Corindia wrote:Ioudaia wrote:Oooh! If there's external space, how about something like the Wake Shield Facility? Perhaps it could be mounted on a boom, and the ScantArm used to move it back to an airlock so astronauts could change the experiment modules on it.
If it's just mounted on a boom what makes this any different than the external mounting options that already exist?
Well, you said there was "external racking". I was thinking of relative small-scale racks. The original Wake Shield Facility was 3m/10' in diameter. It also trailed in the wake of the Space Shuttle, and I don't know if mounting to a trailing surface will produce the same hard vacuum. But if neither of those are a problem, sure, it can be slapped into an existing rack.
Corindia wrote:Ioudaia wrote:Based on my extravagant spending on unmanned missions, I'm going to say that my manned space program is still under development. Since you wanted to avoid getting "15 minutes into the future" what about a spacecraft that combines technologies from previous/existing ships? For example, a heavily modifed Soyuz using the Space Shuttle's ceramic tiles for full reuseablity, and landing like the prototyped Gemini hang-glider system. It doesn't break any new scientific ground, it's just a little clever engineering. I don't think it's too different in concept from many of the weapons people are selling in the region.
That's novel, but I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work. Would be an interesting addition to the potential resupply fleet.
It's novel because it's not an optimal design, except for being cheap to launch. Larger reuseable vehicles are more cost-effective overall, but launching more mass still takes more money. For a nation with few manned spaceflight ambitions, it's not worth the cost.
So... I'll say we have the ship in development with test flights planned for this year. That way, it'll be available for space station missions soon(ish) after the first modules of the space station reach orbit. More stuff to add to factbooks... it never ends.