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Next Generation Space Shuttles
zymano writes "Popular Science has an article about the next generation space shuttles. If you're wondering about what happened to all those cool ideas for a new shuttle and what happened to them then this story will explain it. Mentions the politics, design, costs and time for a new shuttle." There's some neat images of mockups as well.
is one of the few places where I don't mind seeing my tax money used more often. Its a shame more money can't be dedicated to this field of research. A new reusable space shuttle that dosent require expendable fuel tanks or boosters would be a big benifit.
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
Point 1: skylab
Point 2: Islam isn't a superpower; it's a religion that spans a wide variety of implementations; from mild/tolerant to the fanatical.
As a rule of thumb, it doesn't make sense to design a new reusable or semireusable launch vehicle unless you're going to be using it at least 1000 times. Otherwise, the design costs don't get recouped. Realistically this means NASA is going to have to find enough payloads to launch one of these every week or so.
At current launch rates, NASA should stick with expendable vehicles.
"The problem is that NASA made them too high-maintenance."
No. The problem is the 1970s technology made them too high maintenance.
NASA and the contractors made some bad decisions in reguards to the heat shielding and SRBs that NASA is paying for now.
Why is so absolutely necessary to have a fleet of reusable space vehicles? Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a simpler, cheaper, one-time-use vehicle that can be customized for each mission and then scrapped for parts upon landing? I mean, $500 million per launch is a lot, and reducing complexity and reusability requirements could probably go a long way toward reducing that. Why is "reusable" such a huge buzzword?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
The current shuttle fleet is silly. In effect, NASA has a fleet of enormous dump trucks that it uses as taxicabs. They should have more than one type of craft - a small safe one for carrying people, and a big honkin' unmanned one for carrying freight.
Supporters of the Space program (myself and most other /.-ers i guess )tend to find it hard to believe so little prgress has been made in this field over the last 30 years.
Generally NASA and the lot get blamed for being inefficiate, wasing the money, etc. But as a European I have to make the reflection , if that we're the reason why aren't us European ahead of NASA with ESA, and the Russians even with their money problems . Even That Billion Chinese peolple are quite recently joining...
I think we can only conclude it's NOT as easy as it looks/seems...
(Allthough a bit faster must be possible no ?)
> As long as the new space shuttles have some modern computers on board (as opposed to the dated ones on the current shuttles)
What's wrong with the current computers on board? Sure, they're old but they still work and if they still work, why replace them? IIRC, the computers did all they could to try and save the shuttle. In the end, I'm sure it wasn't the computer's fault.
Geoffeg
They should just license the Soyuz from the Russians and launch them from Florida. They cost something like $20 million per launch, and they are probably the most reliable and cost-effective launch system in existence. The article mentions a $6 billion low-end limit on developing a new shuttle. That would pay for 300 Soyuz launches without even factoring in a per-launch cost for the shuttle. But of course, this will never happen due to the NIH factor.
Only two out of five have failed.
Official NASA documents estimated that you should be able to fly the shuttle 10,000 times before you lost one ("five nines reliability"). The reality is much closer to 100 times (two nines). This is very poor. If airplanes would kill you one time in a hundred, I sure wouldn't want to fly on an airplane... and there is nothing inherent to space operations which justifies the poor record of the shuttle.
We need to replace it with something safer, and that is possible.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yes, I agree rockets are damn good at their job of being very good at moving something very fast.
But a single space launch uses a hell of a lot of fuel and creates a lot of pollution - this is not sustainable.
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account. Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
Save rockets for the last resort. Yes they are good at a quick effective solution... but multiple space launches a day (manned or unmanned but something IMHO, necessary for more than the minor interest we have in space now)... rockets no longer become the best option.
They've flown for 22 years. Imagine what the mileage is? Somewhere in the millions, maybe even billions.
Each shuttle launch is ten miles up, and then ten miles down. The rest is just coasting. So the mileage is in the thousands, not anywhere close to the millions.
