New Mars Forums

clark, I've finally managed to dig up some more info on this earlier Mars initiative:

"International collaboration on all Mars missions will be an important aspect of exploration in the next decade. Many space agencies around the world are considering participation in the planning stages of future missions, including those of Russia, Japan and many European countries. Scientists from the United States are consulting with international partners on the best ways to combine their efforts in Mars exploration. This may result in new proposals for cooperative missions in the first decade of the 21st century.

Among the ongoing programs taking shape is one called "Mars Together", a concept for the joint exploration of Mars by Russia and the United States. The program was initiated in the spring of 1994 and bore its first fruit in the summer of 1995. A Russian co-principal investigator and Russian hardware were incorporated into one experiment, the Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer, to be flown on NASA's Mars Surveyor 1998 orbiter. Vassili Moroz of the Russian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute (IKI) in Moscow will co-lead the experiment with Dr. Daniel McCleese of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Russian institute will also provide the optical bench for the radiometer. In addition, IKI will furnish a complete science instrument, the LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) Atmospheric Sounder, for the 1998 Mars Surveyor lander. Dr. Sergei Pershin of IKI is the principal investigator.

Meanwhile, more extensive collaboration is under consideration for a 2001 mission. A joint U.S.-Russian Mars Together team has been formed to study a combined U.S.-Russian spacecraft launched by a Russian Molniya rocket. The exact configuration is still under study, but Russia expects to include a descent module containing a rover, called Marsokhod, in its portion of the payload.

NASA and the Russian Space Agency have agreed to start planning toward a potential sample return mission in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. A joint science team has been charted to study this possibility."

Link 

Never heard about such an agreement but I'm interested. Can you give me a link?

I'm fully aware of the russians' technological expertise and I admire them very much for it. It's just that they don't have any money to spend on fancy probes to Mars, they have even trouble making their government cough up enough money for Progress and Soyuz flights to the ISS. NASA wouldn't be able to get a single rocket off the ground with a budget as small as theirs...
As to the nuclear fuel: I read that  here.

I'm highly skeptical. There is no confirmation from NASA yet and the russians are always short on money. How are they going to pay for it? And the author of this article seems to be ill informed:

"Despite the deadlock, O'Keefe and Koptev discussed a project for a US-Russian space probe, said a top Russian space official who is working on the launch of a European space probe due to be sent up on June 2 on a Russian rocket [Mars Express].

"Russian and US specialists began working on the Martian project 10 years ago," Vasily Moroz from the Russian Space Research Institute told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

The two sides had considered the possibility of sending a US space probe equipped with a Russian descent module and launched with a Russian booster rocket, but financial issues had stalled work on the project, he said."

I've *never* heard of such a mission before and it would not surprise me at all if the author of this piece (obviously a mainstream journalist) got the facts all messed up. Work on this program started ten years ago and we never heard of it until now? Please...And why use a russian booster for an unmanned Mars mission? Perhaps if it was a really *big* probe it would take an Energia HLV to launch it, but again: that's highly unlikely.

Bezos in Space

Very interesting article from newsweek, check it out.

I think there is now a 'critical mass' of private space ventures. In the very near future (2-3 years) at least one of them will succeed, and that will kick off a new space race. It could even be like a new dot.com hype with investors pouring money into every newly founded space start-up company they can find.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Burt Rutan today unvieled "History's First Private Manned Space Program"

Links:

Burt Rutan rolls out "History's First Private Manned Space Program"

US pioneer plans to offer spaceflights

Scaled Composites

Yeehhaaaa!!!

