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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.
My question is if they need to think out of the box, particularly for the manned portion. I wonder if it might be better to go with the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo-Soyuz technology. Forget wings. Come back on retrorockets and parachutes. Focus the reusable technology on the boosters and other rockets.
haha!
I was thinking about momentum and launching... why not get something really really really heavy to move at a moderate speed (could be through some environmentally friendly means, possibly a mag-lev to minimise friction. This heavy objects then hits the light shuttle, propelling it over some runway at fantastic speeds into orbit (could be in a vacuum tube for some time).
Maybe the Gs will be too much for a manned flight above... so how about bombarding a capsule with neutrons or something through a launch tude?
The idea of a rocket for regular flights is just so... flawed and wasteful.
All above ideas are governed be me... source is available but compilation (or building them!) is copyrighted!!!
Damn, now if i can just find something really really heavy!
Oh, wait, it's been done... it's called Project Orion .
Or we could do something even more efficient... throw stuff out the back at high speed and let the reaction provide propulsion. Hell, if you can throw it fast enough, it doesn't have to be heavy...
Oh, wait... that's been done, too. It's called a rocket.
Seriously, though, why do you say a rocket is "flawed and wasteful"? What makes you think that throwing rocks at a spacecraft would work better (or at all)? Have you done any math to substantiate it? Is it, just maybe, possible that all those rocket scientists might know what they're doing?
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
It's very simple. What we need are reusable ships with a modest cargo capacity, plus maybe a few "big dumb boosters" for launching big things.
It's also very clear that NASA is not capable, as an organization, of doing this. NASA has some smart people working there, but any really large project will safely bury the smart ones under red tape where they can't do anything. If you want to convert money into piles of paper, have NASA attempt to make a follow-up to the shuttle.
The US government should make iron-clad promises to buy launches. Station re-supply launches for the International Space Station would be a great place to start. If John Carmack's company, or any other company, can get a vehicle going that can run supplies to orbit, the government should hire them to do it. In other words, pay for results but for nothing else, and don't have any part of the government (especially NASA) trying to help design the ships.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If they replaced the computers with newer ones, the savings in weight could be tremendous. Any savings in weight leads to cheaper flights.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Some one did an excelent post last week (when that russian re-entry vechicle went off course)
the russians dont have a reusable vehicle, and that because of that their saving 100's of millions of dollars over the US (original post had facts and figures)
K.I.S.S
Keep it simple stupid,
instead of one vehicle with 3 backup systems.. why not just build 2 of them really really well?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Russia's Soyuz was the idea I had in mind when I posted. Strapped for cash, the Russian space program has had to find many ways to keep their systems as cheap as possible while at the same time competing with ours. The Soyuz saves them hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is a much safer system than our shuttle. Note that when the Soyuz has a problem it gets lost and they have to spend a few hours looking for it, whereas when the Shuttle has a problem it blows up.
We should probably take a hint from the miserly Russians in this regard.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
That's not actually true. A rocket produces about the same amount of pollution as burning the same amount of fuel in a car engine. The main pollutant it creates is CO2, and it doesn't, overall, produce any CO2 if you use biomass to make the rocket fuel (since the plants suck up as much CO2 as they grow as the rocket produces).
Yes, rocket propulsion is efficient in a chemical-kinetic energy transfer way, but not efficient if all other costs are taken into account.
Nonsense. It doesn't even use that much fuel. First, 2/3 of the fuel is liquid oxygen, it's cheap and environmentally friendly. That's produced from liquid distillation of air. That leaves about 20 kgs of fuel needed for each kg of payload. A person weighs, say 200 kg, including spacesuit. That means you need 4000kg of fuel. That's about the same amount of fuel as I burnt in my car last year. It's a lot, but not an overwhelming amount, and it's not like I go shopping in my rocket every day, going into space is a rare event.
Use geo-thermal energy to power such a mag-lev launcher thing... I find that preferable.
Yeah, but if you have the geo-thermal, why not use it to make hydrogen, and launch with that in a conventional rocket? That way you can do it for a few billion rather than 100 trillion dollars or whatever a 50km long mag-lev launcher would cost. How much pollution would be made in constructing that anyway?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The main thing that killed it, was the projected development cost- around $20 billion or more (and I think these are 1980 prices). The engines look like they would be really expensive to design, and they are the heart of the vehicle. Basically, he couldn't find anyone to fund it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It seems to me that all these designs are made for one thing alone, and that is to ferry astronauts back and forth to that other orbital albatross...the ISS. If they are never going to get any real science going on that damn thing I would much rather that they can the whole thing entirely. I would like to see NASA devote all the money that goes to the the shuttle, iss, and all the other NASA garbage to programs that will get humans out of Earth orbit and into the rest of the solar system.
