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NASA Eyes Shuttle Replacements
jonerik writes "According to this article at Space.com, NASA yesterday released a status report on the first year of NASA's Space Launch Initiative; the search for a space shuttle replacement, currently planned to begin operating ten years from now. The competing contractors - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and a team consisting of Northrop Grumman and Orbital Sciences Corp. - have their work cut out for them. NASA is looking for both a ten-fold improvement in per-pound launch costs (from $10,000 per pound to $1,000) and massive improvements in crew survivability."
In related news, Rubyflame writes: "Aviation Now has a
story about four new kerosene-fueled rocket engines being developed by Aerojet, Pratt & Whitney, Rocketdyne, and TRW. These are engines that will produce a million pounds of thrust, intended to outdo Russian designs in reliability and launch cost, and one of them may power a new reusable launch vehicle. Kerosene has the advantage that it's denser than hydrogen, so the fuel tanks can be smaller."
about time.... i mean since the end of the cold war we really havent had any good push to do things in space.... at least now we can do silly, safe experiments at 1/10th the cost...
Nasa space shuttle
Takes off like a pile of bricks
Lighter craft required
BDB = Big Dumb Booster.
We did the Saturn 5 in the mid '60's with slide rules. Surely we can do much better than that these days?
Reuseable is a joke for the main compnent. The shuttle is practically rebuilt anyways.
TODO: Something witty here...
will it run Linux?
we've takin ideas from them before... how about the magnetic slingshot built on the side of a mountain to "throw" materials into space? of course, with something like 100 Gs, humans would have to use another method...
I thought the point of having a space shuttle was to make replacing it unnecessary...
A good shuttle will include mice for the scientific development of the pleasure center.
Hooray for Mice! Bring on the electrodes!
This is just another money-grubbing scheme, same as the X-33, same as countless others before it. The last thing they want is to really lower the cost of space launch and let the riff-raff in.
They just want gobs of money to spend on technology development programs (read "new toys"). The ultimate goal of upper NASA management these days is to reach retirement without having any disasters (like Apollo 1 or Challenger) on their watch -- the easiest way to avoid that is to launch things as infrequently as possible.
(Note, there are probably a few naive engineers and rocket scientists still at NASA who believe the PR and have honorable intentions. But they're not the decision makers.)
-- Alastair
I sure hope NASA sticks to their guns this time. Shuttle technology is like 30 years old now, and it's seriously *embarassing* because of that. I mean, the gains that they are expecting are reasonable - which shows you how out of date the Shuttle is.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
There once was a man from Nantucket
Built a ship so light that he could chuck it
At c into the air
Not like Nasa did care
They poured more in to Boeing and said 'Fuck it'
"...and massive improvements in crew survivability."
No, I didn't read the article, but, assuming this poster is reasonably accurate with his description text, why is this necessary? Aside from Challenger, have we had any significant (or even insignificant?) problems with shuttle crews surviving the trip?
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
A German concept, AFAIK. Way more reusable than anything NASA has come up with
The days of vertical launches are over.
--- Eat my sig.
This article is light on details but does mention that all of these systems that they are working on are two-staged.
:-)
At first you may think that two-staged launches are a waste of money, but some of it does at least look promising.
The design from Boeing is an interesting one. It looks like a smaller shuttle attached to a jumbo jet. It's then flown near the limits of space where the top ship would then come apart and finish it's journey into space on it's own.
The jumbo jet would then return to the launch site.
I must admit that I would love to see a 1 stage space craft.
Now, I am coming from a background where I am not incredibly familiar with either U.S. capitalism or with issues of defense. Basically, there are a handful of these companies that compete for every government contract. To maintain "competition," the government will try to spread the love around, going with different companies for succesive contracts.
But each individual contract is too big for a single company to fulfill on its own, so whomever ends up winning the contract will turn around and outsource some of the work to...the same "competitors" whose bids they beat out!
As a retired rocketman, I am the first to support expansion and improvement of any nation's space program. I just wanted to point out that the notion of "who will build the next generation shuttle" should be taken with a grain of salt.
"I'm a rocket man / Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." - Sir Elton John
Shouldn't they have been looking into this years ago? The fact that the shuttle is massively expensive compared to rockets isn't very new.
I find it kinda ironic how they're doing this only a year or two after canceling practically every alternative-launch-system project NASA had (X-33, X-34, and a few others that I can't remember). I'd think it would be cheaper to just finish a few programs at once rather than stop and restart them constantly, as NASA seems to be doing lately.
"Rockhound: You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
hehe...
Fore more quotes from that movie go here
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
the head of the canadian space agency looking for a space shuttle too. Yeah I seem him often there at "Jim Scean's Used RVs and Trailers"
They should talk to my cousin Murray, down in the Valley. He'll give you a very good deal...
With everything that's been going on lately, you might have missed this important piece of 'news'.
Anyway, here's the link.
for NASA to pour all its funds into an over-hyped dot com and then have them go bankrupt so I can buy myself a space shuttle at their bankruptcy auction.
More pics here. Dig the one with 6 jet engines.
I understand the space savings advantages of kerosene, but how does the thrust produced per unit weight compare to that of the current SRB/LRB compare? Having to (hypothetically) double the fuel weight to double the thrust seems like a waste of money to me.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Why not just wait until all those brave entrants in the X-Prize contest have had a go.
