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Redirecting NASA
anzha writes "Many people have been sitting and waiting to see what Sean O'Keefe, the new head honcho @NASA, would do with the agency. Would he clean out the temple? Would he simply go through the motions? Spaceref has an interesting article up about what O'Keefe intends for the agency's future. It highlights the changes that are going to happen this year."
I did some minor consulting work for them earlier in the year, in fact my contract ran out just a few months ago. I can't speak for the political climate as I was hunkered down in a cube with a few of their best coders, but I can tell you that they are certainly willing to move in the right direction technology wise.
I was part of a team that was migrating the majority of their C2 server farm away from old Unix's like SCO and HPUX and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSD. They were also bringing down lots of Linux boxes and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSd but that was another team.
It seems that one of the new tech leads has some power and is eventually planning on bringing a team on board to fork the Gnu/FreeBSD sources and develop a version specific to NASA. They are able to do this due to the fact that Gnu/FreeBSD uses a non-restrictive license, well, plus they simply love the stability and security offered by Gnu/FreeBSD. I'm trying to get hired on the transition team as I used to be part of the FreeBSD dev team a few years ago and this would be quite the feather in my cap, so to speak
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Wow, and you're a lawyer, and you run a successful dot.com?! I'm impressed!!
...as a rocket scientist I feel most compelled to answer
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44937
...I run a successful London-based dot com
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44933&ci
... As a lawyer myself, I can state that
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44912&c
... I'm an avid open-source supporter
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21
...I am an avid supported of the open-source movement [sounds familiar? that's because it is -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20824&c
...I'm an avid supported of the open source movement [we know -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20761&c
... I am a passionate supported of the open-source movement [geez -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20760&c
What about the space elevator? I think that it is a really good idea, and there have been some very interesting(and detailed) studies of the feasibility.
Previous Articles:
Space Elevators: Low Cost Ticket to GEO?
More on Space Elevators
Going Up?
Calling the Space Elevator
Space Elevator May Become Reality - The Linked Study(PDF) Was fascinating.
Space Elevator Could Cost Less Than You Thought
Stepping Closer To The Space Elevator
I want to walk into an elevator some day and see too buttons - "G" and "O".
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Whatever we do has GOT to be based on our Number One resource, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME). This is an absolutely FANTASTIC piece of machinery that is as much an American Classic as a 1964 Mustang convertible. A Saturn 5 launched with five F-1 engines that burned liquid oxygen and kerosene - got the job done, but by far not the most efficient chemical reaction to get the job done. Thus it needed to be MUCH bigger and carry LOTS more fuel. The SSME burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which is MUCH more chemically efficient - you get LOTS more energy out of much LESS fuel. In fact, the liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen combination, and the way the SSME burns it at an almost theoretically perfect specific impulse of 480 seconds, is the BEST chemical propulsion engine that is EVER going to be built. They will still be using SSMEs in Star Trek time - Scotty would sing their praises. You can't build a "better" rocket engine than the SSME unless you go nuclear - and in our current political environment, development of a nuclear rocket seems doubtful. (Proposed changes to the turbopumps and heat exchangers address RELIABILITY concerns, not ENGINEERING IMPROVEMENTS...). So any plan to get out of Earth orbit has first GOT to include SSMEs as the core component...
The next step in an improved NASA is to use SSMEs WISELY. Here's the facts. Conquering the solar system is a numbers game. You've got to put up infrastructure to do the job you want done and that infrastructure is first and foremost WEIGHT. A good space program by definition gets the maximum infrastructure weight into space - the more you've got up there, the more you can do.
Now look at what NASA has done with the shuttle. Every Shuttle launch has three dry weights of interest - a payload weight of 20,000 pounds, an Orbiter dry weight of 180,000 pounds and an External tank empty weight of 80,000 pounds. The payload gets left in orbit. The Orbiter achieves orbital velocity and then gives that hard-won velocity up to land on a runway. The External Tank acheives 97% of orbital velocity and then is allowed to burn up and crash into the Indian Ocean because NASA has no ability established to use an ET in orbit if they went ahead and put it there - which NASA could, they just don't. So far there's been around 110 shuttle flights.
