[FPSPACE] Tiangong -- is it even feasible?

[Bart Hendrickx]

Philip Clark wrote :

 

>We know that one of the Soyuz designs - Soyuz-P?? - was for the launch of a
small lab module which looked like the original drawings of Cosmos 186-188,
and >then piloted Soyuz craft would visit them.   Has there ever been an
indication of how long such visits would be?   Only a week or two, I would
guess - not in >excess of a month, anyway.

 

The Tiangong concept has reminded me as well of a Soyuz-based manned
reconnaissance station conceived around 1963 by the Kozlov design bureau in
Kuibyshev (then known as Branch nr. 3 of the Korolyov design bureau, now
TsSKB/Progress). This was known as Soyuz-R and basically consisted of a
Soyuz service module with the orbital and descent modules replaced by a
single, long work compartment. It would have remained within the launch
capacity of the standard Soyuz rocket and crews would have been ferried to
it by standard Soyuz vehicles. Unfortunately, the available sources do not
say how long these visits would have lasted.  Soyuz-R was cancelled in 1966
in favour of Chelomei's Almaz space station, although the concept was
briefly revived (in a slightly different form) around the turn of the decade
by the Korolyov bureau itself (under the name Soyuz-VI). To the best of my
knowledge, no official drawings of Soyuz-R have ever been published, but a
drawing on Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica probably gives a good idea
of what it would have looked like :  

 <http://www.astronautix.com/craft/soyuzr.htm>
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/soyuzr.htm

 

 

The design philosophy behind Tiangong may be quite similar : to develop a
small, Shenzhou-based man-tended space laboratory that uses the same launch
vehicle as  Shenzhou itself.

 

Bart Hendrickx

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