Who knows, mybe that crazy Englishman with his "Thunderbird" rocket made from plywood will astound us all.
Or not.
They just want gobs of money to spend on technology development programs (read "new toys").
American tax dollars are working to make these "new toys". The primary justification for NASA's funding is that the technologies that come out of these "technology development programs" push the cutting edge of modern tech.
It's been a long time since Congress has thought about the values of "exploring space". That's just an side-effect of research spending.
It's like those robot-construction competitions where they have to get all the balls into the goal. The contest isn't to designed to solve the great "yellow ball problem", it's to build and explore ideas in technology.
Congress views funding NASA the same way; by funding NASA they're advancing America's technical know-how. Not to mention that NASA contracts go to high-tech american industries.
There's not some sort of conspiracy to keep regular people out of space here. NASA's just doing its job.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Venturestar seems mysteriously out of the picture here...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
improvement in per-pound launch costs (from $10,000 per pound to $1,000) and massive improvements in crew survivability."
Given the current time and effort put into safety aspects of today's space shuttle programs, the plan of "massively" improving this demonstrates NASA's "it can always be improved" attitude and forward thinking ability.
Well done!
"Furthermore, a second-generation reusable launch system is being sought that lowers the cost-per-pound to orbit from $10,000 to just $1,000 a pound. The second-generation launcher would be capable of lofting crew and cargo separately" Finally!! I was wondering how much longer NASA/Aerospace industry planned on trying to keep crew and cargo on the same payload. Yes, it's not as efficient, but it's more economic and it's the economics that's the space industry's main obstacale. It never made sense to me as to why you would launch a billion dollar payload on a risky rocket transporation system and then on top, make a crew part of the payload. As if there wasn't enough risk and cost to the whole operation.
Not that I'm an expert by any means but...
I would hope that they start by questioning the need for a shuttle to begin with. Manned orbital flight is pretty well handled with the ISS and the Russians have a cheaper, time proven method of transport to/from ISS that is pretty hard to beat.
As far as repair of orbitals, has that proven to be worth the expense? Maybe it is, especially if they use such a vehicle to do trash collection. Again, I'm no expert but I hope those who are will be considering these things.
It would seem to me that some of the would be costs of new shuttles would be better spent on upgrading the design of Soyez/Progress and making them even more efficient. The rest of the money could be better spent on other projects including unmanned deep space research or manned missions to other planets (assuming those make sense).
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Lev Andropov: American components, Russian components, all made in Taiwan!
It's a real link, not some link to goatland or something.
AUGAUUUGCGCACAUAUCUCAGCGAAUGAAAGGGAUUAA
Russia has the Buran. It looks like the american shuttle but it is larger and carries more cargo.
I think it has only flown once. After that they parked it on a runway and it has been there ever since AFAIK. I think one of the fuselage models used for testing is a tourist attraction in moscow.
The Russians dont use it because it is much cheaper to use their rockets.
So please tell me why the shuttles are an embarassment. As far as I can see they're still the only space craft that lands on wheels.
You are totally ill-informed re Buran. The Russians never made meaningful use of this design and there was only one semi-functional prototype built. You can now tour it for a few dollars outside of Moscow, but hurry up, its falling apart quickly and even the carival hucksters who own it are getting tired of it.
It now sits as an amusement park exhibit that you can walk through, and as for it "not flying anymore"...well, it never really flew in the first place in a practical sense.
I don't know why people constantly bring up Buran. There is no comparison between this pseudo-prototype craft that was never practically used, and the shuttle, which has over two decades of nearly perfect mission records.
With the ammount of money poured into NASA (especially the shuttle program) you'd think that the US would have found a cheap way to put things into space.
Instead the Russians still do things cheaper (and so far quite reliably) with their Energia rockets.
It is really hard to believe that those contractors are actually trying to make things cheaper.
Its true though that all of the designs share some characteristics...one stage to get you off the gorund, one to get you into orbit. Obviously this isn't by accident...the physics of the problem and materials/fuel presently available must dictate this design.
If congress really wanted to advance american know how they would put the money into universities, that would make all their discoveries and developments available to the public.
Currently the money goes to a couple of aerospace companies that keep all of their important developments in secret.
And all those advances in know how are so esoteric they are quite useless for most Americans.
The primary justafication for NASA's funding is to feed powerufl contractors. Luckily we can get some important science done as a byproduct of that.
Large scale aerospace and military projects have operated as such for decades. This really isn't news.
Where is Gallofree Yards Inc. when we need it? A couple of those transports from the Battle of Hoth and we could haul stuff into orbit for the same price per pound that FedEx charges to haul packages across the USA.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
A moon station would cost many times what a space station does.
First off, how is the ISS a solution to manned orbital flight??? Secondly, giving up manned spaceflight to the Russians is idiotic on many levels.
They aren't dependable.
They don't have the funding to pursue future programs.
They have nuclear weapons pointed at us.
Why not get rid of NASA and encourage private companies to take over? What has NASA accomplished in the past two decades that really justify its budget? I know it's a bit idealistic right now to hope that we could get the government to cut back on its spending, pay off the national debt and create a sustained tax cut, but that's IMO the only way to spur innovation here.