Well, except that Space is much more dangerous than flying around in the air. It's magnitudes more difficult *and* dangerous!
:)
As an example, please build a rocket car that can go 10 times as fast as a normal car but you want it to run on a normal dirt road.
There's nothing technically impossible about it, but boy it would take a lot of work and effort.
And I'd bet that you killed an awful lot of people to do it!
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Save rockets for the last resort. Yes they are good at a quick effective solution... but multiple space launches a day (manned or unmanned but something IMHO, necessary for more than the minor interest we have in space now)... rockets no longer become the best option.
Rockets aren't just a "good" solution. They're the ONLY solution we have for getting into space. (And, FWIW, they don't even have to make that much pollution--if the shuttle didn't have to be a heavy-lifter it could ditch the boosters, and run purely on a relatively clean peroxide or H20 combination.)
Most other proposed projects are about as feasible as bullets. Among other problems with "power on the ground" systems (pollution, overly expensive precision) you set yourself to one launch system--and with the costs needed to get that much energy into a transferrable form (ignoring the probably inefficiencies), it just doesn't make sense.
Now, two-stage jet-and-rocket designs make sense--they just haven't quite gotten there yet.
Oh, and about the Soyuz--it's great, but only if you can limit yourself to its three-person crew, and don't have to haul anything.
I keep reading that the National Aerospace Plane was cancelled in 1993 because it was "too soon for the scramjet".
Is that still the case? That was a decade ago, have no other improvements been made? The idea of something that takes off and lands just like a plane still seems very, very appealing.
My suspicion is that this is another one of those cases where the too-early version failed, and now everyone's afraid to try it again.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Well, as clearly stated in the article (hint), the outdated systems on the shuttle is a BIG part of the problem. Each system on the shuttle is autonomous, and requires one or more individuals on the ground to monitor it the entire trip. This results in thousands of people on the ground monitoring these things. Alternatively, if you modernized the equipment, you could DRASTICALLY reduce the people required to monitor the Shuttle while in orbit.
This could save NASA billions in costs. The problem is that NASA wants a new device that is massively better than the shuttle, instead of doing a CBA and get a fleet that is modern, 2-4 times safer, and costs half to operate.
The problem is that NASA won't go with replacement programs until they get a 200-fold safety improvement and a 10-fold cost savings. So as a result, we are spending a fortune on an aging fleet of increasingly primitive vehicles.
Instead, it would be nice if NASA would go for 2-4x safety improvements and 50% cost savings, and then build a new reusable launch vehicle every 10-20 years.
If we left alone or increased NASA funding, we could support perpetual research on new shuttles, with each generation bringing down in costs. If the operating costs dropped, you could save the money and use it towards research. The shuttle program produced a LOT of technology for the US economy (remember everything was space-age in the 80s), and new research programs will continue to do so. However, just relaunching the same thing for billions doing retarded thing like ants in space isn't pushing technology forward, it's just spending money to protect NASA's turf.
... are all bad ideas. It is not time to rearchitect the shuttle. It has worked, albeit with some catastrophes, for the past 30 years and it shows that the original design has merit. What needs to happen is actual *construction* of new shuttles based on the old design rather than the *design* of new shuttles based on pure theoretical, untested theory.
It's classic "don't want to fix the bugs, let's rearchitect" syndrome. However, if NASA and its partners hunker down and fix the problems, we can have a new fleet that will last another 30 years *without* catastrophe.
Here's what they should do:
1. Use their crash data to make whatever improvements necessary to enhance reliability
2. Upgrade their computer systems, perhaps removing a significant amount of bulk. (A $999 laptop has 10x the computing power of the original refrigerator-sized computer)
3. Expand the cargo bay a little bit. If carmakers can do it each and every model year, surely they can, too.
4. Better computer-assisted rocket thrusters for far better maneuverability in space. A next-gen space station will require more agility.
5. Improved ground control procedures. This means redundant, randomly paired inspectors, more stringent weather parameters, etc.
