RKK Energia Confirms Private Trip To the Moon 92
Teancum writes "RKK Energia, the prime contractor for the Russian space program and the company who builds the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, recently confirmed negotiations are underway with space tourism company Space Adventures for a privately financed crewed flight around the Moon. While the offer and purchase of at least one seat has been discussed earlier, this is the first time Energia has confirmed the negotiations and has gone into at least some details in terms of what they are expecting to have happen with this flight and the approximate timeframe for when this flight would take place: sometime in 2016 or 2017."
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, rocket launches YOU!
150 million per ticket? (Score:3)
I am sometimes totally amazed at how much money an individual can have. I can't fathom 150 million USD, let alone be able to pay that much on a tourist trip (no matter how awesome this is). Whoever the two individuals are, they are some lucky b******s!
If this works out, I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)
Re:150 million per ticket? (Score:5, Funny)
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It isn't, er, high on my aspirations list; but "First human to die on the moon" would beat the fuck out of "Nth human to die in hospital/nursing home".(Particularly if I had time to situate myself so that my horrifying dessicated husk would be artfully pos
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The only humans deaths in orbit were the crew of Soyuz 11 [wikipedia.org] who died when their capsule decompressed after it separated from Salyut 1.
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Well, you can win the lottery, or you can steal it (at gunpoint or via scam). I don't know of any other way one person can make himself super-rich.
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Google much?
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Yeah, luck. Luck is totally the only way anyone ever becomes rich. All of them are lottery winners, or something.
It is the only way to get that rich.
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yes. he was.
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He was lucky to have rich parents who floated him the capital he needed for his company, and connected parents who helped him get a contract with IBM.
As little children everywhere begin to discover, life is inherently unfair. I remember when I was a small child and started to notice this. I didn't like it much myself.
The question is whether they stay childish into their adult years or if they come to accept this and do the best they can with the hand they are dealt. That means trying to better your lot in life. That means being responsible for what you can control. Sometimes it means tightening your belt and saying "no" to some petty indulgence (
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lol Libertarians.
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lol Libertarians.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
Of course, if you don't like what I said but find it too difficult to refute with your own superior reasoning, namely because you have none, you can always try to lump me together with some group that you already have some talking points against. In your case that would be much easier than dealing with me as an individual because then you can pretend you al
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This does not mean that you are not spouting typical Libertarian talking points.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
And for most of history such an idea would get a person killed, usually by wild animals, long before he will have a chance to annoy his fellow humans with it.
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This does not mean that you are not spouting typical Libertarian talking points.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
And for most of history such an idea would get a person killed, usually by wild animals, long before he will have a chance to annoy his fellow humans with it.
By wild animals? If you are suggesting that the only way to be a responsible adult who can manage one's own affairs without undue interference is to become a hermit living in the wilderness, then you implicitly recognize the same problem I am talking about. Living totally apart from civilized society should not be a requirement for having personal liberty.
What really annoys fellow humans is when you try to tell consenting adults what they may do in their own homes, or with their own bodies, or what the
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Living totally apart from civilized society should not be a requirement for having personal liberty.
I see it the opposite way -- a sane idea of "personal liberty" should be implementable without throwing a person out of civilized society. I reject your idea of "personal liberty" if it doesn't fit into any society that does not sacrifice all its functions just to accommodate such an idea. This kind of single-issue society would be unlivable nightmare if it was ever implemented.
What really annoys fellow humans is when you try to tell consenting adults what they may do in their own homes, or with their own bodies, or what they may read, think, and believe.
And what annoys me, is that just to allow some "adults" to destroy their bodies with drugs, Libertarians along with the worst kind
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Yeah, luck. Luck is totally the only way anyone ever becomes rich. All of them are lottery winners, or something.
It really depends on what you mean by "luck". I couldn't find any good numbers for those just able to take a $150 million vacation('millionaires' includes far too many people a factor of ten or two too poor, while 'billionaires' excludes those in the 151-999 million range who could afford it if they wanted it enough. '150 millionaires' just isn't a very charismatic cut-off category...); but the 2011 Forbes list of billionaires was only 1,210 names long. With a world population around the 6.8 billion mark, t
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If you like thinking about this kind of stuff, I recommend reading "Fooled by Randomness" by N. Taleb where he talks about stuff like survivorship bias [maths.org] among rich traders :
"Say we have a collection of traders whose strategies do no better than random: they will have a good year half the time, a bad year the other half. Half of them will have a good year. A quarter will have two good years in a row, and so on. One in 32 will do well five years running. Of course, it never occurs to them that their success is
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If this works out, I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)
You should read "The Rocket", a short story by Ray Bradbury. It's about the same thing!
