Russia upping the price of Soyuz flights in 2012?

David Spain wrote:
Pat Flannery writes:

They've been playing around with all sorts of Soyuz replacement designs:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/acts.html
With the problem, as usual, being lack of funding to get beyond the design
stage.

Umm, not to be a PITA or anything, but you notice something unusual in that
picture? Like something missing? Like something to do with heat?

Assuming you mean a heatshield and not radiators*, in this painting the
return module is shown with its sides covered with shuttle-style tiles:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/ppts.html
There is a Soyuz-style jettisonable heatshield on the bottom:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/image...ield_sep_1.jpg
That uncovers the landing legs and landing rockets.
I'll say one thing for them, and that is that they have real balls to
have the normal landing be entirely via rockets instead of rockets and
parachutes...although the emergency landing system uses a parachute,
leaving one wondering what the advantages of this approach is:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/image...sion_sep_1.jpg
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/image...bottom_r_1.jpg
Unless you crank up the landing rockets at fairly high altitude to make
sure they are working right, you will be too low to jettison the bottom
part of the spacecraft and use the parachute.
You will also descend on your parachute straight into the fire created
when the bottom part of the spacecraft with the landing legs and rockets
explodes on impact directly under you.
Just like Orion with its airbags, if this thing becomes reality that
whole legs/landing rocket system will probably be the first thing to be
deleted, and it will land under a parachute with terminal rocket
braking, just like a Soyuz.

*The radiators apparently wrap around the outside of the propulsion module.

Pat