These sorts of things are what will make a better space program. Not pie-in-sky next generation planes that will be even more subject to catastrophe. Let the military figure out how to create a scramjet, fly suborbital, etc. NASA has shown it's no longer fit to push the cutting edge of aerospace.
Co-develop the next gen shuttle with the Japanese. The Japanese have a knack at improving efficiency and reliability. Overall, the Japanese lead reliability in cars, computers (vaio's excepted), and general management.
There is no next-generation space shuttle, and there never will be. Boosting NASA's budget doesn't get senators re-elected, and no private companies are willing to look far enough ahead to see the potential profits in spaceborne industry.
Nobody cares about science or exploration, all that matters anymore is who owns which patch of oil-laden sand in the middle east. NASA has lost both the budget and the backbone for manned spaceflight. We went to the moon almost half a century ago, and now all we can do is putter about in low orbit building overpriced, underperforming space stations. Pathetic.
The human race will die on this godforsaken rock.
0 1 - just my two bits
The advantage of the Shuttle's computers are that they've been round since the late 1960s, their design has been thoroughly debugged as have the programming tools used to write their code AND the code itself.
The Shuttle code is widely regarded as some of the best programming ever completed.
Throw the Shuttle computers away and you lose all those hard-won achievements.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The present shuttle's main engines burn hydrogen + oxygen --> H2O. The "pollution" in question is... WATER!
Admittedly, the solid rocket boosters use ammonium perchlorate and aluminum, which does produce nastier stuff - but they're replaced with more liquid fueled rockets in all the proposed shuttle replacements, too.
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account. Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
Why? It can't be cleaner environmentally, and I very much doubt you could build such a "mag-lev launcher thing": for starters, a vehicle accelerating along a maglev track to escape velocity would require either insane lengths of track (on a Great Wall of China scale) or acceleration which would pulp the occupants. A rocket, meanwhile, can give a reasonable acceleration throughout the climb to orbit - spreading the acceleration out over a few minutes.
A space elevator might one day be a feasible approach. Maglev won't, unless/until you find a way to project the magnetic field a few hundred miles away from the ground equipment producing it...
We've lost 2 out of 5 shuttles due to problems stemming from the expendable launch boosters, not the reusable shuttles. True the Columbia did fail on re-entry, but it is highly likely it would have survived had large pieces of insulation been falling off the expendable fuel tank. The shuttle still works the way it was designed. It just wasn't deigned to have it's booster engines explode on it, or have large objects collide with the wings. So the failure rate of the shuttle itself is fairly good, it just couldn't survive a couple extreme situations that either were impossible to avoid or not enough precautions to avoid had been implemented.
Ninjas, they make anything better
>
The problem with this is that the machines will have to be repalced at some point. The MTU (Master Timing Unit) designed by Westinghouse in the seventies was still being used as late as 1993. It was in need of a redesign then because the oscillator used was getting scarce. I have no idea if the thing is still being used but NASA better design a replacement very soon. Half of the parts used in the thing can't be had for love or money. Obsolete technology can be a danger on it's own if it's a critical item to be maintained.
bob@Osprey:~>
I would have to agree. The US is entering the next version of the Vietnam era, the endless war on terror. The cash is going to all the guns stuff and the the space program can go suck.
I agree with most of the posts here. NASA should have a big unmanned heavy lift rocket and a smaller SHUTTLE for humans. George W should do a speech like JFK and aim for Mars and a permanent base on the Moon. That would stimulate interest in space. Also he could use it to hide other problems in his administration (sorry but there always has to be something in it for the politicians).
If we got to the moon in 69 how far could we get now. It needs to be highly funded to. I can't remember who said it but its a golden quote.
'We are going to the moon in a spacecraft made by the lowest bidder'
We need to get away from that mentallity. Award the contracts on ideas/quality. I'd would mind spending more money on space and less on Defence/Iraq occupation.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George