MarsBlog.net

This may come as some surprise to Bruce and Dennis and the “anti-militarization” gang, but it turns out that the Russians have had weapons in space for decades:

In 1976, a Soyuz spacecraft came down in a freezing squall and splashed into a lake; the crew spent the night bobbing in the capsule.

Eleven years before that, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 2,000 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That’s when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft.

Keith Cowing has some interesting documents that describe contingency plans for an emergency Soyuz landing in North America.

[tip: Carl Carlsson]

Keith Cowing has posted an interesting little document: Report on Top-Level Assessment of Use of Apollo Systems for ISS CRV.

When the expanded OSP requirements were issued a month or so ago, a bunch of us chuckled over the notion that a resurrected Apollo CSM could meet most of them. It seemed like a joke at first, but it soon became one of those “It’s so crazy, it just might work!” ideas.

This study is eye-opening, mainly for the mere fact that NASA is considering it at all. For one thing, it is in a sense a huge step backwards — politically/PR-wise, if not in fact. They’ve spent three decades and hundreds of billions of dollars developing, demonstrating, flying, and improving the CSM’s winged replacement, and a few billion more on failed winged replacements for the Shuttle itself, only to come back to the capsule vehicle they started with. There is real risk that, should such a concept be adopted for OSP, the agency could make itself the target for severe criticism from the public and Congress, on the premise that those billions of dollars were wasted somehow.

Worse for the agency would be the implication that they can’t make a winged vehicle that will work any better than Shuttle. It could be seen by the public as an admission of failure, a retreat from innovation into the safety of the tried and true…”America just can’t do space anymore.”

It’s also surprising for internal political reasons. The resurrection of an old design lacks the glamour of and opportunities to develop radical new technology. While much that is new would still need to be developed — the guidance and navigation systems, for instance, which no one would really want to even try to replicate today, given three decades of innovation to play with — those opportunities would be strictly limited.

At first I was opposed to the whole “capsule OSP” notion, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I think Keith Cowing, in his blurb for Alan Boyle, captures my own opinion on this concept very well:

?If America is looking to build a capsule simply because it doesn?t have money to build something more sophisticated, with wings, then shame on us,? he said. ?However, if this capsule and the modular approach ? an approach that could include missions outside low Earth orbit ? is what?s under consideration, then yahoo!?

It appears that NASA is laying the groundwork for a UAV for use on Mars.