Posts tagged space
Chris Woo — 胡仲平
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Not to be remiss among my other posts regarding man’s first flight into space, today is also the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch STS-1. The above picture is a comparison of the American and Soviet space shuttles, the latter of which only flew once.
This is just a part of the R-7 rocket family, the workhorse of the Russian Space program. The Sputnik satellites were launched from an R-7. Fifty years ago today an R-7 rocket launched Yuri Gagarin into space inaugurating the era of manned spaceflight. Following this, every single Russian/Soviet manned flight has used the R-7 rocket platform. R-7s have been successfully launched well over 1500 times. It is still used to launch the Soyuz and Progress crafts, and will likely continue to be used by the Russians for quite some time.
This is the Energia II “Uragan.” It is a fully reusable heavy-lift launcher based on the Soviet space shuttle Buran and Energia. Those boosters are “flyback” boosters, meaning that after they were jettisoned wings deploy and they land.
They really should have made one.
One day you will tell your children that Americans reached for the stars in the coolest spaceship imaginable. And then we decided to just give up because we were bored.
The Space Shuttle retires next year, and here’s one of the many choices for the final mission patch.
I have to say, I wasn’t really a fan of Burt Rutan and Richard Branson but damn if that isn’t a pretty ship.
Russia: No space for space tourists
Really, this is a sad unintended consequence. Sure, it was a little bit of a ridiculous thing for the rich and privileged, but it also helped fund the Russian Space Agency. And now that they have to double their flights per year that means more financial and material burden. I think we’re definitely paying for some of the flights while we get the CEV in place, but still.
I don’t know why we aren’t trying to get the Chinese involved with ISS. They have a manned flight capability, and this would certainly help out the Russians and promote cooperation in space.
See? We went to the moon. Now shut up with the conspiracy or I’ll go Buzz Aldrin on your ass and punch you in the face.
Robot armies ‘will explore alien worlds’ — yes they will. Now let’s get on with it already!
Friends who like Planetes, an infographic that my pique your interest!
The Augustine Commission is recommending orbital refueling for Project Constellation, the United States new manned space program (which in many ways seems similar, at least to me, to the Soviet Soyuz A-B-C moonshot plans developed by Korolev 50 years ago; it’s probably more similar to the Parom-Kliper concept from post-Soviet Russia). It also looks like the commission wants to move towards private rocket companies, but we’ll learn more about that later.
This may mean that we will not be devoting as many resources to “heavy-lift” rockets as we have in the past. There will always be uses for those systems, but I think the idea is to make rockets more specialized (and hopefully less costly for launches that don’t need heavy-lift but have to use heavy-lift rockets anyway). I could, of course, be reading the article incorrectly obviously.
It’s about time America. This is the first practical step towards having a forward-looking space program.
NASA is saying that LCROSS created a mile-high plume. There’s one particular sentence in here that is particularly funny:
“In media coverage before the impact, many observers said they were disappointed at the lack of spectacle.”
No, it was coverage AFTER the impact. You can’t be disappointed by a spectacle that has yet to happen!