Let's face it, if there were very few to no regulatory hurdles to creating private space travel, colonies, etc coupled with low enough taxes for the venture capital to be there, we could accomplish NASA's "goals" in about half the time. Telling corporate America, "you see that big, beautiful, mineral-rich asteroid worth 2 trillion USD? Well if you can get to it, you can mine it for free!" would spur space R&D faster than NASA ever could.
No generation of Americans has ever had simultaneously the kind of economy we have and the scientific know-how. The only thing keeping us back is the government. The national debt's interest alone consumes 13% of the budget! If we got rid of it, filed the charters of 70% of the federal agencies in file 13, booted the majority of people off social security and medicare (keep only those that even if they stuck only to survival, could not pay for medical care) and cut the taxes to something minimal who knows what we could accomplish. There would be so much money availible for private research grants that it would be mind boggling.
Freud would be proud.
Give NASA a chance!
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
The most expensive stage of any orbital or even suborbital launch is the first 30 miles or so.
At these low altitudes, air resistance is a major factor and, due to the heavy fuel-load still onboard, a great deal of power is required.
Conventional rocket motors suffer from the need to carry their own oxidizer (O2) but if the first stage of flight used air-breathing engines then far less of this heavy fuel element would be required. The result would be a lighter "wet" vehicle that required less power to fly.
This is why NASA and other researchers are spending such huge amounts of money on things such as the SCRAMJET and Pulse Detonation Engines.
Unfortunately it appears that there's still a big gap between laboratory and launchpad as far as these new engine designs are concerned.
Liquid-fueled rocket engines will always be risky and fuel-hungry. The magnitude of improvement in safety and price-performance being sought will probably have to wait until they're perfected.
What is sitting in Gorky park was a prototype used for structural testing.
There is a fully functional prototype that flew one orbital mission before funding ran out and is currently mothballed somewhere in some hangar (probably not a ranway).
So i dont know where i was "totally ill-informed".
Stories about NASA aside, I'd like to take time to seriously complement /. editors for doing a very good job of meeting expectations this week.
An absence of lame blurbs and the worn out "must read/good read", etc., along with a generous cross section of topics users expect, has made visiting these last few days a joy...thanks!
So much for Buck Rogers. No all you future space cadets are just spam in the can.
Of course they didn't have a device to prevent political "corrections" like the severe beatings Gargarin was given after his flight was over (and there are in fact photos of him with his face beaten in).
I wonder what has become of Lockheed Martin's "Linear Aerospike" engine technology. When X-33 went down the tubes, LA engine tests continued. The results looked somewhat promising.
Every time a NASA is mentioned 'round here - sombody always mentions how screwed up the shuttle is. How it's expensive, and comlicated, and it sucks. I can see their point - if our goal was to launch a bunch of crap into space. But our goal isen't that - it's to learn things. In this endevour (pun intended) the Shuttle has been wonderfull. When we get to colonising the moon, we'll resurect the Saturn 5 - but for advancing the state of the art, the shuttle has been worth it.
As an aside, I'll bet you that the the SR-71 'Blackbird' replacement, the Auroura, was made possible by things learned by making the Shuttle - like the tiles. But as we don't know much about the Auroura, so I'm just pulling crap out of my butt.
Anyways, comerial rocketry is great for launching stupid XM radio satelites - the shuttle is great for learning and doing wacky things like fixing Hubble.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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Well, I have to say that NASA's move is at least ten years too late, hell, in 2012, we'll have flying cars by then (where are they now?), and our technology will be much improved. That said, what will the new design be like? Will it be a sleek, space-age (wait, isn't that a bit old?), and have cupholders with artificial gravity? Comments appreciated.
There's been talk of reviving Buran, which would be good. It's a more modern design than the Shuttle.
The problem with the assumption that private industry can do any task better than the government is that private industries are about making money first and everything else is a distant second.
NASA is about space exploration, not about making money. If there was no NASA and everything was left to private companies, there would be no Mars Pathfinder, no Hubble teliscope and no Moon landings because they don't make any money. We'd just be launching satellites and have Bill Gates pay to go up to orbit the earth.
The other problem with leaving it to industry is all the time and resources wasted on duplicate efforts. Look at the plethora of differnt standards for Bluetooth, HDTV and recordable DVD formats as an example.
Not that government is always the solution, but neither is it always the problem.
What I should also have said is how it can work pretty well to have a combo of gvt and private industry for space....kind of like how the defense department operates. DOD say "we want a plane that has x range and x payload" and let Boieng and Lockheed (sp) fight it out to produce the best plane.
Commercialization of space could make NASA's life easier. Now, they loathe the idea of having to compete, it would show just how much mismanagement there really is at the organization.
.
However.......one of the single biggest problems with the Space Shuttle is also one that could be solved in the future by creating a market for them - with space tourism or somesuch.
When you decide to build something like the Shuttle or the Concorde and then you find yourself with one or two users and no need for any more beyond the origional production run, then you have serious problems down the line that drive up costs to an insane level.
Simply put, you run out of spare parts.
The Shuttle and the Concorde were built all at once. The factories churned them out one after another. They needed parts - lots of them - so factories mass produced them.
Then, there weren't any more Shuttles to be made, so there was no need for parts to be built.
