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The moon, Mars, and a space shuttle of their own
The
Soviet Union was first in space, first with artificial satellites and
then first with dogged missions, manned missions, womaned missions, and
space stations. NASA was unable to catch up until the moon landing,
marking a gigantic first that hasn't been accomplished since. But the
Soviets still dreamt big until the very end. Here are five of their most
ambitious programs that never quite got as far as they planned.
Space Shuttle
Ralph Mirebs
The
space shuttle was a three-decade workhorse for the American space
program. From 1981 to 2011, it was how we got to orbit. Despite the two
tragedies of Challenger and Columbia, it was largely
successful, ferrying up parts for the International Space Station,
deploying the Hubble Space Telescope, testing out new technologies, and
once taking up a lightsaber.
The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle.
Called Buran, it came on the scene in 1988. It flew exactly once. With
superficial resemblances to the American space shuttle program, many
called it a knock-off. But according to Buran.su,
the Soviet version had some design differences that set it apart from
the American shuttle program. It was designed to be entirely autonomous
if need be, and its one and only mission was entirely unmanned, reaching
orbit and returning to Earth without a pilot inside the ship.
Buran
lacked the rear engines of the American shuttle. Instead, the Soviets
worked on a heavy lift Energia rocket which would be responsible for
firing the system into orbit. Energia was designed as a reusable system.
Two of its four booster stages would deploy parachutes after they were
expended, allowing them to fall gently to the ground for retrieval. (If
this sounds familiar, it's because Elon Musk and SpaceX are trying to
get reusable rockets to work now, a quarter-century later.)
While
NASA's shuttle program launched a few classified payloads for the
Pentagon, Buran was built to be more outright militaristic. It was even
designed to deploy nuclear weapons out of its shuttle bay. You know,
just in case. But it was ultimately cancelled in 1993, and the original
craft was unofficially decommissioned in 2002 when the roof at the Baikonur complex collapsed.
Of course, it wasn't a total loss. As you may have seen in the past few days, somebody named Ralph Mirebs gained access to the derelict facility at Baikonur,
returning stunning images of the shuttle bay with Buran still inside.
Two of the derelict prototypes are still out in the hangar.
Moon Landing
Slavinskas
The
Americans Apollo missions remain the only successful manned missions to
the moon—or the surface of any other world. The Soviet Union had grand
plans to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface before the USA, but the
mission never launched. However, as historian Marcus Lindroos writes, the USSR refused to acknowledge this failure until the nation was close to collapse in 1989.
Planning
began in 1963. A series of successive Soyuz rockets would have put
cosmonauts into higher and higher near-Earth orbit until the space
agency would go for a complete orbit around the Moon. The Luna missions
would attempt unmanned soft landings as a lead-up to a manned soft
landing on moon.
In
addition to political turbulence back in the USSR, a few key events
derailed the mission to the moon. In 1967, the Soyuz 1 craft crashed
after its parachute failed to deploy, killing occupant Vladimir Komarov.
In addition, a series of unmanned test flights failed to reach lunar
orbit, further setting back Soviet plans. Specifically, Lindroos, says
the failure of the Zond-6 craft showed the flaws of the automated system
that would take cosmonauts to the moon.
The
Soviets managed to dock Soyuz 4 and 5, creating what some have called
"the first space station" in orbit and taking a step toward the moon.
However, before they could take additional steps, their heavy lift craft
(the N1) exploded on the pad, causing widespread damage. Finally, in
1969, Americans successfully made it to the moon, and Russia's plan to
send humans there faded as a priority.
Things could have been different. While the Soviet Space Agency didn't have the rockets, it did have full-scale lunar landers at the ready. Today, though, they're stuck on Earth in a museum in Moscow. One of the would-be Soviet moon suits is also on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Manned Flybys of Venus and Mars
Wikimedia Commons
The Apollo program flirted ever-so-briefly with the idea of capping off the program with an ambitious flyby of Venus and Mars.
It never went beyond the planning stages. Russia had a similar plan,
and while it never got further than planning on paper, it was much more
fleshed out and less of a pipe dream than what NASA was thinking about.
The Soviets even drew up plans to build the spacecraft in Earth orbit.
In the decades since, only space station components have been
successfully assembled off-planet.
According to Brian Harvey in Soviet and Russian Space Exploration,
the Russians were aware of the development of the Saturn V rocket and
wanted to outperform the Americans. As early as 1959, they were already
laying the groundwork for a manned recon of Mars and Venus. The
timetable placed the mission in 1971, and the Soviets went as far as to
subject three cosmonauts—Andrei Bozhko, Boris Ulibishev, and German
Manovtsev—to a year-long test mission on Earth
meant to simulate the isolation of long-term space travel. "The sheer
duration of it, the monotony… It's hard. I mean the regimen, little
things get to you," Manovtsev later told Russia Today.
