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Orbital Space Plane Problems
FTL writes "NASA's next big step in space (after getting the remaining Shuttles flying again) is the construction of the Orbital Space Plane. It is a small vehicle designed to transport people to and from ISS. Jeffrey Bell takes a close look at OSP in this article and comes to the conclusion that it will result in yet another crippled vehicle. Sounds like what people were saying about the Shuttle's problems back when it was being designed."
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?O SP4.jpg
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/shared/news2003/OSP/
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Hopefully they get it right this time around, cause we don't have the extra $$$ to waste on NASA.
Why not just support the X prize project
If it wasn't on an actual NASA.gov server, I would swear that was a joke. I would half be expecting to see a rendition of that image in ASCII, posted in full crap flooder fury with the caption "PENIS SHUTTLE - PENIS SHUTTLE" or something.
What next, the "space elevator"?.. Oh wait...
Ñ'
Maybe we can outsource it and have the Russians and Indians build it?
4 spacecrafts and an elevator to space. We'll have to have morning radio reports for low orbit traffic.
What do I have to do to get a sig around here?! www.bearscanfly.org
Wonderful lines like:
Sound familiar? It should. The OSP is only the latest of many "Shuttle replacement" programs that have all failed dismally.
Most critics have focused on the suspiciously low development costs, or the embarrassing gap between 2006 and 2010 in which no ISS lifeboat is planned. In fact, the basic concept of the program is so stupid that every knowledgeable person involved in it must be perfectly aware that it will never fly.
Lost my attention at this point. If he had anything worth saying he destroyed his credability by that point.
Yeah I read the article. However I realized it would've been against the rules to RTFA and then post, so I'm pretending I didn't. :)
Anyways, it sucks that this "space plane" still needs a big buttload of fuel tank and booster rockets to get off. This is hardly gonna save any money... What nasa oughta build is a reusable launch vehicle that can carry the OSP or the shuttle off, and then land and refuel.
Want to see another familiar image on NASA's site? Check out my sig!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Aint it great to be posting an article for "Nasa Kids"?
I glanced through the article...this is unfortunate news, and I hope the author's conclusions are incorrect. The shuttle is aging, and I think we all expect it to go the way of the Segway pretty soon.
.NET Server Orbital Vehicle Edition failing to convert between metric and English units correctly as leading to the tragedy. Space travel is important to our culture, the future of our children, and our global economy...we in the open source community need to do our part to ensure its success.
Maybe with some more $$, NASA could do a better job of shoring up the space program, to ensure boy-band members will still have the opportunity to travel in space for the foreseeable future. Perhaps if they switched the shuttle's software to an open source alternative, like Linux, or even one of its flakier derivatives like BSD, they could save enough money to get this new space plane up and running. It may also improve safety, as some of the reports from the Endeavor disaster cited issues with Windows
Consensual sex is boring.
"Apollo missions regularly landed within 2nm of the predicted point," Wow - 2 nanometers! That shows my tax dollars are well spent....
They gave us vodka
and the prototype is working.
they used a modified 747, and a special tow line. they then tow the orbiter up to very high altitutes and launch the orbiter.
the orbiter then ignights its rockets and because it it already high in the atmosphere, it can use half the fuel of bullistic launch.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
How many times do we have to tell you?!!!
Big, dumb boosters for cargo.
Little, safe (99.999%) rockets for crew!
Orbital Space Plane @ orbital.com
Orbital Space Plane @ globalsecurity.org
With spelling like that, I'm shocked that you have not yet been offered an Editorial job a Slashdot!
Slashdot. Journalism at its very best.
At least their re-entry vehicles don't explode.
OK, NASA still looks screwed up.
Possibilities we must consider:
What should we (the United States in particular and humanity in general) be doing?
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
... or could it?
Simple lap belt replaced with 7-point harness.
In-flight movie would just have to be Apollo 13.
In-flight beverage would be Tang.
Mandatory cavity search at security gate.
No sharp or blunt objects allowed on board.
That includes shoes.
In case of decompression, a preferred religious object will drop from ceiling.