Time passed.
Things broke down.
And they broke down again.
And again.
Guess what happened? They started to run out of things. But you can't retool an entire factory to make 100 more of something you need - and do this for every part. So, instead, when something breaks, you have to make it. If some parts of the Shutte go bye-bye, guess what? Someone has to walk into a file room, pick up the blueprints and make a one-off of that part by hand.
Sounds like excruciatingly time and money consuming fun, huh?
Well, it _is_
A growing market for a vehicle such as the Shuttle would mean more parts could be built, and for less. A permananet Shuttle maintence industry could be established, driving costs through the basement.
Australia welcomes US Heroes!
When asked how they were going to deal with the intense heat likely to be encountered on any journey to the sun, NASA responded "no problems, we'll send them at night"
They have nuclear weapons pointed at us
Dickhead - and how many does the US have pointed at them ?
And your's have fuel as your country has the money to maintain them
While you are at it maybe you should do a bit of research and find out about the nuclear target packages that included Paris in france, Bonn in Germany and other allied countries - this was the case in the 80's when i was still serving with SAC at Edwardes - maybe you should get a clue you twit
You really are quite and impressive asshole
Seastead this.
Naivete is the opposite of wisdom, not intelligence.
Only if you equate wisdom with cynicism. Being cynical never got anyone to the stars.
I'm naive, and damn proud of it.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
If we need real-time human intelligence for planetary exploration, telepresence from orbit is likely also a better choice than human landings: you reduce risks greatly, save on equipment, and still get real-time manipulation. But current planetary exploration goals are so modest that purely robotic systems are probably better.
So, let's scrap human space flight for the time being. We can do an enormous number of really neat exploratory missions in space for the cost of the shuttle program and its replacements. When we return to the issue of human space travel again in a few decades, we'll have much better technologies.
Who says the 'moon base' has to be made out of metal? Why can't you ship up some excavation tools, and light weight polymers and build an airtight underground lunar base with the only imported metal being the airlock doors? True, this doesn't provide you with any method for creating food, but We Could have had a lunar base easily. One much larger than any of the space stations we've shipped up, because as you recall all of those ARE made out of tons and tons of metal. There is also a cumulative advantage, the longer you've been building stuff on the moon, the more resources are at your disposal to build more complex projects... Unlike the space stations which all fall back to earth after a few decades. Depending on how far we push nanotech we may not even need to build factories on the moon, we may just need to send up a few machines that recieve power wirelessly and process raw materials into usable resources.
The moon is a more practical environment to work in, the low G enables a person to remain there signifigantly longer than in the microgravity of space.
The Biosphere projects are partially aiming at researching the viability of building an enclosed, self sustaining habitat on the moon, but even if you build a moon base that requires resupplying like space stations do, it could easily be done for less money as long as you take advantage of the fact that you can always dig a hole use some plastic to make it airtight and cover it with a metal lid. Homsteaders used to build houses out of earth and mud where trees weren't available, so why should we build lunar bases out of 'industrial grade metal' when really the only part that has to be metal is the door.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Let me see if I understand what you are suggesting. Are you saying that even though Gragarin's missions seemed successful to the rest of the world, he did something that displeased his masters, and they had him beaten up, and allowed photos of him with the marks of these beatings still on him?
This is all news to me. But I remember during the buildup to the main attack in the Gulf War, a number of pilots were shot down. When the Iraqis allowed pictures of these airmen, there was a lot of speculation in the press that they too had been beaten. Then I heard someone less charged with emotion who said that being bounced around during a really rough landing could leave bruises on an airmen's face that looked like those one might get from being beaten up. This sounds reasonable to me, so I am going to assume, unless you can muster up more evidence, that any facial bruising you see in photos of Gragarin was due to a really rough landing.
The shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than disposable rockets. Look at it's costs now.
NASA simply doesn't do cheap.
Deleted
They don't do it to maintain competition, they do it to keep the industry skill sets high. With the massive budget cuts in defense spending at the end of the cold war, mergers and layoffs were destroying the skilled worker base that had been built up. By spreading around contracts (and, in some cases, pushing companies to partner with other companies in the design and construction of larger projects), they ensure that companies with particular skill sets, and their highly skilled machinists, etc all remained in business and employed.
Thats the biggest reason that projects like the Seawolf continue -- to keep companies like Electric Boat in business, and to keep the extremely valuable skills their worker base represents available for future projects.
You can say a lot of things about our government, but you can't say the people doing these things are stupid. Just because the general public isn't up to speed on the reasoning doesn't mean there aren't very good reasons for them doing things the way they do them.
One of the main reasons that the project was abandoned was that development was far from complete and it would a lot more cash to "Man-rate" it.
One thing that the Russians are very good at is metallurgy, particularly with respect to titanium alloys. The US could equal this, but at a substantially greater cost of production.
A few years back there was an article in an aviation magazine about the US investigations into nuclear propulsion back in the 50's and 60's. I guess some of the kibosh came when they started looking for pilots who were "past reproductive age." There were investigations into a manned bomber, (I remember my older brother's plastic model of the thing when I was a kid.) and a cruise mother-missile that dropped bombs. The latter was called Project Pluto, and was the focus of the article.
