Countries Considering Circumlunar Flight From ISS 170
FleaPlus writes "The BBC reports that the space agencies of Europe, Russia, and the US are in (very) preliminary discussions about a potential collaborative mission where astronauts would assemble a small spacecraft at the ISS, then fly it around the Moon and back. This is somewhat similar to previously-proposed commercial missions, with many elements adapted from spacecraft systems already in existence. This would also be a testbed for eventual asteroid and Mars missions, which would likely require modules to be launched on multiple rockets and assembled in space."
BREAKING NEWS (Score:4, Insightful)
You Have Been Warned!
Also: "WHAT THE HELL TOOK YOU SO LONG"?
Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I guess it's not exactly the same. Given the collaborative international nature of the effort, I can guarantee that it'll take five times as long to get going as Apollo, cost ten times as much (mostly in pork), and it'll be nobody's fault when it fails. Except maybe the French.
Have $100 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here, get yourself a ride [spaceadventures.com] (those are people cooperating on almost all private spaceflights so far); also in Soyuz, it would seem - only apt, considering how it was the first spacecraft to carry macroscopic life (turtles) beyond LEO (around the Moon) and return it safely, on a Zond 5 mission.
Funny how, out of both sides involved in Lunar Race, it is Russia who now has few decades of experience with a spacecraft essentially capable of beyond-LEO operation.
This is something... (Score:3, Insightful)
...we should've been doing YEARS AGO.
Thank you and have a nice day.
shuttlecraft (Score:3, Insightful)
astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
We routinely do refueling on orbit "for decades now" - ISS, earlier Mir and Salyut stations, all refueled by visiting Progress spacecraft (which have provisions for fuel transfer in their docking collar)
(but Shuttle would be really a bad choice for such mission - around 70 tons of dead weight, thermal shielding probably ill-suited for a possibility of direct reentry on return)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one who thinks that this could have been done 30 years ago with multiple shuttle launches. I know, I know, the shuttle engines are designed to perform multiple long burns without being inspected and rebuilt but come on, orbital refueling just seems like the kind of thing we should have been doing for decades now. I guess we haven't done much for manned (and therefor time critical) long range missions since Apollo but still, this seems like it's some pretty low hanging fruit as far as space exploration technology is concerned.
I know you're just highlighting the point, but you really shouldn't act so surprised. Sadly, everything we do in space is low-hanging fruit. We've done some amazing stuff with telescopes and things launched out into space, but as far as human exploration... not much has been done in the last 40 years. We could have easily had a manned outpost on Mars already, but it would have taken a lot of money, a lot of risk (with likely some tragic deaths along the way - more so than what we've had) and least likely of all, the cooperation from one political administration to the next.
That's the biggest problem at NASA - one president says "The last president had no vision - lets go to mars!" and then the next president says "The last president was spending like crazy. We can't afford to go to mars!" and then it repeats every 8 years or so.
If we had had a concerted and continuous effort to explore space, we could have filled out the inner solar system by now.
But would have taken trillions of dollars, and a level of agreement that we've simply never had.
Thats why I'm so excited about privatization of space exploration - a corporation has a real vested interest in getting something done. Unlike politicians.
Hopefully the billionaires of the world will take us places no government has. THAT is what I'm looking forward to.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said he'd like to retire on mars. That's likely a little far-fetched, but he's more likely to make that happen than NASA. (well, technically his fortune is pretty small in comparison to some other people, but lets say Tesla does really well...)
-Taylor
Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:3, Insightful)
FREAKIN' JENIUS ROCKET SURGEONS!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
We could have easily had a manned outpost on Mars already, but ...
But there's ZERO profit in it. Go on and name a period of human exploration of Earth, and all of them have one thing in common: profit.
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:3, Insightful)
Also: "what the hell took you so long"?
Government.
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:3, Insightful)
Government.
Given that governments are, to date, the only entities that have done so much as put human beings in LEO -- to say nothing of sending them to the Moon -- you're going to have do some fancy dancing to make the case that government is what's stopping us from achieving science fiction dreams.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
2. WTF were you thinking?
Probably, "I can't believe they're making us risk all these lives so that we can haul the shuttle engines back to earth and reuse them" Followed closely by "the damn SSMEs are going to be such maintenance hogs we'd be better off ditching them in the ocean anyway".
Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
But people will blame the USA no matter what.
As long as there are large numbers of Americans who are unable to acknowledge that the USA is ever at fault for anything, or ever less than the best at everything, you have to expect a certain amount of reaction.
