Posted on 03/09/2008 5:52:23 AM PDT by Truth29
KOUROU, French Guiana (AFP) — The European Space Agency on Sunday carried out the maiden launch of a massive robot freighter designed to rendezvous automatically with the orbital space station.
The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), a nearly 20-tonne payload the size of a London double-decker bus, blasted into the skies aboard a beefed-up Ariane 5 launcher, an AFP reporter saw. After being placed in orbit, the cylinder-shaped craft will deploy its solar panels and gently find its way to the International Space Station (ISS) and berth with it. The launch had initially been scheduled for Saturday but was postponed for further checks.
The ATV will deliver seven and a half tonnes of food, water, pressurised air, fuel and personal items to the ISS crew. After docking, the ATV will use its engines to propel the station, which is being gently tugged earthwards by terrestrial gravity and lingering atmospheric molecules, to a safer height in low orbit.
After six months or so, the craft will detach from the ISS, taking with it rubbish accumulated during the station's mission. The trash and freighter will then safely disintegrate over the Pacific, mission scientists say.
Weighing 11 tonnes unloaded, measuring 10.3 metres (33.5 feet) long and 4.5 metres (16.25 feet) wide and laden with hi-tech optical navigation, docking sensors and communications equipment, the ATV has cost ESA 1.3 billion euros (1.96 billion dollars). The payload, handled by an Ariane 5 ES, is the biggest undertaken by ESA yet. It will be placed in orbit at an altitude of 260 kilometres (160 miles), and then take about two weeks to edge up to the ISS, in order to test its systems and wait patiently for the departure of a US space shuttle, the Endeavour, before docking with the station.
Deployment of the ATV has been put off for some four years because of delays in assembling the ISS after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in February 2003. The first ATV is named after Jules Verne, the French author who pioneered science fiction. Four more cargo ships are in the works, with their assembly and launch each costing just over 300 million euros. Europe's other major contribution to the ISS has been a 1.4-billion-euro science module which was attached to the burgeoning orbital outpost last month.
The ISS, whose assembly began in 1998, now has a mass of more than 240 tonnes and is so big that it can be seen at night with the naked eye, perceptible as a small, moving star (location details on (http://heavens-above.com/)). French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed the successful launch as a "major European contribution" to the ISS's functioning.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and European affairs minister Jean-Pierre Jouyet said it was a "result of European cooperation in strategic top technology". "France and Germany, which had a special role in developing this space craft, are today reaping the benefits of their cooperation," they said in a joint statement.
ping!
Ping
Cool. Not the tech I hoped we’d have by now, but the more the merrier.
Not to burst their bubble here, but shouldn't they hold most of the crowing until after it successfully docks with the ISS, and then the rest when it successfully undocks and burns up, without going Chinese (as in hazardous debris)?
Mir had a collision or two with supply vessel (okay, the USSR went bare bones, and ditched the radar docking equipment...).
There was a 1987-1990 concept for a cargo version of the Shuttle called Shuttle C that was unmanned. The idea was "...abandoned when it was found the concept had no cost advantage over existing expenable launch vehicles."
However, if they had gone to the advanced Five-segment shuttle solid rocket boosters* and added one or two extras to the present two boosters and an enlarged main fuel tank for the three SSME engines, they would have a system capable of delivering 75-85 tons into Lunar orbit.
As there was once a plan to use the shuttle's empty fuel tanks in orbit as segments for a space station, so I've often thought that with some tweaking, these enlarged fuel tanks would journey on to the Moon to be used as segments of a future Lunar base. Lowered into a trench system and then covered with six feet or so of Lunar backfill, they would be well shielded living compartments.
I have often said that two of the initial things needed for Lunar Missions is a Lunar GPS system and prepositioned supply and solar/nuclear power generator units landed at the site picked near the Moon's south or north poles. The Shuttle C offered a starting point for this but it is now a mute point.
BTW I was 22 when we first landed on Moon and all the dreams and bright future of Lunar Exploration when to hell in a hand basket with the change in NASA's manned missions aimed at the shuttle and space station. They were worth goals, but nothing compared to placing a permanent manned presence on the Moon and on Mars and on out into the solar system and to the stars!
Yeah, yeah, the boo-birds can crow, but I still want to go to the Moon, but they won't be booking any spaces for 60 years old fat fuds like me anytime soon.
I feel like Delos Harriman from Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, but for me, there will not be any Requiem.
*One of these 5-Segment boosters is currently being developed as the first stage of the coming Project Constellation "Orion" manned space program.
Let's see if that's enough to get the Boeing crowd to show up with their disinformation campaign.
Updates on http://www.space.com/ISS/ and http://spaceflightnow.com/ reporting that 1/4 of the thrusters have been shut down.
A problem was detected with the propellant mix and a system automatically disabled them.
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