It was meant to fly over enemy territory at Mach 3, dropping bombs. It was also had a terribly dirty exhaust. In the end, they weren't sure which caused more damage: sonic boom from the low-level supersonic overflight, the bombs, or the exhaust. One of the things that killed it was the inability to test, because we couldn't find a place to fly it over, since the flight alone was so obnoxious.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Maybe we should start to take notes from the Russians.
/.'er pointed out, the competitive bidding process is a sham. All of the contractors share the work amongst the others when a contract is awarded. The rules of the game are well established and profits are repeatable. You layoff or hire staff with the ebb and flow of government funding and lobby all you can to keep things going.
Funny how our competitive capitalistic system ended up producing a bloated monolithic space industry dominated by a government bureaucracy. Our funding of NASA has been too high in my opinion. It allows all sorts of inefficiency like the space shuttle while discouraging private enterprise from getting into the game. Why risk time and money getting into space when the US tax payer is willing to foot the bill and assume all of the risk. It is much easier and safer to feed from the government trough. As another
The Russians on the other hand have a cheaper and more efficient way of getting into space. Their lack of funding has actually encouraged innovation and efficiency. They can't spend their way into space. They must be clever. They also seem to be open to new sorts of ventures such as paid space tourism. Our high brow NASA frowned upon the riff raff getting into space but the cash strapped Russians were forced to be more pragmatic about things.
I think that it is a shame that our space program which started out to be a demonstration of US might and know how has turned into what it has. It is downright un-American. After 40+ years of space flight our space program should look much different. I would prefer funding dozens of smaller competing designs compared to one large shuttle project. Encourage efficiency and innovation, not playing it safe. Why put all of your eggs in one basket? Why lock yourself to one design by one company? NASA has so much money invested in the shuttle that they can't walk away from it even though it has not even come close to meeting its original goals.
The Russians pushed to efficiency and needing funding will ultimately be more open to trying new things. Entrepreneurs and visionaries will probably have a much easier time dealing with them than the US program which tends to push them aside. The one thing that I see getting in the way is that they seem to be feeding at the US government space program trough also. They may end up being as complacent as our traditional contractors going for the easy and repeatable money.
Okay, Britian has a long history of telling people what they ought to have built without actually putting very much together themselves. But it still strikes me as the right solution.
Well the first problem is the proximity of the crew to hundreds of thousands of highly explosive fuel. At least with a rocket, the crew is on top and you can have some sorta either vertical or lateral escape system that can fire off with in 1/10 of a second of the rocket detecting a propellent cookoff. With the shuttle, the craft is strapped to the side of said fuel. The only way you could improve the crews surviveability would be to modularize the shuttle in such a way that if a propellent cookoff was detected, it would fire the crew capsule laterally away from the main fuel tank (and be able todo this while not killing the crew from g-forces and still getting them away quick enough that the concusive forces of the exploding fuel and the shrattnel from the fuel tank don't shred the vechicle.) This is a totally feasible. The biggest problem would be the weight involved. I t would increase the cost per pound instead of reducing it.
I'm not sure what a better solution would be, but I'm sure that some smart people will come up with a solution.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I thougt a pound was just over two dollars -- or is that the Euro? -- but 10,000-1,000 dollars per pound! Just shows how little I understand the intricacies of international finance.
Dirt doesn't need luck.
And cnaned one program after another. Just more hot air from NASA.
The extreme costs of the Space Shuttle
have nothing to do with the technology
and lots to do with NASA's desires to
keep 40,000 people on the payroll at
contractors offices and NASA centers.
The biggest way to cut costs is to focus
on improving operations. Nothing in the
space launch initiative changes this.
the sole and critical factor is looking to
reduce headcount.
the sole criteria to review a nasa proposal
is to determine how many people will work on
it. if it's less then 100 it's likely to
succeed, if it's more then a 1000 it is
doomed.
It's not surprising, but it is a little disappointing to see that the only companies being considered for the final phases of the space launch initiative are the same few companies that have held a chokehold on the industry since almost its inception.
Over the past several years, I have watched countless small companies try to break into this market and fail. In 1998, there were over 80 for-profit companies around the world attempting to develop launcher technologies. Most of these have failed now.
I will be the first to admit that most of these companies deserved to fail, putting fantasy before reality. But to watch the glimmer of technological evolution be quashed because NASA chose to only back the "Big Boys" is a real disappointment.
Can anyone tell me the last "small" company to get a foothold in the space launch business? Orbital is the closest I can come.
just the ramblings of someone who hoped for better.
...and here I always thought it was "Knights In Satan's Service". Y'know, with that scary makeup and all.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Put down that flamethrower and follow me on this before you reply.
I assert that reusable launch vehicles for normal space launches are stupid.
Every kilo of mass on the launch vehicle costs, therefor every kilo that does not DIRECTLY contribute to getting the payload into space is wasted - worse, since you have to have the fuel to boost that kilo, you increase the mass of the rocket by several MORE kilos, each of which has to boosted at least part of the way, requiring more fuel....
Now, if reusability DOESN'T increase the mass of the rocket, fine. Go for it.
However, in reality making any part of the launch vehicle reusable WILL add to the mass of the rocket, therefor reducing the payload or increasing the fuel cost.
