (#13360481) Homepage
      "To the latter I say that it is not North America falling behind, but rather the rest of the world is catching up."

      Americans by and large seem to be content to sit on their fat rear ends while they're throwing away the keys to the kingdom.

      The question isn't whether or not the rest of the world is catching up, but why are we letting them do so?

      Wait. Never mind. Survivor is on...

    • Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too
      Well, you did until Dubya cancelled the X-33.
    • North America, and the USA in particular, will fall behind because ever more intellectual property will be locked up behind a multitude of corporations and individuals effectively ruled by lawyers who are more interested in earning legal fees rather than bothering to actually manufacture anything.

      Europe's bureaucracies will not hesitate to forcibly acquire the necessary intellectual property needed get things done for large projects. That's how the European airline industry managed to get the Concord, Euro

    • "Don't doubt that we don't have a new shuttle on the board somewhere too."

      And where do you get this 'wisdom' from? Sad to say, your statement is just not true; NASA has plans to start designing a new reusable orbiter (basically a frankenrocket cobbled together from an unholy mating between the US' rocket designs and the shuttle), but no more thna that.

      Had you been up on your news, you'd know that. Projects like the shuttle are just too expensive and large scale to keep secret.

  • You'd have thought... (Score:4, Funny)

    by corngrower ( 738661 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @08:53PM (#13359729) Journal
    You'd have thought that they would have learned enough not to deploy a reusable shuttle based on the bad experience of NASA with these things. It's just not a cost effective way to run a space program.
    • Yeah, and all those reusable aircraft we have flying around everywhere - death traps, all of them.

      A one-shot jet is what we need. Build it cheaply, fly it across the Atlantic once and then dump it. Smaller, faster, cheaper is the answer. We might lose the occasional load of passengers, but it's gotta be cheaper overall.

      One-shot cars, too - I mean, look at all the rust buckets you see on the road these days, it's just begging for trouble. How many of all those annual road deaths could have been avoided i

    • You'd have thought that they would have learned enough not to deploy a reusable shuttle based on the bad experience of NASA with these things.

      They did, NASA is not involved.

      NASA has actually demonstrated that reusable is practical before congress removes wide swaths of your initial plan and sticks in a bunch of unnecessary pieces.

      I'm fairly confident that the Russian system will still cost under $60M per launch to send up, a minor increase in cost compared to Soyuz and lower per kg of payload.
      • Agreed.

        The Russians and the ESA get the benefit of learning from all of our mistakes without having to spend tax dollars.

        I still think wingless is the best way to go for the Kliper and/or the CEV. Unless you are taking off from a horizontal position, those wings are just dead weight.

      • Re:You'd have thought... (Score:4, Informative)

        by corngrower ( 738661 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:38PM (#13359879) Journal
        They did, NASA is not involved.

        By 'they', I meant the EU and Russia, not NASA.

        NASA has actually demonstrated that reusable is practical...

        I disagree. The turnaround costs to get the shuttle ready for the next mission were far, far greater than the estimated costs. I'm aware of how NASA got jerked around by congress and how the shuttle as implemented was not the shuttle that was conceived. But even so, the cost to turn the shuttle around turned out to be so much more than what they anticipated that putting up single shot spacecraft would have been less costly.

        What they should be doing is designing a re-launcable manned capsule which is separate from non-reusable payload module. The reduced launch weight and reduced turnaround rework (compared with shuttle) would make this a good option. You wouldn't be throwing away the expensive life support systems. The payload area would be pretty much structural components, making it fairly inexpensive. It wouldn't have any complicated electronic or mechanical systems.

      • I just learned the reason for the current 'reusable' design of the shuttle. Apparently, there was a much better design on the table at the time...but that one was simpler, and meant that 5.000 jobs wouldn't be created in Texas...so they went with the current design, which even at the time wasn't considered the best option.

        I really hate it when politics interferes with science; a scientist can learn about politics, but a politician just doesn't have the smarts for science.
  • Hasn't it been proven that a Shuttle type transport is not the most cost effective way of lifting heavy loads and even for things like simple manned space flight? Could this be a case of trying to copy the USA, just because, or is it viable. I seem to remember reading that making a temporary space station for experents say out of Apollo parts like skylab, when done today with other space parts we have lying around would be cheaper than a schuttle. Feel free to prove me wrong, but the one size fits all seems to be what NASA is getting away from, and specialization is the way to go.

    • Re:Shuttle type transport not economically effecti (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rtaylor ( 70602 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:14PM (#13359812) Homepage
      Hasn't it been proven that a Shuttle type transport is not the most cost effective way of lifting heavy loads and even for things like simple manned space flight?

      It has only been demonstrated that the Shuttle, in it's half completed "still a prototype" design, is not an overly cost effective way of putting up payloads.