There's gold in them thar hills. (Score:2)
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Plus, you have the advantage of megatons of metals lying about, large flat areas for placing solar panels, and metres (or kilometres) of natural radiation shielding. The Moon is the natural shipyard for Earth-orbit and beyond.
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The energy cost of going from the Earth to the Moon is enormous, going the other way is much cheaper. /kg).
Current railgun technology would be capable of launching objects from the Moon to the Earth at ridiculous low cost (solar powered ~3kWh
A solar farm of 1 square km should be sufficient to launch 1000 metric tons of material from the Moon each day.
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Yet the Sahara, despite being insanely more welcoming for infrastructure than the Moon, is not an industrial powerhouse of the p
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Same here.
Actually, the way my life is, i'm having trouble even seeing myself driving a car worth more then 50k. That's not to say i'm poor, but after buying a house and having a family, those kind of things suddenly seem pipe-dreams. Never mind milions for a space-trip.
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Oh, wait...
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I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)
While hoping, better don't aim the chances of that happening anywhere above negligible to minuscule ...physics, rocket equation, is a bitch.
...if anything trying hard to not make the depicted world too different from earthly experiences, too uncomfortable and unpalatable for
Dreams of "big and glorious" space travel popularised by works of fiction (often a sort of scifi cargo cultism, and contrary to many core things we've learned about our world; they are a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling
Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, when you go around the moon, take some time to get some good photos of the Apollo missions remains. When I say "good photos", I mean photos that show stuff almost as good as they are shown on NASA's videos from the moon.
It would shut the Apollo conspiracy advocators up for good, and close this silly subject.
Re:Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. (Score:5, Funny)
I want photos of the military bases on the dark side.
The alien ones.
I don't think you quite understand how conspiracy theories work.
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"I don't think you quite understand how conspiracy theories work."
Exactly! Because any evidence disproving the conspiracy theories MUST be part of the conspiracy. Besides everyone knows that that the dark side of the moon is really Elvis' retirement home. :)
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> "I don't think you quite understand how conspiracy theories work."
> Exactly! Because any evidence disproving the conspiracy theories :)
> MUST be part of the conspiracy. Besides everyone knows that that
> the dark side of the moon is really Elvis' retirement home.
This is exactly how the global warming and October surprise conspiracy
theories work too, except for the Elvis part.
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You fool! Do you want to scare the aliens off and lose all the potential knowledge of their anal probe research?
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I want photos of the military bases on the dark side.
The alien ones.
Dont you mean the nazi moonbase?
http://www.ironsky.net/ [ironsky.net]
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There is no way that would change anything. If the overwhelming evidence that already exists isn’t enough then nothing can convince you.
Once you buy into the conspiracy nothing can get you out of it. Evidence that is shown is part of the cover up and a lack of disconfirming proof is just evidence there is a cover up in place.
Air tight logic!
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NO NO NO.
I want the LONG FORM photos of the Apollo missions remains.
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Hell, even if they went themselves, they'd claim that it was mirrors dropped by previous unmanned trips. Or swamp gas. Or they never left Earth at all and were in some kind of simulator. Though I suppose there's an easy way to fix that last one: offer to open the airlock.
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You have got it backwards. If they produce such pictures it will all be part of the conspiracy. However if they say they looked for what the Apollo missions left behind and didn't find it, then that would be taken to prove the conspiracy theories. But at that point they would accidentally have accepted that mankind had been to the moon.
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That would prove nothing except that they'd paid off the Russians to take pictures of the secret NASA sound stage and pawn them off as coming from the moon.
The Apollo conspiracy theorists don't even acknowledge the pictures of the stuff the various Apollo crews left on the moon taken by just about everyone with the necessary equipment here on Earth, so what makes you think they'd believe these?
Re: Photos of landing site from Earth? (Score:3)
Correct me if I'm wrong - but wouldn't they have good reason to be skeptical of such claims?
I don't remember any photos of the moon landing site as taken from Earth. In fact, it was my understanding that resolving power of just about any optical system in existence on Earth is inadequate?
I know photos were taken fro
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I should hope so. You can't resolve anything the Apollo astronauts left on the moon with any existing telescope on the planet.
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Actually, the LRO is currently taking some photos of the Apollo landing sites. From the LRO's Twitter feed on August 10th:
"Today I will begin dipping down from my usual ~50 km orbit to an orbit that will allow me to image the Apollo sites from about 20 km away!"
"Once I reach my new temporary orbit, I'll take images of and around the Apollo sites between August 14 and 19."
"After that, I'll return to my 50-km-orbit until December."