What we need for normal launches is a dirt-dumb-cheap rocket, something we can churn out by the hundreds. I suggest a large solid fuel rocket - no expensive turbopump to machine. Make the casing out of either simple rolled metal, or possibly even a cellulose compound ("big paper rockets"), filled with solid fuel. Something designed to burn up on re-entry so that we don't spend kilogram 1 on recovery.
Now, this is only for heavy lifting - chucking stuff into orbit. Obviously, these rockets would not be man rated - you still need a man rated shuttle to put people in orbit. HOWEVER, you can now make the shuttle just a people hauler, reducing the size of the shuttle (and therefor the cost). This was the original intent of the shuttle - then the DOD got involved, demanded an increase in payload, which was WHY the shuttle had to have the SRB's added in the first place.
OK, if you've read everything this far, and you still feel like flaming, knock yourselves out.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why flight crews? They don't fly the shuttle anyway: it is all automated.
"Max survivability of human cargo" is a much different issue, much easier engineering.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
You tell 'em, Buck.
I don't remember why NASA went with the solid boosters. It may have had something to do with which Congressional district the SRBs are built in.
The choice to use SRB's was made for two reasons.
The first reason is efficiency. In the initial stage of flight, most of a rockets mass is fuel. It is very inefficient to burn propellent which generates moderate thrust compared to it's mass The SRB's produce ~70% of the total thrust in the initial stage of flight while only accounting for a fraction of the total mass. Using liquid fuel boosters would necessaraly be much larger to generate the same thrust and would substantialy contribute to the total mass of the package.
The second reason is financial. Most of the cost of a shuttle launch lies in labour expenses to refitt the shuttle after each flight. Components such as engines need to be replaced and rebuilt. The simplicity of the SRB design allows this to be done at a much lower cost because there are fewer components to replace.
You know, the whole "science" community has got its blinders on. Chemical rockets are so old news.
NASA needs to go and twist the arms of the black ops projects and get them to release the UFO anti-gravity technology the spooks have been futzing with for 50 years... Problem solved.
I think I've got some of that element 115 lying around in my closet somewhere. Gezz, where's Lazar when you need him?
You know, I'm always annoyed when people bring up Freud in polite conversation. Granted, it was a joke this time, but.
To quote Sam & Max, "You're on the cutting edge of third-grade humor."
I've always thought that Freud's genius lay not in providing any particular insight into the human mind and soul, but rather in selecting imagery so vague that it can be applied to almost anything. Because almost everything in the universe is either kind of round or kind of elongated.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
They could more than double crew survivability by just sending up three astronauts at a time instead of seven.
Firstly, no, the shuttle's primary mission is to launch stuff into space. If all we wanted to do was "learn stuff," we could do it far more economically using subscale unmanned test vehicles.
Secondly, the shuttle was originally supposed to save money vs. the Saturn V. It doesn't. It is at minimum an order of magnitude more expensive to run than the staged rockets it replaced. Just how expensive is not clear: it depends how much of the cost of its infrastructure you include in the cost of a launch. But the absolute minimum I've seen quoted is 300 million a launch, and that does not include infrastructure at all. Compare it to a cost of 20 million for a commercial flight of a Soviet space capsule, which includes both payments on infrastructure and a profit margin. And, because the shuttle was designed at the command of politicians and beaurocrats, the infrastructure is spread all over the country, to spread out the pork and give work to each of the beaurocrats' petty little domains. Why, for instance, didn't we just build the shuttle factory adjacent to the launch site, and cut out the cost of transporting it across the country? Why weren't the landing fields adjacent to the launch site from day one? Why use expensive and dangerous booster rockets? Why build the booster rockets using completely different technology than the main engines? Because it was a beaurocratic clusterfuck, that's why.
The shuttle was supposed to be reusable, so that it could be turned around quickly and relaunched. Instead, it takes months to refit a shuttle.
The shuttle was supposed to be safer than the systems it replaced. Obviously, Challenger blew up, the Saturn V's did not (the crew of Apollo 1 died in a ground test of the capsule, not the rocket). But also, one has to look at the underlying problem of operational complexity: the shuttle is just too damn complicated. It is a credit to the people involved that it has flown as safely as it has.
There were supposed to be many shuttles, flying every few weeks, which would have made each launch less expensive by spreading out the infrastructure costs more. Instead, there are a handful of shuttles, flying about once a year. They're too expensive to build, and take too much time to refit.
I'm not even going to talk about it landing at airports.
Lastly, when you look at Shuttle, you have to point out that at the time we stopped production of the Saturn V, we HAD THE SATURN V ALREADY. The space shuttle cost billions to develop, on top of what we had already spent to develop the Saturn V. Worse, it set the space program back at least 20 years. Hell, we still don't have a replacemnt for the Saturn V.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
And, while you're at it, throw the doors open for any other company that can put payload x into orbit y for z dollars.
Here's the deal:
You build a launch system and run 2 successful test flights (say, putting aluminum girders and panels and robots up near ISS, so later on we can build a space station that doesn't suck), and we buy 10 launches in 10 years.
You pay your own R&D. If you can't make the launches for the price you bid, you eat the extra cost. At any rate, US Gov doesn't sign a contrct with you until we see the launches. And to be sure, we'll put aside the first 5 launches for unmanned payloads.