This is why we missed Mars.
This is getting ridiculous. Billions of dollars later we can't figure out how to build a space raft. Well then its simple - you tell future astronauts that they will be on their own on the ISS unless a shuttle or the Russians can get to them. Sinking more money into ISS at this point is pointless. The Chinese will be laughing at it from the moon in ten years while Americans continue to pretend to do "important scientific research".
u r00L... :)
So, Mr. Bell does not agree with the new designs, hm?
Well, I just so happened to be browsing a Russian site about space research and glanced at the researchers that 'helped' them with their research. Now, gentlemen, what did see? I saw that not one, not two, but three Bells are working with, or should I say, _for_ them and two of those Bells happened to be American.
Now here we are, reading an article about a Bell who does not agree with the American NASA's Orbital Space Plane designs...
Coincidence? I think not.
Eagle landers finished in 1999 for Moonbase Alpha.
But, sometimes when you're just going for a drive or taking a trip, you don't really need a bus, a moving van, a construction truck, a science lab, or a race car. Sometimes, a simple compact car would make traveling a lot more convenient and less expensive. The same principle applies to spaceflight.
I wonder if NASA has considered actually bringing some compact car makers as consultants. How would Honda, Mitsubishi, or Toyota would go about tackling these problems? Combine the efficiency of the Civic or the Insight with the existing X-plane aerospace technology of Lockheed Skunkworks and Boeing, and see what happens.
An interesting can of worms to open here, who owns those patents? If NASA developed them, then they should be in the Public Domain, since they used public money for funding, shouldn't they? Even if they are developed outside of NASA, if NASA pays for it, the U.S. government pays for it, so indirectly I've paid for it, so if anyone is making money I should get a cut. (Hey, that's Metallica's reasoning.)
I'm not trying to start a IP bru-ha-ha(sp?), but I'm curious if anyone actually knows this. Or do these end up in those companies with the "We don't make X, we just make it better" ads?
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Shuttle's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Shuttle faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Shuttle because *Shuttle is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Shuttle. As many of us are already aware, *Shuttle continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of squandered astronaut blood.
ColumbiaShuttle is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core astronauts. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time ColumbiaShuttle astronauts <Some Isreali Col> and <some Paki Dr> only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: ColumbiaShuttle is dead.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
AtlantisShuttle Cmdr. Theo states that there are 70 users of AtlantisShuttle . <got bored of this here...> How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of AtlantisShuttle versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Direct quote from the article(around 3/4 of the way down, under the heading "Weight a minute..."):
The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to -400F. to make the gases flow as liquids. Ice will form on the tank. When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank.
Indeed...
I'm surprised it took so long to happen.
Goodbye, Columbia.
If the situation is thus, NASA is way too bloated a govermental organization to keep things running smooth, maybe unmanned space flight for now is the only responce.
If you notice, many of the experiments performed on shuttles are ones that there is really no need for a human to be involved, you can have a robot or control from the ground do it fine and have it be both safer, and more cost effective than spaceflight. In fact its almost as if NASA is making busy work for astronauts now, with the fact most experiments can be done without human aid.
But is this really the case, is it maybe more, NASA scientists are unimaginative? I can think of tons of very valid and important human experiments yet to be performed in space that NASA never does for one reason or another. Not to mention a lot of the "future in space" projects they alwaysed perposed end up getting tossed for something else unimportant. We dont need to know stuff like how insects perform in space or GASP how fish f**k, We need to know stuff like staisis and how a better sleep system might be invented or creating artifisial gravity or other things that pertain more to humans living in space than anything else.
Which leads me to my next point, a lot of my suggestions are next to impossable right now cause we dont have enough data on them, so why dont we make it. Limit human spaceflight, study more things on the ground, and then when we are ready go back with the new data in HUMAN experiments. Go back to the old days of Apollo and Gemini and stuff where it was an exploration, not busy work.
perhaps GASP slow down and let science catch up!!!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Me, I think that Dennis Tito did it right- buy a flight at the lowest price he could. Ok, so it turned out to be the Ruskies, I call that an incentive to Americans to actually get off their money-wasting duffs and actually go out and make competitive rockets rather than the government subsidised massively overpriced efforts you see at the moment.
