News US and Europe plan new spaceship.

[Notebook]

Nearly new spaceship..

"People are thinking about ideas that have increasing degrees of complexity," explained Esa's ISS programme manager, Bernardo Patti.
"First, perhaps it is a check-out mission of an exploration vehicle to the ISS. The second is to make a sortie that goes well beyond low-Earth orbit - with a crew or without a crew. And then having an Apollo 8 type of visit around the Moon makes perfect sense," he told BBC News.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13286238

N.

 

[Scruce]

Anyone call for [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5050"]ESA ATV Orbital Concepts V1.2[/ame]?

 

[Grover]

sounde like a european/American lunar space program may be coming up...

anyone find some good images of their plan and get it on OH?

 

[Yoda]

Yet another "plan" that will never see daylight due to budget shortfalls.
They should have just continued their efforts on the Orion project

 

[Ark]

Yet another "plan" that will never see daylight due to budget shortfalls.
They should have just continued their efforts on the Orion project

Agreed, we can't build any of the crap we have "planned" now.

 

[T.Neo]

The 'crap' that has been "planned" now is better than Orion in many respects, though it depends on what exact 'crap' you are talking about.

A recreation of Apollo 8 with ATV-derived hardware? Wow. What an awesome advance in spaceflight and a venture into the unknown...

It is a nice hardware test, maybe... but if we only ever plan to do things that we have done before, we'll never get around to doing stuff we haven't done before.

 

[N_Molson]

The ATV works very well. Add a capsule, + fuel as a payload and you have an Apollo-class spacecraft (+ the Soyuz-like solar arrays).

 

[Urwumpe]

It is a nice hardware test, maybe... but if we only ever plan to do things that we have done before, we'll never get around to doing stuff we haven't done before.

Well, remember that Europe hasn't done it yet. That is a small difference.

 

[Notebook]

I thought this rang a bell, and it has come up before:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8139347.stm

I might even have put that link in Orbiter Forum then.

As we are all skint, and USA has its own projects, I don't know how feasable this is. Might take money away from Skylon too. Shame, as the ATV looks a good base design.

N.

 

[Grover]

its nice to think about this, and its a good way to give the boffins at ESA more to think about than ISS supply, but it has one major problem:

Nobody will pay for it

 

[T.Neo]

Well, remember that Europe hasn't done it yet. That is a small difference.

Not all that exciting, to be honest. Must be the fact that I'm not European.