Craft Will Overshadow Soyuz's Size
Russian engineers have
begun design work on a new spacecraft that would be twice as big
and spacious as the existing Soyuz crew capsules, the nation's top
space official said Tuesday. The new craft will be able to carry at
least six cosmonauts and have a reusable crew section, Russian
Aerospace Agency director Yuri Koptev said at a news conference.
Soyuz carries three cosmonauts and isn't reusable.
The spacecraft, designed by the RKK Energiya company, will have
a takeoff weight of 12-14 metric tons (13-15 tons) -- about twice
as much as the Soyuz, which was developed in the late 1960s.
Energiya has also proposed developing a new booster rocket based on
its Soyuz booster to carry the new spacecraft to orbit. Koptev
wouldn't say how long it could take to build the spacecraft or how
much it would cost, but said that Energiya had done a lot of work
on the new vehicle already.
"It has already reached a serious project stage while the
Americans are only talking about their spacecraft," Koptev said,
referring to U.S. plans to build a new spacecraft as a replacment
for the aging Space Shuttle fleet. President George W. Bush's plan
of returning astronauts to the moon and flying to Mars and beyond
envisages phasing out the shuttle in 2010 and building a new
spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which is set to
make its first manned mission no later than 2014.
Koptev said that his agency was willing to consider possible
participation in the planned U.S. moon and Mars missions, but
hadn't yet received any formal proposals from NASA. At the same
time, he reaffirmed his skepticism about Bush's space plan, saying
that the U.S. administration would have trouble raising resources
for the planned missions.
"There is no explanation whatsoever where the money needed to
implement the declared program would come from," Koptev said. He
added that more robotic missions to moon and Mars could be useful
but sending humans there seemed too costly and inefficient for
now.
"It's necessary to switch from emotions to pragmatic assessment:
how much it would cost, where the money would come from and what we
would get from such manned missions," Koptev said.
Koptev said that the prospective Russian spacecraft would be
intended for orbital flights, not moon missions. He also
noted that Russia and other partners in the 16-nation International
Space Station were waiting for the United States to clarify how the
orbiting outpost would be run after 2010 when U.S. space shuttles
will retire.
Koptev said that Russia would be willing to offer its Soyuz
spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the station after the
U.S. shuttles retire, but that would require renegotiating the
original documents on the station. Russian Soyuz and Progress
spacecraft have served as the only link to the station since the
U.S. shuttle fleet was grounded pending investigation into the
destruction of the shuttle Columbia during its return to Earth in
February 2003.
Koptev said that his agency has enough funds to send the two
Soyuz and two Progress spacecraft necessary to operate the station
this year. He said that Russian and European space officials are
currently negotiating the possibility of sending a European
astronaut on a six-month mission to the station in a Soyuz.
Several European astronauts so far have flown only week-long
missions to the station.