"At the International Aeronautics Congress in Adelaide, Australia, representatives of NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that they had signed an agreement to work together on venturing into deep space, with the first conceptual goal being a deep space gateway. In plain language, that means we're building a space station somewhere near the moon." popsci.com
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Judging from the frustration of Russian MoD and the Syrian government as well as the bizarre actions of CENTCOM, it would be easy to conclude that the Russian and US government are at complete loggerheads, but, this says something quite different. pl
pl,
This Deep Space Gateway project sounds pretty exciting. I remember the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 when US and Soviet capsules linked up in orbit with the aid of a docking module. As I remember political and military relations between our countries weren’t exactly peachy then either. I was at ROTC summer camp at Fort Bragg at the time and caught some of the coverage at night on the TV in “Willies” under the Officers Club. It made me think that someday we may enjoy the optimistic future of the “Star Trek” universe.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo-soyuz/astp_mission.html
Since Detente and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, there’s been a link between Russian & US scientists, engineers & spacefarers that politicians have not been able to destroy (despite their best efforts).
I think there’s a bond among the people of both nations who desire to transcend policies & arguments that risk war. Links among peoples forged through joint exploration of the cosmos make conflict on Earth seem a bit… childish?
{special recognition for Deke Slayton; born in ’24, WWII bomber pilot, cold warrior in Germany, test pilot & then astronaut … displayed great talent in managing the astronaut corps & dealing w/ NASA bureaucracy… finally getting his ride into space on Apollo-Soyuz}
“The Meaning of “недоговороспособны”
“Not Agreement Capable” (недоговороспособны) is a term Russian diplomats came up with to describe their American counterparts.”
But the “exceptional” nation still lags in rocket design, tech, or production, therefore; it will honor this agreement.
Sir
This is a good example of what our two countries should be focused on. We need to put the Cold War behind us. Unfortunately the neocon and R2P fifth column, the hysterical media and the establishment of the two parties are wedded to conflict and the dissipation of our strength in useless interventions around the world.
It means that the US severely lags in that technology. Nothing more.
I ran across this article from Fivethirtyeight, one of the few places that gave Trump a reasonable shot at winning the Presidency. They appeal to me because they try to look at the way issues are perceived using analytical methods and do a reasonable job of avoiding confirmation bias.
This piece looks at the change in popular opinion about the influence and reliability of the United States. Of the nine countries surveyed, two countries had increased confidence in the United States as well as the President from 2015 to 2017.
They were Russia and Israel. All others declined in both categories including countries like S. Korea and the Philippines. So perhaps the NASA/Russia joint effort isn’t all that surprising.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-world-thinks-of-trump/
I also remember the USSR and USA space-science corps staying in as much and as good touch with eachother as they could even during the political down points.
I think the various RussiaGov personell, from Putin and Lavrov on down; know and understand that Trump would like and would have liked better relations between US and Russia . . . perhaps even all-the-way re-normalized. They see the powerful permagov forces, the Clintonite-Obamacrats, etc. all arrayed against that happening.
Hello Sir,
In plain language, this is an agreement to work out requirements and broad engineering challenges for such a station. No mention of timelines or funding, and remembering the issues faced by the ISS on those fronts may curb some of the enthusiasm. It will happen, but not for a couple of generations IMO.
Regards,
mongo
The US does not lag in space technology. Our one deficit is in maintaining our rocket engine technology and manufacturing capacity. The Russians can help us with that.
doug
I remember it rather differently with respect to Fivethirtyeight’s assessment of Trump’s chances. In fact, I remember being convinced that Nate Silver was intentionally lying.
Here is “7 Times Nate Silver Was Hilariously Wrong About Donald Trump”:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/04/7-times-nate-silver-was-hilariously-wrong-about-donald-trump/
It’ll likely be overshaddowed by Musk. Here is from 2 weeks ago:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E4FY894HyF8
I was also looking at some polling data recently and I noticed two numbers that suprised me. In one poll taken just prior to Trump and Putins first meeting at the G20. It asked G20 citizens who would do ‘the right thing in world affairs’? The only country to give either above 50% was Russia – from momory Russia was T53% P87% and US T47% P30%ish – implying the Russian people are far less jaded/more optomistic than anyone else in the G20. The other suprise for me was a similar poll, with countries not thier leaders, and for Israel I was expecting the two big Muslim countries, Pakistan and Indonesia, to give them the worst rateing (they were 8 & 9%) but Germany was bottom at 7% with Spain at 11%. All from memory so caveat emptor.