      A number of additional steps in the program, cut by congress, would have significantly helped.
      • I'd like to add that the 25,000 ground crew personnel positions required to keep the shuttle operations going... rain or shine, lanuch or no launch, certainly add a huge portion of the cost to launch a single shuttle mission. If an airplace going to Europe from America would require 25,000 people to get it there and only flew once every six months, with safety reports and equipment tests that the paperwork alone would make a pile of debris in a landfill larger than the plane + "launch system" on each flight, those flights to Europe would cost about $20-$100 million each as well and would only be done as a congressional junket.

        Most private initives are to try and cut the ground crew for launches down to a very manageable number, like 5-10, and to try and increase the number of launches to keep that ground crew busy. Assuming the rest of the cost of manufacturing is kept the same for private launches, that savings alone makes a huge difference. The CEV (and other designs at NASA) mainly try to keep that same 25,000 support personnel in their jobs.
    • I don't think the EU and Russia would be doing this if it weren't practical. Just because the US shuttle was built by a committee with a bunch of retarded congressmen looking over their shoulders doesn't mean someone else can't do it right.

      "Hasn't it been proven...?"

      Now there's an intelligent and informed remark. Feel free to get your head out of your posterior and do your own research.

    • Re:Shuttle type transport not economically effecti (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:16PM (#13359817) Homepage Journal
      Despite the title, it's doesn't look like a replication of the NASA shuttle. The phrase "reuseable orbiter" used in the article seems closer. It looks more like a capsule to which they've added some semblance of "wings" to allow a little bit of maneuvarbility and more landing options. Hell some of the designs for the CEV [popularmechanics.com] look not dissimilar, and that is supposed to be NASAs next generation that they are seriously banking on.

      Jedidiah.
    • The Russians already had a clone of the Shuttle - the "Buran" - which successfully took off, orbited the earth, and landed without losing a single heat tile.. all unmanned. The project was then scrapped due to lack of further funding.

      If they are copying anything here it's not the shuttle, but the next-gen NASA design which is back to a "lauched on the tip of a rocket" type design... but the timing, if anything, more suggests NASA copying Russia rather than vice versa.

      http://www.aeronautics.ru/archive/space/ [aeronautics.ru]
  • My memory could be (no, certainly is) shot these days, but I seem to remember the USSR launching an unmanned craft that looked almost identical to the space shuttle. I think they abandonded the entire program.
    Anyone care to elaborate?

  • Government vs. Spaceship N (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:25PM (#13359840)
    Although government funded/designed/managed/operated space project have a place, I argue that the future is in private hands. What will make space cheap is competition and mass production. In that regard, I, personally, have more faith in Scaled Composites or Blue Origin than in hand-wringing risk-averse bureaucratic organizations. As much as I love NASA, it's high cost structure breeds risk aversion and that risk aversion breeds higher costs in a very vicious cycle. Moreover, the constant political pressure to cut costs perversely raises the per-unit cost of space travel. Unless we can break that cycle, space will only become more and more expensive and launches less and less frequent.

    One key is mass production -- amortizing all that costly engineering over a greater number of vehicles. Current commercial ventures may only be suborbital today, but competition to reach orbit and provide tourist services will probably lead to the development of ever more capable private launch systems.

    Uless we can drammatically reduce the cost of access to space,
    • The purpose of the space program was to take federal dollars and spread them around the texas hill country. Johnson was a New Deal bureaucrat who got himself elected to congress. The first thing he did was use federal dollars to bring in electric power to his district. The next thing he did was to get federal money to build a dam, which went to a company which is now known as Halliburton. A chunk of this money went back into Johnson's pocket so he could buy his way into the senate, where he chaired the space subcommittee and gathered power to run for president.
      As president, he used tax dollars to build high tech infrastructure in texas, again funneled through Halliburton. Putting a man on the moon was misdirection and PR. Halliburton also was the main contractor for nuke plants and vietnam.
      The purpose of a government run space program is to spend as much money as possible. A private sector project to do the same thing has a very different set of incentives.
        I tend to favor market economies and be wary of the sort of public private partnerships pioneered by mussolini and lbj. But I have to give the guy some credit for bringing the Texas hill country out of the stone age into the space age.

  • Near-term competition in human orbital spaceflight (Score:5, Informative)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:29PM (#13359855) Journal
    It's looking like there should be quite a bit of competition soon in human orbital spaceflight. Here are the various competitors I can think of off-hand:

    * USA: Shuttle-derived system [wikipedia.org], probably with a CEV capsule on top. There's several downsides to a shuttle-derived system, but it keeps the constituencies happy and should have enough government momentum to keep on going.

    * Russia and Europe: Kliper's [wikipedia.org] been searching around for financial support for a while, and it looks like they finally got at least -some- funding from Europe.

    * China: various iterations of Shenzhou spacecraft [wikipedia.org]

    In the private sector:

    * t/Space: The (Rutan-affiliated?) company just completed a parachute drop test [wired.com] and water landing of a full-scale model of their proposed CXV space capsule. It's uncertain if they'll get more funding from NASA, but their concept seems sound and may get private investment. Oh, and their web page has some really spiffy videos [nyud.net].