So what has NASA done with the SSMEs it's flown so far? They (could have) left 20,000 * 110 = 2.2 million pounds in orbit, they've put 80,000 * 110 = 8.8 million pounds into the Indian Ocean and they've brought 180,000 * 110 = 19.8 million pounds BACK from orbit and landed it on a runway. Of the 30.8 million pounds launched by NASA using SSMEs that could have been placed in orbit and left there, only 2.2 million pounds actuall WAS - only around 7%. So 93% of what SSMEs actually sent to orbit NEVER GOT TO STAY THERE under current NASA utilization policies....
Because of its greater efficiency, the Space Shuttle is capable of putting as much mass into low earth orbit as an old Saturn 5. The problem is that 93% of the weight put up by a space shuttle COMES BACK AND LANDS ON A RUNWAY OR FALLS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. This is STUPID. The dream of the 1970s or routine cheap Shuttle flights with astronauts being a combination of an interstate trucker crossed with a souped-up fighter/test/commercial pilots HAS NOT COME TRUE and NASA MUST ABANDON THIS DREAM TO PROGRESS. Shuttle launches are SO expensive and the on-orbit stay time is SO limited (a week or maybe two if you REALLY stretch it) and the destination so boring (low Earth orbit) that there is NOTHING an astronaut can do in a week that's worth the cost of putting her there to do it.
Bottom line - NASA needs to abandon the manned-flight tunnel vision mentality it currently has and build an expendable heavy lift unmanned cargo vehicle based on SSMEs that it can fly IN CONJUNCTION WITH existing manned Shuttle flights. The sooner NASA acknowledges this, the sooner we can conquer the solar system...
... is changing everyone's email address from "foo@[installation].nasa.gov" to "bar@nasa.gov"... Seriously.. I wonder what the costs are for that... Besides the technical change costs, there will be loss in productivity for everyone having to sit around updating everything, updating webpages, new business cards, etc... You get the picture...
There are three Saturn 5 flight vehicles - one at the Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville AL (where I live), one outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, and one at the Banana Creek Viewing Site at Kennedy Space Center, the closest you can get to watch a Shuttle launch. The ones in Alabama and Texas have been stored outdoors in the rain and sun and you would have to scrape tons of bird poop off of them to send them to the moon - basically, no way those puppies are ever gonna be launch-worthy. The one in Florida is BEAUTIFULLY preserved indoors - but still, even if a meteor was gonna hit Earth and it were an emergency, I'll bet you'd find it couldn't be made ready to fly no matter how motivated you were.
And of course, if we had robots up there, we could go into the geologically interesting sites that would be too dangerous for a manned mission - AND stay there for an extended period of time.
But the manned programme looks even more ridiculous when you take the ISS into account. What are they doing up there that couldn't be done by an unmanned mission? Even the much vaunted protein crystallisation experiments or novel alloy manufacture could be done in recoverable capsules.
As for the medical experiments, they're being done to see how the human body reacts to zero G. Errr - why? Don't put people up there and you don't get the problems associated with zero G.
At the end of the day, the manned programme is nothing more than a flag-waving exercise that can only be afforded by the big players. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the liner races or the battleship races of the 20th Century - ultimately pointless, but it makes for great headlines.
I'm just glad I'm not an American taxpayer who is being expected to cough up for it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
NASA will no longer have full time employees. Instead researchers in academic institutions and contractors will devote part of their time to NASA projects with their paychecks coming mostly from their institution. NASA only pays for equipment and contractors. This is how the Mars rovers are being done already. The scientists are all on university payrolls, while NASA pays for equipment.
Also it depends on what orbit you're launching into- big cost difference for Geosynchronous (comm sats) vs Low Earth Orbit (everything else). However, shuttle has lots of goodies that justify the extra cost -- robot arm, big cargo capacity, can take lots of people, is piloted, etc.
The ISS, on the other hand, eats up lots of $$$. I've heard scientists say you would get vastly more for your money by paying for individual launches for each project that would go on the ISS (i.e., ROI of the ISS doesnt nearly justify its cost)
SUV's support terrorism !
No. Russian Proton is about $2500/kg right now to LEO. Sea Launch is about the same. Ariane is nearer to Space Shuttle costs per kg, but that's a geosynchronous launcher whereas Shuttle can only make LEO.
My rule of thumb is that Geosynchronous is about 3x more expensive than LEO; since you need more than 3 the payload at LEO to be fuel for a kick motor to push you up the last bit into GEO (an additional 3.8 km/s).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You're comparing optimized, theoretical expendables vs. unoptimized but actually deployed reusable. Unoptimized varies by degree of unoptimization, but in theory, optimized (cheap) reusables could get down to $100/kg or less.