Hermes

Okay; it's a very, very old project, cancelled in 1993, but maybe some of you are too young to have known what was the HERMES project. The european space shuttle.

Class: Manned. Type: Spaceplane. Nation: France. Agency: ESA. Manufacturer: Dassault.
The Hermes spaceplane began as a purely French project. As development costs increased, France managed to obtain other European funding, primarily from Germany, for development of the spacecraft. Hermes would have provided independent European manned access to space, and the weight growth of the spacecraft during design and development was a major driver in the specification for the Ariane 5 space launcher. Hermes was designed to take three astronauts to orbits of up to 800 km altitude on missions of 30 to 90 days in space. Payload to be returned to earth could be contained in a small payload bay, but most experiments were included in an expendable pressurised supply module, equipped with a docking port, mounted to the base of the glider. After the Challenger disaster many safety precautions were added, leading to yet further weight and cost growth. In an emergency the crew cab could have been separated from the remainder of the glider. Yet later the crew escape capsule idea was abandoned and replaced by three Martin Baker ejection seats to save weight. Hermes was to have been launched atop an Ariane 5 by 1998, but by 1992 estimated development costs rose to DM 12 billion and the project was cancelled.





Some link :

www.friends-partners.ru...

It was a very interesting concept, originally put forth in the 1960s in the US as the X-20 Dyna Soar. It was an early space shuttle design, and would have ridden to orbit on top of the Titan missle. It was cancelled in the 60s, but if not, it would have put us in orbit well before the space shuttle.

www.astronautix.com...

www.deepcold.com...

www.worldspaceflight.com...

And even more interesting was the earlier concept put forth by German engineer Eugene Sanger...

www.ad-astra.net...

there is a brittish man, attempting to become the first private manned space mission!!