Slashdot Mirror
Mickey Mouse Propels ISS To New Heights
TOTKChief writes "Aviation Now is reporting that NASA will use the Structural Test Article for the new Propulsion Module design for the International Space Station. NASA Watch is carrying a good rendering of the concept as well as a rendering of what the Prop Module would look like attached to ISS. FWIW, this is called the "Mickey Option" because of the resemblance to Mickey Mouse. Only the Feds would choose the Mickey Mouse route, right?"
But there's also the New Jersey Devils who were initially titled a "Mickey Mouse team" by Wayne Gretsky, then proceeded to win 2 cups in a little over a decade.
Apple was called a "Mickey Mouse computer company" before they inflitrated schools everywhere and made millions.
If you believe in luck, calling something "Mickey Mouse" is probably the best suggestion of all.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Currently, the Russians have the only spacecraft capable of refuelling fuel tanks in orbit, and that's the Progress freighter. The Russians also have the only automated docking technology (KURS, used on Mir and the ISS), the cheapest and most reliable person transport (Soyuz, in service for over 30 years), and so on.
Despite this, the western press still paints this image of Russian space hardware as being obsolete and unsafe! It's amazing, fewer Russians have died in space than US astronauts, and the Russians/Soviets have spent YEARS more in space then we have. Mir is a functional spacestation now with a proven reliabillity and track record while the ISS can't even properly scrub CO2 when there's more then 3 people onboard, they have to run vents from the shuttle!
Now, we're paying Boeing millions additional to build these fuel tanks that can only be refuelling through a $500 million space shuttle launch? Look, if you ask nice, you can probably get a Progress-type fueller system installed! It'll cost 10% of what we're spending to make this half-ass system work, and it'll use existing technologies that have been proven since the Salyut stations in the 70s.
Before anyone starts making cracks about dangerous Russian space and obsolete hardware, remember that the US doesn't have ANYTHING for space station ops other then the Shuttle, and the state of the US space station art hasn't changed since Skylab.
If we're serious about building our own technologies so that we don't rely on Russian economics, we need to get federal startup money for companies like Roton (www.rotaryrocket.com), Kistler (www.kistleraerospace.com) and most importantly, get 100% behind the European ATV, a cargo freighter that performs what Progress does but carries something like 5 times the cargo and fuel to the ISS. Think of it like the old Soviet Star modules for Salyut, except launched on the Ariane 5.
Of course, the best space freighter would be a cleverly tricked out Corellian freighter, but that'll just have to wait a bit...
And it's cost us a hell of a lot of money. The trouble is that for all of the advances in computing technology, which is governed by Moore's Law, the tecnology involved in keeping people alive and healthy in space has hardly advanced at all in the last 30 years. The always round the corner drop in costs for getting stuff into orbit have yet to materialise, and the ISS is just not practical.
The whole point of the ISS was never anything more than a showpiece to get people interested in space again. There's no serious research going on up there, all of the money is going into providing living quarters and equipment for a small crew of people. It would be far more practical to have a set of automated laboratories up there engaged in experiments which could be controlled from the ground, but people have this rediculously quaint idea that people have to be there!
This level of pandering to the sentimentality of the masses is both impractical and foolish. The ISS will never be more than a blip on the attention of a public too jaded from MTV to care, and all of the valuable research that could have been funded with the absurd sums of money they spent on it will never happen.
Maybe NASA needs to start thinking of science rather than ratings.
"FWIW, this is called the "Mickey Option" because of the resemblance to Mickey Mouse. Only the Feds would choose the Mickey Mouse route, right?"
Micky Mouse operations have been the USGov's Standard Operating Procedure for the last several decades (minimum) -- at least now they're admiting it!
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
If the US is serious about living in space, we need to build larger structures. The easiest way to do that economically is to use the external fuel tanks from the space shuttle.
Each launch takes an external tank 95% of the way into orbit then throws it away. The shuttle would not need to store extra fuel to hold onto it through the OMS-2 burn (orbit circularization), it would be able to do it with the onboard supplies.
Once in orbit, a tank could be converted (in 1 launch) to a living space 4 times that of the completed International Space Station (39 launches). On the second launch, attach the next tank by a cable to the first one. Spin them and you have a space station with artificial gravity.
The best part of artificial gravity is that you get to stop re-inventing the wheel. No $5,000,000 toilets to work in zero g, no $300,000 anti-torque wrenches, nothing. You just use normal stuff from earth at a significant savings, plus you don't have to worry about muscle degradation.
Need microgravity? Set up a farm of External Tanks to fly free next to the manned station. This is better anyhow because you don't distrurb experiments when using the treadmill or running into walls.
Serious effort has been put into determining the feasibility of using ETs in orbit, and all the numbers point to it being the cheapest way to set up a serious presence in space. Slashdot your senator and demand that NASA implement one of the hundreds of viable low cost concepts and start storing ETs in orbit!
Oh, and for the propellent freaks that complain the ET has such a high cross section that it would de-orbit quickly because of atmospheric friction, that's what space tethers (METS) are for, and if NASA would get off its collective ass and build a tether system for the ISS, those could be adapted for use on the ET farm as well.
For more info, check out www.orbit6.com. Chris Fitch has a great website about using ETs in space.
I would imagine the Right Thing to do would be to modify the Space Shuttle so that it could function as a shuttle for fuel between the ISS and planetside.
:)
:)
;)
That modification would require converting the space shuttle into an unmanned spacecraft.
You've got far far to much to worry about in those 4 minutes of liftoff to add a large container of combustables to that cargo bay. Better to design a resupply ship and send up all the feul without people being anywhere close to it.
Gee, isn't this what the Russian Progress Module is?
The Americans might do well to emulate the Russians somewhat. This is the American's second space station. It's the russians sixth? Seventh? They know what they're doing, they just have a hideous lack of funding. (OK, you can argue against this, but the division of Soyuz, Progress, and Proton rockets makes more sense than a single semi-reuable shuttle... Again, this may change once a true reusable launcher becomes feasable.
Seperate out the functions of cargo into space and man into space. More rockets, but it should be more efficient that way. Only thing your missing is a "garage", that open payload bay of the space shuttle. Perhaps there should be some truss structure built onto the space station to haul the hubble space telescope back to the station to be worked on, etc. Also cool would be the pods from the movie "2001" (used in "Project: Space Station, for the C64 and IBM if I recall..
Oh well...