Roscosmos Says Nyet To Space Adventures' Moon Plan
Roscosmos Disavows Plan to Send Space Tourists to Moon, Moscow Times
“Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, will not be involved in a plan to send two space tourists on a flight around the Moon and was not consulted about the project, the federal space agency said. The mission, hatched by U.S.-based space tourism firm Space Adventures and a major Russian spacecraft manufacturer, Energia Rocket and Space Corporation, would see two space tourists travel to the Moon aboard a modified Russian Soyuz spacecraft by 2017. However, Roscosmos was kept out of the loop on the plan. The organizers “could have consulted with us before making such loud announcements,” said Denis Lyskov, Roscosmos’s deputy chief in charge of piloted flights, Izvestia reported Monday.”
A private expedition to the Moon, Space Adventures
“Using flight proven Russian spacecraft we will fly two private citizens and one professional cosmonaut on a free return trajectory around the far side of the moon. They will come within 100km of the Moon’s surface. If you chose to join this mission you will see the illuminated far-side of the Moon, and then witness the amazing sight of the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon. We expect our first mission to launch by 2017.”
They didn’t even tell Roscosmos that they planned to use their hardware to make the trip? Truly, this is a serious expedition.
FWIW, that doesn’t sound like Space Adventures at all.
I suspect that Roscosmos crunched the numbers, found that they couldn’t do it without a serious investment in hardware and decided to claim that it never existed. The Soviets tended to treat embarrassing project failures in the same way, IIRC.
Space Adventures deals with manufacturer RSC Energia, not operator Roscosmos. Energia has previously sold hardware to western operators, like Sea Launch, and has certainly done the preliminary design work (and associated PR) without Roscosmos pre-approving every idea floated.
However, Moscow is pulling the aerospace contractors back under government ownership. Clearly Energia is being given a message.
This message was delivered a long time ago when Syemonov (spelling) was removed from the helm of Energia. The Russian aerospace companies are firmly in the grip of the state. This was different fifteen years ago. It is no longer that time.
If not Roscosmos, would SpaceX or Boeing be up for it? I mean this is what commercial HSF is all about: boldly attempting what no government will. It’s not as foolhardy or perilous as Mars One or Inspiration Mars.
The Falcon Heavy should be able to launch an unmodified crewed Dragon into a Lunar free-return trajectory. I also suspect that there would be a big chunk of change from that $150M/seat price too.
Over to you, Elon!
EM has mentioned that he might, just might do a lunar fly around just to prove out capability. Whether or not it would be a crewed flight is another thing altogether.
Cheers.
Elementary caution would require a minimum of two flights.
Flight one would be a DragonLab with experiments on board to measure the environment in the cabin during the flight as well as any other experiment that someone wants sent through cis-Lunar space and can pay for.
Flight two would be the crewed flight. I’m thinking that the $300M raised would not only cover the cost of the mission in hardware terms but would also meet some of SpaceX’s costs for a flight engineer to be along for the ride, even after Space Adventures’ profit is taken out of the pot.
That sounds like a good plan the moon landing 50th. Should be very doable.
Actually the main thing on an unmanned test would be whether the heat shield holds up to reentry. (And the guidance system makes the reentry corridor, etc.)
[If they prove the reentry system at near escape velocity, and the radiation tolerance of electronics in BEO, then any lingering argument in favour of Orion vanishes. Dragon, being an ISS capsule, will be optimised for long duration stand-by; whereas Orion was designed for a two week mission only. So both capsules would need dedicated habitat modules for long duration BEO mission, but Dragon will be designed out of the box for being docked to a space-station and powered-down for six months. Killing Orion would free up funding to actually develop that long duration habitat module. And, without Orion, killing SLS would free up funding to develop FH-optimised deep-space propulsion modules (a fast-burn rocket stage to get through the Van Allen belts, then a continuous-burn SEP for the trip to Mars.) That buys you Mars flyby/orbit by 2021, and frees up SLS’s entire 2020-2030 budget to develop a lander and surface hab for a 2025-2030 Mars landing.]