Re:Have $100 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, it is launched by a rocket from R-7 lineage. A family which carried all Soviet and Russian manned missions to date, starting with Yuri Gagarin. Which launched Sputnik. And was the first operational ICBM (not very practical in its first role; but...sort of competing space agency says it is "The most reliable ... the most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" [esa.int])
Re:Have $100 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apollo was a technological dead-end. The Shuttle was a technological dead end. On the other hand Soyuz did what it needed to do and had a design that could be adapted effectively while cutting costs.
Apollo also did what it needed to do, and while it cost more than contemporary Soyuz designs, it also had to do a hell of a lot more than Soyuz or any other spacecraft has ever done. The reason it was a dead end was political, not technological. The Shuttle, I'll grant you, although I'll note that the early designs for a reusable people-launcher made a lot of sense; it was when they tried to combine it with a heavy-lift system that things went to hell.
We could have kept turning out Saturn V's assembly-line style and even without incorporating all the improvements we could have made over the last 40 years, we'd still be ahead of where we are now, for less money.
Re:The ISS is in the wrong orbit for this! (Score:3, Insightful)
The big problem with using the ISS to do this type of mission is that the ISS is in the wrong orbital plane to easily launch flights to the moon. While it's not impossible to fly from the ISS it will be far more costly(in terms of fuel) to do so.
I've been looking all over, but can't find a good figure of just how much more costly (in terms of fuel) it would be to get from the ISS's orbit to do a lunar flyby. Are we talking about a few percent more delta-v required, an order of magnitude, or somewhere in-between?
All I've been able to find is that it's apparently "cheaper" to get to lunar polar orbit from the ISS's inclination.
Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but such knee-jerk reactions of blaming us for everything don't help fix the issue.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Insightful)
The Trieste was part of a United States Navy project during the late 50's, when the US had a strong vested interest in developing better submersible technology for it's expanding fleet of nuclear submarines.
So to amend the grandparent, there are TWO reasons why any real exploration is done: profit and military gain. The fact is, exploration takes a huge investment and enormous risks, and the only times in human history it has been done was because there was something to gain by it, be it profit or power.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm. Not with the Shuttle. The engines are badly designed for zero-G. They have never been fired in orbit for a reason. (Also, the Shuttle could not have survived re-entry from a lunar return. It gets real ugly trying to cut the velocity from a vehicle returning from that far out.)
But, you could have done with with some basic assembly. The technology has been there for years. The last real innovation was the TransHab module.
There are some real technical issues to deal with when discussing ISS though. It is in a very bad orbital plane for lunar missions. There are much better orbits. I am cynical here. I think the reality is that ISS really does not have much of a purpose outside of justifying Shuttle budgets.
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Government.
Given that governments are, to date, the only entities that have done so much as put human beings in LEO -- to say nothing of sending them to the Moon -- you're going to have do some fancy dancing to make the case that government is what's stopping us from achieving science fiction dreams.
Ok then, specifically: Government
<cue fancy-dancing> Compare how long (and how much money) it took "the government" to be waving men-in-space vs insert-random-commercial-entity in the recent x-prize race(s).
Yeah Yeah Yeah you can rabbit on about "standing on the shoulders of giants" but today the biggest current roadblock to the successful leveraging of "outerspace" for the betterment of humankind is "The Government".
The *amazing achievements* in reaching the moon were *personally instigated by some dude who has been dead for many years now*. ONE (count'em folks, ONE) president made a significant committment to OuterSpace.
everything done since then is a pale shadow of a once bright future.
Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. (Score:1, Insightful)
Exactly. The paradigm has shifted over generations. As long the U.S. only gets reactions, instead of actions from its fellow nations, *and* foots the bill in the process... There will always be a large percentage of it's citizens that could care less about your meaningless lack of contribution to what we do so well. Now fuck off.
(sarcasm intended, don't take it personally - i was going to post as myself but i'm a capitalistic karma whore)
finally on the right track with the ISS (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:3, Insightful)
A) Billions of dollars in taxpayer funded R&D that are inaccessible to private companies because they are classified.
B) Several spacecraft
C) The ability to use a lot of military technology
D) A guaranteed revenue source from US taxpayers
E) NASA had almost unlimited funding during the height of the cold war
Private companies have none of these advantages and yet they've managed to do a lot more on a lot less of a budget.
We've paid for a shitload of R&D that will never be realized because A) NASA has decided not to pursue it and B) It is considered classified so private enterprise can't use it.
Dollar for dollar, private enterprise accomplishes worlds more of progress than any government space agency has. Want private enterprise to go to the moon? Give them $170 billion (cost of Apollo missions adjusted for inflation) and I'm sure we could get beyond a few spaceflights to the moon.
The only advantage government has compared to the private sector is that no matter what they can steal -- I mean, acquire, enough money to fund their programs.