I have a question: NASA plans to start development of a Shuttle replacement (second generation RLV) sometime around 2010 so that it will be operational by 2020. Originally it was planned to begin development of such a vehicle in 2006 after years of technology development and paper studies (SLI) and to have it operational by 2012. Now they say the OSP will be developed first. SLI has largely been scrapped and what remains is now called the NGLT (Next Generation Launch Technology) program and it's becoming more and more of a joint NASA/DoD program. So far so good. Now my question: Contained within that NGLT program are so called "third generation RLV efforts" and NASA seems determined to have a HTHL scramjet spaceplane as its third generation RLV. There are plans to fly the X-43B in 2010. This craft will be the first one to be powered by a combined cycle engine and will pave the way, according to NASA, for a "Large-Scale Reusable Demonstrator Vehicle" (first flight in 2016) which will finally lead to an operational third generation RLV in 2025. Why then do we need a second generation RLV (probably a "conventional", i.e. rocket powered TSTO design) which would be operational just five years earlier? Surely NASA will not retire its second generation RLV, which will have cost billions to develop, after just five years of service to replace it with a new third generation RLV??? Keep in mind that the Shuttle ('first generation RLV') is currently planned to remain in service until 2022 (!) And where is the money for two multibillion dollar development programs (second and third generation RLV) going to come from???
NASA must develop a coherent longterm strategy for developing a Shuttle replacement within the next 15 years and stop making new plans (that don't make any sense) and revising the whole program again and again so that nothing gets ever build!

Great news! The Duma Committe on Defence has urged President Putin to push for the development of a 'new' RLV: "...a system consisting of an orbital plane, which in Soviet times was under development at the Molniya research-and-production association under the direction of Academician Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky, and a carrier-aircraft. The An-124 and An-225 planes can serve as such carrier-aircraft. The system is capable of deploying a payload weighing up to 11 tonnes into orbit."

If Russia really can find the money to build this system then the US will lose its leading role in space for the foreseeable future. It is becoming increasingly clear that even the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia was not enough to shake up congress and NASA management to make the right decisions (such as phasing out the Shuttles as soon as possible, before 2010, and building either a fully fledged Shuttle replacement or the OSP on an accelerated schedule). Instead, NASA apparently has not the slightest idea where they are going: Enhancing and Replacing NASA's Space Shuttle: Ideas? Yes. Funds? No.

If the so called experts have their way NASA will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on developing a Shuttle escape system (which will further decrease the Shuttle's payload capacity) and, to justify the expense, keep the Shuttles flying until 2022 (!). With luck we'll get the OSP by 2010 but the program is already widely criticized and I think there is a very real possibility that it will be cancelled when they have done half of the work (remember Shuttle II, NASP, X-33, SLI).
Russia on the other hand will have a modern innovative launch system which will be an order of magitude cheaper to operate than the Shuttle/OSP.

Go Russia!

The Russians were no the only ones interested in air-launched vehicles. Check out these links:

Air-Launched Sortie Vehicle - design by Boeing

Air-Launched Sortie Vehicle - design by Rockwell International

From the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project's website:

In the Summer of 2002, both the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project and the Revolutionary Propulsion Research Project, that were part of ASTP's "Revolutionary Research Investment Area," were removed from the ASTP.   There is presently no funding available to continue the BPP Project.

It seems the decision was made sometime in january 2003. MSFC's efforts to reproduce Podkletnov's results (gravity-shielding) were funded through BPPP. Now that the funding has been cut we won't see any verfification or falsification for a long time and are left wondering if he was really on to something or not.
However, I read Podkletnov is continuing his research and perhaps Boeing and Lockheed have already begun their own research programs. There was a report in JDW last year hinting at such a possibility.
If I were a die hard conspiracy theorist I'd say the military has pressured NASA to abandon their reserach in this area since they don't want to see this out in the open yet. After all the team at MSFC came very close to actually testing the device they had built...

There will be no tower. They plan to connect the cable to an oceangoing platform (modified oil-rig).

When NASA rolls out its FY 2004 budget on Monday a large new planetary exploration mission will be revealed. The Bush Adminstration has signed off on a multi-billion-dollar-class mission dubbed "Jupiter Tour' - a mission which embodies a radical departure from the past four decades of planetary exploration.

Jupiter Tour would utilize a sophisticated spacecraft capable of multiple jumps from an orbit around one jovian moon to an orbit around another. Such a capability will allow close, detailed, and long-term studies to be made of many of the members of Jupiter's retinue of 40 (or more) moons.

The mission is slated for the 2009/2010 time frame and is expected to last more than a decade. Jupiter Tour will use an advanced nuclear-powered propulsion system developed under the umbrella of the newly-focused "Prometheus" program.

The cost of the program is projected to be at least $3 billion through Fiscal Year 2008.

From nasawatch/spaceref.com