Well falcon heavy will be delayed till next year which will give Spacex more time for dragon fly tests and development of Dragon V2 as an unmanned spaceship. Shouldn’t Musk use that first Dragon flight to try an Apollo 13 free return of the moon? Seems like nothing to lose to me
Imagine if the very first falcon heavy returned two or three boosters to dry land and shot the moon! It could happen.
well, SpaceX has a lot on its plate at the moment. very likely they are expending a lot of energy to repair and upgrade LC-39A in preparation for the Falcon Heavy.
http://spaceflightnow.com/n…
i’ve heard conflicting reports about what will be the first FH payload. some say it will be the STP-2 for the DOD, some that it will be a SpaceX mass simulator.
just to quibble on a point, the velocity you need to get going anywhere out of LEO already means you’re going fast enough to quickly traverse the Van Allen belts, so you really don’t need a “fast-burn rocket stage.”
also the belts, while a radiation hazard, are only really dangerous if you linger in them. even traveling straight through the heart of the VA belts won’t kill you unless you stay in them.
also, the Apollo missions avoided the densest parts of the VA belts, thanks to the inclination they were launched at.
http://www.braeunig.us/apol…
and presumably a similar trajectory would be used for a future mission to the Moon or to Mars.
your comment implies you need a specially built stage to get through the VA belts, which isn’t true. that’s all i was pointing out.
If you’re using SEP for the trans-Mars burn, you need an initial higher-thrust stage (hence chemical) to get through the Van Allen belts; although more efficient, an ion drive takes too long to reach escape velocity and thus would require too many passes through the belts.
And if you are assembling a multi-module system in orbit (even if it’s just hab+capsule+SEP), it’s reasonable to assume that you can’t rely on the second stage of the last launcher for the burn out of LEO.
Together, that suggests a separate “specially built stage to get through the VA belts”.
(There may be ways of configuring a mission to avoid it, or modifying a FH second stage as a booster stage, and likewise it may be cheaper to launch extra tanks of fuel/Ox and just use a chemical stage. But I was trying to keep things simple because I was pointing out that even if you have to launch entire separate propulsion modules on multiple FH launches, those extra launches are still cheaper than a single SLS launch, and developing those multiple dedicated propulsion modules is still cheaper than developing SLS.)
I like.
Instead of messing with Space adventuress
Musk should” boost” say right now that Spacex is planning a commercial flight around the moon on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing and sign up some tourists.
Unfortunately new space is rife with con artists. A few legitimate and ground breaking firms that are revolutionizing space access, and the rest are essentially Ponzi schemes
My bet would be that the next human to see the back side of the moon will be in a Dragon V2, launched from a falcon heavy.
How close is china to trying that one?
Why wouldn’t Russia do it? Cost?
Yeah I think that’s a good bet.
I suspect both China and Russia don’t have the capability at this point. Russia’s been flying leo and so has Chiina. It’s a step up to do beo and probably pretty costly.
Cheers
Like to name a few? Easy to throw stones however the newspace firms currently around are all legitimate businesses. Pretty much all of them have won government and/or commercial contracts.
Cheers.
There are con artists in every industrial sector. NewSpace, whatever that is, is no different.
I’m not saying there isn’t, just believe that most have been shaken out by now. Anyway, you haven’t substantiated your claim and I believe that the original post by Nernst used the term ‘rife’ which implies many.
Cheers
Whew, $150 million dollars a seat and they already had two people committed. That’s almost a third of what is estimated to upgrade the Soyuz and build a hab module according to this article.
Well, that just lets the Falcon Heavy/Dragon system get the flight instead!
Just curious, Energia builds the Soyuz so why would Roscosmos need to be in the discussion? Some sort of Russian ITAR?
I suspect Roscosmos runs the actual program with training facilities, launch crew, mission support, etc. Energia builds the hardware but their space agency still has to sign off. Kind of like how SpaceX is leasing a launch pad from NASA, and unlike SpaceX, I doubt Energia has the money to build one of their own. However, that would lead to the question, could Energia cut a deal with Arianespace to use their launch facility, without the approval of Roscosmos? They are already set up for Soyuz launches.
Roscosmos could have read about it right here three years ago:
http://nasawatch.com/archiv…
I don’t know, that cheesy Space Adventures promo makes it look like a fly-by-lunar night operation.
Might be cheesy but Space Adventures are the organisation that has arranged all tourist travel to the ISS so far. They’re far from an fly-by-lunar nighters.
Cheers.
They’ve brokered a few seats on the Soyuz, which routinely goes to the ISS anyway.
However, arranging an immensely more complicated and dangerous manned flight around the moon is something the Soviets, er Russians have never done.
I’d like to see it done, I really would..but it’s been hailed by Space Adventures for around a decade or more and it just seems to be pretty far out of reach right now.
Maybe next decade, who knows?
https://mobile.twitter.com/…
Irrelevant to the article at hand.