You would have to put it into law that NASA and DOD would be forced to buy the launches, so that the next president or congress couldn't weasel out of it.
It gets the NASA beaurocracy almost completely out of the picture, as well as the congressional pork that would otherwise interfere with efficiency.
And, it would get real competition back in. What we're seeing here is the Old Boy's Club of Space.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Ground based lasers will always be subject to thermal blooming due to atmospheric attenuation.
Interesting. Is this caused by the lasers or just natural artifacts of the atmosphere? Incidentally power is the cheap bit in the equation, and you need less of it delivered at altitude due to g-limiting anyway; so it may not matter.
Atmospheric. You have two effects happening. One is that minute particles in the atmosphere scatter the laser beam. This is unavoidable, and causes exponential attenuation over long distances. The second is that the atmosphere absorbs some of the light you're sending, and heats up. This causes optical mayhem that defocuses the beam.
Compounding the problem is the fact that you'll have to fire through a *lot* of atmosphere. Your craft needs most of its velocity to be tangential, and you want as long an acceleration path as you can get away with to keep the acceleration to something that a) you can provide and b) won't damage your cargo. This means a grazing path through the atmosphere, which means your lasers will be firing through hundreds or possibly thousands of kilometres of air (i.e. as far as you can manage).
The only practical scheme I can think of for very long distances is to have multiple stations along the flight path and to fire a converging beam, so that heating problems are only significant for the last little part of the beam path.
On a couple of other points: You'll be using a laser array, not a single laser, so the cost will be directly proportional to the power required. More power means more cost.
Also, I have doubts about a heat-exchanger system working. Throughput tends to be low compared to the power flow required to get high ISP, and a heat exchanger means a heavier craft. The most practical craft design I've seen suggested, which has flown in small-scale tests, has the bottom of the craft being a curved mirror with a central projection. The laser is focused by the mirror and heats air immediately below the central projection, which is shaped to force the air to move away from the craft.
Laser launchers are a neat idea, and avoid the problem of carrying most of your reaction mass when set up in jet mode, but there are formidable engineering problems to overcome before they're practical.
"Rocket Man" was written by David Bowie.
**>>BELCH
There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning. First of all, it presumes that you know all of the technical issues to do telepresence (aka Heinlein's "Waldos"). You still have to get the robots/monitoring equipment into place and the sort of equipment you are talking about takes quite a bit of infrastructure in order to get it going. I believe that this is used in parts of the Nuclear Power industry quite a bit, because the risks far and away stronger than the cost of the equipment. Check out the web site for INEEL for some additional information regarding the use of robots as you are suggesting, but in another context.
The other problem is the concept that people just can't live in space. What is going to need to happen for space flight to be exciting again like it was in the early 1960's is to have people up there sticking their nose in places that nobody has ever been to before. A color television just doesn't do the same justice as a human eye, noticing subtle stuff that you would just miss on a monitor. The geology that Harrison Schmitt of Apollo XVII did on the moon just couldn't be duplicated by sending a Viking-style probe to the moon, grabbing a couple of rocks, and coming back to the earth. Much of what we know about lunar geology is due to the efforts of the last three Apollo missions.
It is also unavoidable that people MUST eventually get into space. To doom humanity to this little chunk of rock in an obscure backwater arm of a rather ordinary galaxy is, in my opinion, a great waste of the amazing potential of mankind.
Finally, there is the often quoted phrase "LEO (low-earth orbit) is more than halfway to the rest of the Solar System." If you get a strong human presence in a low orbit environment, it will be essentially trivial to travel anywhere else in the solar system, including Mars, the Asteroids, etc.
Mind you, I am not saying that there wouldn't be tasks that couldn't be done via remote-control. There will be stuff like this, and where appropriate it should be done. Just don't openly dismiss the fact that this is the only option that should be considered.
Why does the Northrup Grumman design feature a Boeing Logo? you can just make it out on the top!
"I wasn't using my civil rights anyway...."
The Space Launch Initiative is the wrong way to go. Even if NASA picks a design and builds it, we will just end up with another inefficient government-run launch system that costs 10 times as much as anyone else's. Why are we letting NASA control access to space? Why do ordinary Americans have to go to the Russians to get into space? This SLI business is just another example of big, dumb NASA trying to do things the only way it knows how, and messing up the US launch market in the process.
So how should NASA get a new rocket? NASA should invest in American businesses who have good ideas without trying to control them, and they should pay American companies (maybe Russian companies?) to send their astronauts into space.
Foozone.orgExcept that I didn't propose a Saturn V or moon colony.
I wasn't debating history, I was saying it was a bad call, for reasons I stated which you have failed to refute.
Again, I never proposed building a Saturn V.I. I simply pointed out that the Shuttle program failed to meet its own stated goals, and not by a narrow margin. And again, Saturn V, at the time the decision was made, was already off the drawing board and in production.
Or travel to far-out Planet You.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Hey, if LEO is what the requirement is, then just get is there. I agree - SV is ugly but it works. This fancy schmancy stuff isn't paying off, as RUS sends stuff into space all the time, most recently for Direct TV:
l ]
Russian rockets idle Òåêñò: Ivan Ivanov [ http://www.gazeta.ru/2002/05/08/USbetrayalle.shtm
Russia's heavy-lift Proton-K rocket successfully took off from the Baikanur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on its second commercial flight carrying the US communications satellite DirecTV-5. The second commercial Proton-K flight may well, however, be the Russian rocket's swan song, since the ILS launch service provider, which exercises the exclusive right to use the Proton carrier, has expressed a preference for American rockets.
