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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."
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!
Problem was the Saturn 5 was already paid for (million pound thrust kerosene engine -- didn't they call than the F-1?) while the Shuttle that replaced it required billions in development cost. Also, the Saturn could put 4 times the payload in LEO, making it half as expensive as the Shuttle per pound, and it could send stuff to the Moon.
Instead of punching around with the Shuttle in LEO and this Space Station which is the overpriced whatever, we could have kept Apollo going and evolving, and with the same money we have spent, we could have had a permanent human presence on the Moon by now.
What would that gain? Well, we could have a much more thorough evaluation of lunar resources (possible polar ice) and more thoroughly evaluated O'Neil's ideas of using the Moon as a source of construction materials for space-solar beamed power systems in geosynchronous or L-whatever orbits. Instead we are dinking around in LEO learning nothing.
The Big Dumb Booster by the way, was an idea to scale up the Lunar Module descent engine (had to be a KISS design to bring the astronouts down in one piece) -- they gave the job of building a prototype motor to some general construction contractors who didn't know the first thing about rockets, and they test-fired a successful motor. The thing would have been the size of a Saturn but much more cheaply (heavily) build -- payload would have been more in the Shuttle category, but the idea is that boiler and bridge makers could slap them together. Of course the Shuttle killed the idea.
Unfortunately given our current level of rocket propulsion technology a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) isn't terribly practical. They made some prototypes and actually flew a scaled down prototype in the desert, but ultimately they had tremendous problems with the extremely high performance rocket engine they had to use, couple with the experimental composite cryogenic fuel tanks.
I honestly don't think we'll ever get SSTO going with conventional chemical propellants. You simple have to carry too much weight in fuel, which means you need a bigger rocket, which means more fuel, then a bigger rocket...you get the idea. What we need is a way to extract more energy from whatever fuel we use. One way to do that is to go nuclear.
Nuclear rockets have been proposed in the past and always shot down by the enviro-Nazi, anti-nuke crowd. Seems you can't split an atom these days without attracting a lot of attention from this fringe crowd that cringes at the very word "neutron". Yes, nuclear technology CAN be dangerous. So can a lot of other things. NASA has an enviably safety record given the hazardous work they do, and I have no doubt that if the nuclear engine project were ever to become reality it would be a paragon of safety.
Of course, there could always be something flying out of left field here like some sort of teleportation technology or anti-gravity, but I doubt it in my lifetime.
And if we ever get REALLY serious about getting off this planet, the ONLY way to fly would be a space elevator. A monumental engineering task to be sure, but once in place it'd be the cheapest ride into low Earth orbit that we could come up with.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You do realize that opposition to nuclear propulsion comes from rational concerns about its safety as well as irrational hatred of everything nuclear, don't you? I don't have particular problems with nuclear energy in general, but I have serious reservations about any flying nuclear system. A nuclear powered spacecraft is not like the radiothermal generators that have been used in spacecraft so far. It would require a large amount of quite hot material, so any accident could spread a lot of radiactive contamination over a very wide area. I'd want to be damn sure that there were adequate safeguards against that before signing off on such a thing.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.