In
his assessment, Harvey went as far as to suggest that Russia's
underplanning for the lunar missions, including an initial mission draft
calling for sending up only about 50 tonnes, may have been evidence
that there was no serious plans for lunar missions—that a Mars flyby was
the Soviet Union's real goal. But America's lunar ambitions shifted
course for the Soviet space programme, causing them to focus their
energies on getting to the moon first. By 1966, the Mars plan was
largely dead.
Military Space Station
Wikimedia Commons
The
space race wasn't all peaceful exploration. After all, many rockets
used in the early space program doubled as intercontinental ballistic
missiles. But the Soviets had something no other nation has
(acknowledgedly) had: a manned military outpost in space.
The
Almaz program sent three total missions into space. The first, Salyut
2, failed after reaching orbit. Salyuts 3 and 5 were successful,
entering orbit in 1974 and 1976. They were test projects for wider space
militarization, even including Rikhter R-23 rapid fire cannons on board
Salyut 3. Both of those spacecrafts were purported to be for peaceful
purposes while actually serving as testbeds for military recon in space.
(According to Lance K. Erickson,
the Salyut 3 cannon was fired only once, on the last day of operations
of the station.) A fourth station, called the OPS-4, was planned but
scrapped. Simply put, the Soviet government found that orbital military
outposts weren't as efficient as reconnaissance satellites.
Of
course, none of this was a total secret. There were a few signs, to the
public at large, that the space stations weren't as peaceful as they
claimed. For one, the Soviet agency bragged that it managed to spend the
longest duration in orbit affixed to any one point at the ground below,
requiring 500,000 firings of the rocket thrusters, according to Philip Baker.
Baker also hints that the cannon "weapon test" was performed in such a
direction that the projectiles would quickly re-enter the atmopshere and
burn up.
Had the Almaz program continued, the militarization of space, which was called for by such peaceful folk as Barry Goldwater and seriously proposed by other factions in the United States government, might have gained more momentum. Then again, what is X-37B doing up there?
Asteroid Sample Return
NASA Dawn
The
USSR's space agency planned an asteroid mission in 1991. It would have
visited Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, extracted
a sample, and returned it to Earth. The joint project between France
and Russia hit a little snag, though. It was delayed to 1994, and then
cancelled entirely when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
According to Brian Harvey,
the spacecraft would have used a Mars flyby to launch a probe to Vesta.
To augment the mission, the scientists also might have tried to drop a
payload toward Mars, perhaps landing it by balloon.The exact details
about the mission continued to change as the USSR's political fortunes
grew more dire. The final plan for the spacecraft was a grand tour of
five asteroids after a Mars flyby, launching in 1996 and wrapping up its
main mission in 2001. While plenty of planning went into the mission
(and the European Space Agency became an eventual collaborator), no
concrete hardware came out of the proposal.
Even
after the collapse, the mission held on ever-so-briefly in a
post-Soviet mission manifest for 1992, but disappeared thereafter.
The Race To Mine Asteroids Gains International Support
Today, the Luxembourg Government announced that they aretaking steps to become Europe’s hub for mining space resources.
The small European country plans to establish the necessary legal and regulatory framework and invest in related research and development projects. They’re even considering investing in already-established asteroid mining companies like the U.S. based Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources.
This announcement comes shortly after the United States took a huge step forward in making commercial space mining legal. President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA) in November, which stated that U.S. companies are entitled to maintain property rights of resources they’ve obtained from outer space.
Asteroid mining concept / Image courtesy of Deep Space Industries
Mining resources from space isn’t the first initiative the country, with a population of just over half a million people, has pursued in the space industry. SES, a company that owns and operates over 50 geostationary satellites, is also based in Luxembourg.
Regulatory Peace of Mind
Mining resources in space is not an easy – or cheap – business. CSLCA gave space mining companies peace of mind that they will be able to maintain property rights to resources they extract.
CSLCA explicitly outlined private sector rights which were only implicitly stated in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the prevailing international law on these matters. Now that CSLCA has been passed in the U.S., it reduces regulatory risk for domestic companies investing millions of dollars into the technology required to properly mine space resources.
With today’s announcement Luxembourg is on its way to become the second country to lay the groundwork required to make space mining a reality.
The Value of Space Resources
Established space mining companies today are generally interested in two destinations: asteroids and the moon. The companies that Luxembourg has stated an interest in, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, have focused their attention on asteroids.
The website Asterank maintains a list of known asteroids in the solar system. Based on an asteroid’s composition and today’s current market prices for metals and minerals, it determines an asteroid’s current value. Some of the asteroids in Asterank’s database are worth more than $100 trillion.
That is an unthinkably high value for the market of asteroid mining. But before you get too excited, there are other factors to consider.
Asteroids included on this list have different orbits, spin rates and orbital speeds. Some are too far out, spin too quickly about their axis, or are moving too fast in their orbit to reasonably select as a mining destination.
Ultimately, only a portion of these asteroids will be worth a company’s time.
Today, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are working to identify the best asteroid candidates. Both companies are building small spacecraft that will be used to prospect promising asteroids.