40 to 60 years from now?
mongo,
NASA has a more fleshed out plan beyond this agreement. They plan for a lunar orbital station to be in place by the mid-2020s. They see it as a stepping stone to deep space exploration. I would think there would be a lot more robotics involved than in the ISS and full involvement of our commercial space industry. I haven’t found any talk of costs so the time schedule is bound to change, but I am confident I’ll be watching this happen on my digital broadcast TV from the comfort of the same chair I’m sitting in now.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/deep-space-gateway-to-open-opportunities-for-distant-destinations
I missed the first moon landing because I was camping with friends. We laid among the pines on a hilltop watching the moon as Walter Cronkite narrated the event on a small transistor radio. Actually I’m now glad I experienced it that way.
Just when you think we’re getting somewhere:
U.S. Military Chief Says Recommends Providing Ukraine With Lethal Defensive Aid
https://www.rferl.org/a/us-military-chief-dunford-says-recommends-providing-ukraine-lethal-defensive-aid/28759423.html
This recommendation must surely be turned down.
It’ll likely be overshaddowed by Musk
No it will not, Musk is a Steve Jobs V 2.0 selling shiny useless objects to university students. Musk already failed miserably with his Tesla fraud especially the “affordable” one which was discontinued a week ago. All those repeat use rockets are also mostly nice technology demonstrators. It would take a long time to explain a dramatic difference, and massive resources required for space station, especially on the Moon orbit and all those PR “space” projects Musk peddles due to him getting favors with Obama Administrations. Only resources of states and their governments are enough for pulling something of this complexity. But I am sure Musk and his PR department have a good handle on Power Point presentations and CGI.
People like polls that agree with their desires.
Nate was all over the map but gave Trump the highest probability of winning the nomination by 2/16 when the general opinion was more negative.
Then, after Trump won the nomination, Nate was almost alone, and had Trump ahead of the other pollsters all the way to election day. This was met with a great deal of pushback by HRC supporters. The most liberal sites consistently had higher numbers for HRC. Some were apoplectic that Nate was giving Trump any chance at all. Nate’s projections of 2:1 odds for HRC wasn’t enough. Look at HuffPo’s rant about 538:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nate-silver-election-forecast_us_581e1c33e4b0d9ce6fbc6f7f
>> “I get why Silver wants to hedge. It’s not easy to sit here and tell you that Clinton has a 98 percent chance of winning. Everything inside us screams out that life is too full of uncertainty, that being so sure is just a fantasy. But that’s what the numbers say.”
Yep, HuffPo just cranked the numbers. No bias creeping in there -lol.
Sure Nate predicted essentially 0 chance Trump would get the nomination back in 2015. He was in a large crowd. But the fact he was alone in giving Trump even half a chance the week before the election made me take notice. That he had wrong before, but in the opposite direction, just says he probably doesn’t get locked into predicting what he wants to happen but what he believes represents the statistical evidence at the time.
Lot of electoral vote in Florida.
Did somebody mention Star Trek and co-operation with the Russ?
NCC-1701, the Starship Enterprise- its naming reveals a lot. At one time the US Navy controlled most of the aircraft and radio spectrum in the world. A lot of the US amateur radio call signs even today still start with N, mine included. Likewise, the Aircraft registrations start with N. Example- The Spirit of St. Louis (Registration: N-X-211). So, the Enterprise was NC with an extra C added from the CCCP to give it an international, cooperative flavor.
I agree.
Probably much better than watching from the NSA hospital recovering from malaria..
But pretty moeving none the less!
Not to be a troll but it is obvious from your comments about Steve Jobs that you never owned a NeXT Computer. At the time they were far and away the best thing to happen to computing for nerds and data geeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
Hi TTG,
I don’t doubt it — I remember finding some discussion papers on the Voyager probes once when I was doing a journal search for something else… they were published in the mid sixties. It was a lot of fun to go through them.
However, I strongly doubt that NASA’s plans are far enough beyond the conceptual point to begin construction so soon. That article you linked to doesn’t even have an artist’s conception of this station, much less a scale model. There’s a lot of legwork to be done still.
It takes a few years to put up a skyscraper these days (Burj Khalifa took about five I think), and I extrapolate from that to estimate a couple of generations even if we follow a happy path and use the technology and engineering techniques available now. If I were magically tasked with being program director for this I would be adding 100-200% contingency to every task and probably revising upward as I go. 🙂
The construction of such a space station would absolutely have to be done primarily by robots just to save the cost of ferrying people to and from the place. And training them as astronauts.
It will also require highly reliable, high payload launch craft, ideally designed to be broken down for parts and materials at the destination point as opposed to being reusable.
And on, and on. Lots of really cool engineering work needed if the government finds the will to fund it and see it through.
Regards,
mongo