    * SpaceX: They've already announced their intent to compete for Bigelow's orbital prize, and their upcoming man-rated Falcon V will be large enough to carry a Gemini-style capsule.

    Now what about destinations? Besides the ISS, we've got Robert Bigelow's inflatable space station modules [wikipedia.org], which should be up and operational by 2010, with several prototype launches before then. He's planning on selling these modules to various groups and countries, so hopefully we'll have several different space stations up there.

    Between Shenzhou 8 and 9 China is planning on launching a small orbital laboratory, which Shenzhou 9 will be docking with. Various members of the Chinese space program have also been visiting [aviationnow.com] Bigelow's facility, so perhaps we'll see them doing something with his modules.

    The future should be interesting.

  • He'll see the big board! (Score:4, Funny)

    by infonography ( 566403 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:42PM (#13359890) Homepage
    Turgidson:
    Is that the Russian Ambassador you're talking about?
    Muffley:
    Yes, it is, General.
    Turgidson:
    Ahh, am I to understand the Russian Ambassador is to be admitted entrance to the War Room?
    Muffley:
    That is correct. He is here on my orders.
    Turgidson:
    I... I don't know exactly how to put this, sir, but are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? I mean... begins closing his notebooks he'll see everything. He'll see the big board!
    Muffley:
    That is precisely the idea, General. That is precisely the idea. Stains, get Premier Kissov on the Hotline.

    Apologies to George C Scott and Peter Sellers.

  • It's not a shuttle... (Score:5, Informative)

    by everphilski ( 877346 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:43PM (#13359892) Journal
    It isn't really a shuttle. If your definition of "shuttle" is reusable then OK it's a shuttle. But the reason the US space shuttle was called "the shuttle" is because of the payload bay. The space shuttle was to be used to routinely shuttle stuff to and from space.

    The Kliper can't do that.

    The Kliper is basically an upgraded resuable Soyuz that can host 7 people (good for station) and a basic amount of payload. A Soyuz is a three part contraption of which only 1 module returns to earth and none is resued. The Kliper is just a single piece reusable capsule that's stretched. It launches like a capsule - on the tip of a rocket. It reenters like a capsule (unless they opt for wings... the judges are still out on that one). It's not a shuttle.

    -everphilski-

  • Welcome to Bush's 21st Century (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19, 2005 @09:44PM (#13359894)
    I know that this will be considered to be flame bait, but in my opinion it is the truth. The Russians and Europeans collaborating without the US is a direct response to the Bush administrations contempt of international cooperation. The Bush administration has make it clear in every possible way that that the only correct position on any subject is the US position. When the rest of the world disagrees the response is a mix of anger, contempt and disdain.

    This is true from the war in Iraq to the Koyoto treaty to appointing Bolton to the UN. After that kind of treatment it is only natural that everyone else will decide that they don't need the US and will go about building the future without US involvement.

    This is a very bad development for everyone. The big problems like space, global warming and war need cooperation from all the international community, and splitting into competing factions will only lead to failure.

    I'm very upset over this, because we all loose.

  • why don't we leave more stuff up there? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pintpusher ( 854001 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @10:02PM (#13359955) Journal
    I know this is slightly OT, but years and years ago there was a sci-fi book that has always stuck with me. The book was about a guy who was essentially the first EMT in space. But, the really interesting part was the simple space-station technology. basically, they stuck a really simple box-car sized tube on the top of a booster and shot it up there. The astronauts came back in some kind of capsule (lifting body?, reusable?) but left the big tube (sort of like a tank) up there. These tanks had basic standard life support systems and standard airlocks on each end and on two sides. Each launch put a new one up there, they'd strap 'em together and eventually they had a space station. Need more solar power? send one up with a bunch of panels inside it. Deploy them over the surface of existing modules already in orbit. Need more computers? life-support? water treatment? whatever, just send another one up with the gear crammed in and depoy it as needed throughout the standardized compartments. neat concept. love to see it. prolly never happen. ho hum.

  • Desktop of choice for the Kliper (Score:4, Funny)

    by frankmu ( 68782 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @10:23PM (#13360037) Homepage
    ... must be KDE.

    thank you, thank you. please tip the waitresses

  • Kliper? (Score:5, Funny)

    by hobotron ( 891379 ) on Friday August 19, 2005 @11:09PM (#13360171)


    Klippy: I see you are building a space shuttle. Would you like me to overrun the budget?

  • See also the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] for very extensive additional information about the Kliper project.

  • Apparantly, the Kliper will run on KDE (that's why its got a silly name) and thus be more user friendly than the USA's GNU/Shuttle. The developers hope that will reduce the number of crashes, and that the more solid frontend won't break into bits and damage the wings. Whilst it will be based on a Linux(R) kernel, it will not use the name "Linux(R)" as Russia can't afford a license to use the word.

    Linux(R) is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and its use has now been restricted to those with money and editorial

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