NASA research programs are sitting on all sorts of interesting innovations and inventions. I think it would be great if some of those innovations got the kind of funding that would allow them to be realized on a useful scale. I want to see a nuclear powered rocket fly to far reaches of our solar system. I want to see some of the technology put to use in putting humans on Mars and a permanent settlement on the moon.
I'm tired of seeing tax dollars blown on orbital crap that can be done faster, better, and cheaper with robots and computers than by humans in flying tin cans when there are far more exciting possibilities for human exploration of space.
Suitably updated where necessary and with an eye towards reusability if feasible. The Saturn V kicked ass and shows what a kludge the shuttle is, we're talking about a booster that could put a Mack truck in orbit around the moon. The Shuttle was a huge step backwards in every area except for reusability.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I read the article and have seldom seem such unassuming outrage in my life.
... to 2010!
The engineers (at least those who are doing the acutal work) knew the shuttle was heading for another loss-of-all-hands.
... and goes on to present several.
I'm not worried about options ... I'm worried about cost.
With prior projections of $6 to $35 (!!!) billion, I don't feel particularly compelled to keep NASA in the space-shuttling business.
Instead, with the basis for the current shuttle being $500 million per flight, see if we can task those much-vaunted aerospace companies to build a system and run it, at LESS THAN THAT COST.
If it turns out for their launch system that they use a gigantic rubber band stretched between two immense pylons, and charge $10 million per flight, then ... GREAT!
The current shuttle is a terrible system that started out with too many compromises. It smacks of a political statement. The same system could have been accomplished with two other, smaller, cheaper systems: crew-mission ships (very X-15 like) and heavy-cargo lifters. But those were too functional (i.e. not sexy enough) and frankly couldn't have funneled that much money into a mondo-beyondo development program run by an aerospace company or three. So, instead, we got a moderate-lift, heavily-crewed ship that tumbles in the airstream of some mishap (thus being completely destroyed) once every 50 to 100 flights.
What was NASA's response to this last November?: let's keep this good thing going
The article claims that for replacement programs, there's "no shortage of ideas"
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Look, there are way too many veriables in using a shuttle type vehicle. Has anyone ever even looked at a reusable capsule?
Why would we want to have the shuttle transport the equipment up to space? Why not have a transport for people (ie: a capsule which is low risk)? Have a seperate transport for equipment and materials (a big rocket that is unmanned).
Why is a capsule lower risk, NO MOVING PARTS. ONLY 1 surface for reentry. A smaller area for the reentry surface.
Look, I'm not a rocket scientist, but the shuttle is, for me, a money pit, and will have alot more failures than a capsule system would.
Not quite. Sure, there have been advances in computers, metallurgy, etc, in the interening years since the shuttle fleet was built. But the main problem was the short-sightedness of the Congressmen who controlled NASA's budget while the shuttle was being designed. The reason we wound up with a shuttle with so many shortcomings, problems, delays, etc, is largely due to Congress' having cut the shuttle development budget SEVEN TIMES during the Carter administration (as documented by a later government commission).
Another problem is the politicized distribution of subcontractors for any major NASA undertaking. Pieces of large projects are distributed among contractors in as many states as possible. This ensures that every Congressman's state gets "a piece of the action". A good example is the construction of the solid rocket boosters in Utah. Because the boosters were made in Utah, they had to be built in sections (so they could then be shipped to Florida for launch). If the boosters had originally been built in Florida, the boosters could have simply been floated like barges from their construction site over to the Cape. There would have been no O-ring seals to fail, which is what ultimately doomed Challenger.
The shuttle fleet we have now is definitely the result of subcontractor gerrymandering and repeated budget cuts. Even though it would have cost more up front to build an 'ideal' shuttle fleet (without solid rocket boosters, for example), we would have been better off in the long run. We would likely have saved some astronauts' lives, indirectly. And we wouldn't be faced with the prospect of scrapping the existing fleet to build the fleet we should have built in the first place.