Of course, the conspiracy theorists won't be satisfied. They'll claim the ima
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You are far too optimistic. The conspiracy theorists would promptly come up with convincing reasons (well, convincing to them, anyways) as to why the RKK Energia flight was *also* fake, and the photos are obvious fakes.
Sounds like the 1979 Iran mission, repeated (Score:5, Interesting)
This won't be easy. The big russian rocket, the Proton has way too toxic fluoric propellant to be allowed for man-rated flight. The smaller Soyuz (the R7 family) is too weak to do the lifting as a single launch. There will be two or three near-simultaneous launches, maybe 1 unmanned Proton and 1 manned Soyuz, or 2 unmanned Soyuz (Zond) and 1 manned Soyuz to bring all the hardware to LEO, where there will be a need for spacewalks to assemble the big round-the-Moon rocket.
That project will be about as complicated and reliable as the 1979 US mission to save hostages from Iran. Over-complicated plans have a high chance of failure. Maybe it would be simpler to adopt the large, but less toxic Ariane-5 missile for manned launch and that could possible do the whole Moon round-trip in one launch.
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Fluorine compounds are certainly a pretty horrid lot; but if propellant is making its way into the paylo
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that's what i was thinking, if any bit of the rocket propellent is making it ways into the payload enough to poison the kosmonauts, then the vacuum you are launching into might prove problematic as well.
Ariane 5 has a similar LEO mass to proton, both of which are only a sixth(!) of the LEO payload capacity of a saturn V. A single shot moon mission using a soyuz like capsule and a proton/ariane launcher is pretty much limited to only a flyby, if it is possible in the first place.
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A single shot moon mission using a soyuz like capsule and a proton/ariane launcher is pretty much limited to only a flyby, if it is possible in the first place.
If? Zond 5, essentially a Soyuz launched by Proton, was the very first mission which launched macroscopic life on a flight around the Moon, and safely back.
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Ok, i didnt know that. Wiki says the weight for Zond-5 is 5 tons (metric), and i thought modern soyuz's are somewhere around 7, then again, Proton M has two tons extra launch weight, so it should be possible allright
thanks for the info!
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As others have said, what's the problem with the Proton propellant if the crew compartment is properly space-worthy?
And why assemble anything? Not that orbital docking is exactly a big problem these days, but even if the Proton propellant is a problem, just have it launch the trans-lunar craft and transfer the crew in a rendezvous. And there shouldn't be a need to re-transfer if the trans-lunar craft has re-entry capability.
And most strangely of all, why the 1979 Iran hostages mission? WhyTF would you pic
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And most strangely of all, why the 1979 Iran hostages mission? WhyTF would you pick something as random as one of many failures by the Carter administration?
To post seemingly unrelated and obscure facts - that's how you get modded up.
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The concept of stacking multiple parallel stages is also being pushed further, and probably in a better way than Energia did it. Its approach to that was a bit flawed - either a big-hunkin'-stack around unique core stage, or using (and almost as an afterthought) the boosters singly (as Zenit).
But enter, for example, Angara. Made of 1 to 7 identical core stages (with... Energia-derived
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In the late 60's, the USSR was planing on using using a Proton to send a Soyuz capsule on a circumlunar flight. (Note that they weren't planing on orbiting the moon, just swinging round the dark side and heading back to Earth, similar to the course Apollo 13 used.) They flew four unmanned test flights, but they were unable to fly a reentry pattern that wouldn't have killed the crew. The plans were shelved after Apollo 8 beat them to it with their lunar-orbital mission.
Zond 5, 6, 7, or 8 did fairly well (6 depressurised while still in deep space, but that's unrelated to reentry). Skip reentry worked fine. Turtles were alive and well (except for those on 6 of course :p ). Their main problems seemed to stem from the late go-ahead, crazy schedule, lack of focus, and related technical problems, apparently. [astronautix.com]
And a third rocket (Score:2)
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Couldn't find Wikipedia today? The Proton uses N2O4/UDMH, not a fluorine atom in sight. NASA didn't think it was a problem for manned flight as the Titan II used to launch Gemini capsules used N2O4/UDMH+Hydrazine. In fact NASA thought it was safe enough that the launch escape method was aircraft style ejector seats rather than the solid rocket escape tower considered necessary for the Redstone, Atlas and Saturn launches of Mercury and Apollo capsules.
Trip AROUND the moon, not TO the moon (Score:5, Informative)
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The above, plus how they demonstrated capability to do automatic landings... I'm sure if you'd throw several hundred million more at RKK Energia, they would be more than happy to make you the thirteenth* man on the Moon.
*But will you dare after what happened to Apollo 13?
Dibs (Score:1)