The Proton-K carrier was to take off from the Baikonur launch pad at 2100 Moscow time on May 6. However, owing to technical problems the launch was cancelled only two minutes before the scheduled blastoff. The launch was put back 24 hours, and at 2110 on May 7 the rocket successfully blasted off into space. Several minutes later the US DirecTV-5 satellite was safely positioned in its orbit.
According to RIA-Novosti reports, the orbit parameters are of a maximum distance of 245km from Earth and a minimum of 198km. Russian Space Force's experts said that once placed into the orbit, the satellite will then move into the interim orbit, and later into the target orbit - the so-called high elliptic and circular orbits with altitudes ranging from 700 to 40,000 km. In line with the experts' estimates, the satellite will hit the target orbit at 0332 Moscow time on May 8.
In comments for RIA, a Space Force specialist noted that the 4.3-ton DirecTV-5 communications satellite is designated to provide digital television services to customers in North American. Its payload amounts to 48 powerful transponders. The satellite will be taken to a geostationary orbit where it is expected to work for no less than 15 years. The device is meant solely for telecommunications and will not be used for military purposes.
International Launch Services is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. in the United States, with Russian companies Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, and Rocket Space Corporation Energia. The company was formed in 1995 to provide launch services for the American Atlas and the Russian Proton vehicles for customers worldwide.
Tuesday's launch was Proton's second commercial flight this year. In December last year, director general of Khrunichev Alexander Medvedev optimistically said that in 2002 his company planned to launch at least 9 commercial flights jointly with the ILS. In addition to that, the Khrunichev Centre planned to carry into space the European astrophysical observatory Integral, Russian communication satellites Express A-4 and Louch, three navigation satellites for GLONASS system, and several military satellites. (Note: GLONASS -Global Navigation Satellite System- is a satellite based radio navigation system which provides an unlimited number of users with all-weather 3D positioning, velocity measuring and timing anywhere in the world or near-Earth space). Altogether, Khrunichev planned to carry out 15 Proton launches this year. That would set a new record for the number of Proton flights, with the current record of 14 flights being set in 2000.
But in the first four months of the current year Proton has been launched only twice. In April, the Russian rocket travelled into space with the communication satellite Intelsat-903 and the DirecTV device on its second flight. To all appearances, the 2000 record will remain unbroken in 2002, since the ILS failed to secure the planned number of orders for Proton.
It is expected that by the end of the year Proton will have placed only two more commercial devices into orbit - the US EchostarVIII (launch scheduled for June 16) and the European Astra-1K (August 16). The launch of the US communications device GE-12, earlier planned for the 4th quarter of 2002, has been postponed till 2003.
Four more satellites will be travelling into space in the near future, but not on board Proton. Only one of those has ''flown the nest'' from Proton to other launch service providers: the owners of AtlanticBird-1 have decided against using Proton and are instead considering Europe's Ariane or the US's Delta-IV as alternatives.
As for the other three satellites, ILS has decided not to launch those on board the Russian carrier, but on board the US rocket. Asiasat-4 is to travel into space on board Atlas IIIA in June, while European HotBird-6 and Canadian Nimiq-2 will be on board Atlas V, the new carrier of Lockheed Martin, in July and October respectively. As a result, the Russians will not receive the $340 million revenue it had forecast.
By jumping ship to other carriers it seems that ILS has made a conscious decision to give up cooperation with Russia altogether. As long as Lockheed Martin only had the Atlas II carrier, which was not exactly renowned for its lifting capacity, the ILS used Proton carriers to launch commercial satellites into space, which allowed it to retain its market share. But as soon as the US company learned to produce the more powerful Atlas III and Atlas V launchers, ILS started to award contracts primarily to them.
The future now looks bleak for Proton. Paradoxically, the producer of Proton, the Khrunichev Centre, under their agreement with the founders of ILS, does not have the right to enter into contracts with foreign customers. Moreover, ILS has the same exclusive right for the use of another Russian rocket Angara, also developed by Khrunichev, therefore, the same sad fate is likely to befall that carrier, too. Thus, it seems, the Americans, who have retained their market share with the help of Proton, are set to seal the fate of the Russian rockets.
08 ÌÀß 17:50
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
It's an interesting theory, but there are some benefits of metal that you don't get from rocks. For one, if you import metal, it's all of a known quality. With on site rock, you're taking a significant risk--
Is the rock porous? What sort of loading can it take? How risky is it to mine?
Once you have this sort of information, you can determine the risks of attempting what you're suggesting. There may need to be some sort of a sealing process to prevent permeation, and an ultrasound scan to determine if there are any fissures to be worried about. [which they'd have to constantly re-check while mining, and after every major meteor hit in the area].
I do see it as being a definate possibility for living, however, due to the risks involved [ie, accidentally breaking through to a cave which is connected to the surface, and causing decompression], I would assume that they'd want to set up a preliminary construction camp from which to build the caves.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.