After the prospecting work is completed, these companies will need to conquer the next difficult task: determining a cost-effective extraction strategy.
There are a few different options for asteroid mining companies. A company could harvest an asteroid for water which can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen and used to create rocket propellant. This would essentially transform asteroids into gas stations where traveling spacecraft could stop and refuel, extending their mission lifetime.
Alternatively, companies may extract raw material from an asteroid and then bring this material back to sell on Earth.
Regarding this second strategy, many are quick to question the value of the asteroids in Asterank’s database. Critics cite the important factor that if you add a large amount of a rare resource to the market, that resource no longer rare and will decrease in value. Some of the asteroids are calculated to be worth $100 trillion simply because they’re rich with resources that are limited here on Earth.
However, the situation is more complicated than that. If one asteroid mining company owns the majority of the supply, they can hold great influence over the value of that material.
Consider the diamond industry where, for over 80 years, De Beers held an international monopoly. During their monopolistic reign, the company was able to strongly control the price of diamonds by influencing the supply in the market.
It’s possible that one of these asteroid mining companies could do the same with various space-based resources.
A Problem Worth Tackling
There are many expensive steps that will be required for any company to successfully make money from asteroid resources. However, providing the necessary legal framework is an important first step in order to encourage innovation and investment in this area.
When asked whether they saw this as a competition with Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries told TechCrunch, “We don’t look at it as ‘competing’ with PRI, as much as working together to build a viable long-term industry. At this stage of the game, what benefits one of us, benefits all of us.”
To date, there have only been two successful robotic sample return missions from planetary bodies in our solar system. Comet dust particles were collected in NASA’s Stardust mission, and microscopic asteroid particles were collected from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa probe.
Sample return missions, even those that are only capable of bringing back microscopic particles, are very expensive. NASA’s Stardust mission, for example, was nearly $200 million.
Determining a cost effective way to bring back exponentially more material will be a challenge for the asteroid mining industry.
But with the value of asteroids potentially in the trillions of dollars, it’s a problem worth tackling. Having more countries join the United States and Luxembourg and contribute to research and development will help the private industry work on these problems faster.
Deep Space Industries told TechCrunch, “the country’s willingness to help support research and development in this area could be very beneficial to increasing the pace of the industry’s progress.”
NASA’s New Super-Fast Solar Ship May Have Just Revolutionized How We Explore Space
Instead of a traditional, chemical propellant, it’s powered by photons from the sun and can travel nearly 64,000 miles per hour.
It took NASA’s Voyager I probe 35
years to reach the edge of our solar system and enter interstellar ut a lot has changed in space technology since Voyager launched
in 1977. NASA’s new space sail—propelled only by the sun—can make that same trip in 20 years.
On Tuesday (Feb. 2), NASA announced that the Space Launch System—the rocket that replaced the space shuttle and will eventually send humans to Mars—will carry 13 small satellites (called CubeSats) on its inaugural flight in 2018. One of those satellites is the Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout, a space vessel that runs on light.
NEA Scout, whose solar technology some believe to be the future of space travel, is detailed in an excellent profile in National Geographic. The satellite’s initial destination is asteroid 1991 VG. It’ll do some recon on the asteroid’s size, movement, and composition, so that NASA is better prepared when the time comes to send humans there (or to similar asteroids).Instead of a traditional, chemical propellant, it’s powered by photons from the sun pelting its ultrathin sail, which is about the size of a school bus. The sail is made of plastic with aluminum coating, and is as thin as a single strand of human hair. According to National Geographic, it’ll fly up to speeds of 63,975 miles per hour (28.6 kilometers per second).
The trip to 1991 VG is just a fraction of the distance a spacecraft like NEA Scout is capable of traveling. “In the future, solar sails can take spacecraft to the outermost regions of the solar system faster than ever before,” said Les Johnson, NEA Scout’s solar sail principal investigator, on NASA’s website.
Normal propellants slowly burn up during long journeys, causing the spacecraft to slow down. Solar sails, however, don’t have that problem—the sun never stops shining.
“A sail wins the race in terms of final velocity because it’s the tortoise and the hare,” Johnson told National Geographic. That means solar sails can travel extremely long distances relatively quickly. The catch is that its payload must be light for the spacecraft to accelerate, since its source of power (the sun) is constant.
The nonprofit research organization Planetary Society, led by scientist Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” is also developing solar sailing technology in its LightSail project. “We strongly believe this could be a big part of the future of interplanetary missions,” Nye told the New York Times (paywall) last year.
NASA is now investigating something called electric sails, or “e-sails.” Instead of a single solar sail, e-sails use several long, razor-thin coils that sprout from the center of the spacecraft. When charged particles in solar wind reach the spacecraft, they’re repelled by the electric field that the coils create—propelling the spacecraft forward.
E-sails can move up to 93 miles per second (150 km per second). At those speeds, an e-sail could reach the end of the solar system in just 10 years. Perhaps one day, they’ll sail far beyond that.
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