I mean, everyone acts like 'high technology' is the answer. Nope. Sorry. 'Low Cost' is the answer. And you nearly always don't get that from Government run operations. Government departments want to grow; they don't want to shrink. They don't want higher efficiency, because that just means they can do the same with less, that just means that their 'excess' budget gets cut and they end up doing the same amount for lower cost.
No. We need businesses. Businesses actually have an incentive to grow the market. Launching more often actually makes launching cheaper, and this in turn grows the market and hence the business and the total profits. Businesses win over governments.
Frankly, if you're proNASA you're pretty much a communist- (no I'm not trolling, not everything that seems controversial is a troll) NASA is run by the country 'for the good of the country'. I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone. Being nice does not scale like profit motive does. We need to scale space up to put a reasonable number of people into space, you and me.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Budget overruns, construction difficulties, and safety issues are causing many tribal elders to reconsider whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs.
Many tribal members feel increasingly alienated by technology.
A case in point is fire. The recent development of fire has been seen as a mixed blessing by many in the community.
"Fire bad.", says Dr.Ugh, gesturing to his burned hands suffered during an early meat cooking experiment.
Good or bad, fire has been rapidly adopted by the younger generation as both a means of cooking and the primary source of entertainment.
If the wheel does beat the odds and becomes a viable means of transportation, what will it mean?
Is our technological advancement going to far, too fast?
Where will our science lead us, and do we really want to go there?
We spend tens of millions (hard to say, NASA won't disclose) training "astronauts", and then dedicate most of the lifting capacity of the vehicles to keeping them alive while they watch a board and occasionally push a button that could be pushed by the guy that trained them back at mission control. That's a hell of a lot of money per button push.
Buzz Aldrin says it best. He never thought space exploration would come to mean shuttling cargo up to low earth orbit. Let's leave that to the machines, and send men out to do what they can't. Explore and describe the wonders that are out there, so that us lesser men touch them by proxy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I don't know this guy, but sounds like there's a considerable chip attached somewhere south of neck. Invoking the word 'stupid' towards your critics in a technical article isn't going to go over too well.
Look. Flying to space is hard. People are going to die doing it, just like people are going to die driving across the state or flying across the country or running around the water on a jet ski.
As long as we do it only a few times a year, the fatal mistakes are going to look horrific. If a million people a day flew through space and a few dozen died, why is that any more astounding than what happens on the roads?
Of course I'm not proposing flying lots of people into space to make the accidents look good. But realize the carnage we DO put up with to get to the movies or visit some tourist trap.
Now, if it were simpler, it'd be safer.
If it were truly reusable it'd be cheaper.
If it were less vulnerable to chaos (water landings, wind shear, parachutes) it'd be easier to swallow the alternatives.
As for climbing cables to orbit, a bunch of smart people on a shuttle had a real tough time wrangling a few hundred meters of cable - but 200 km? I want a few more proof-of-concepts and sims before I grab the business end of one of those.
Part and parcel in this whole thing is the time to market - the shuttle took too long to get to the pad - if it had flown with current at the time avionics and computers, it'd been in much better shape. Tony Englund tells the story of being in the shuttle simulator when they shut it down one day and said sorry guys - we need the cue-ball - a mechanical cue-ball - becasue the last working one one a flying shuttle had gone bad and they aren't making them any more. That sort of thing has stopped, but could be repeated with obsolete tech if they don't dev faster...
I would still sit on the shuttle flight deck tomorrow to orbit. Knowing the risks and using the process. NASA ain't perfect. But they're not malicious or stupid.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"Halfway to Anywhere" by G. Harry Stine should be required reading for anyone interested in new manned spacecraft design. It's out of print, but used copies are readily available.
If you are going to debunk the debunkers, please do it properly.
The atmosphere is responsible for "twinkling" yes.. but htat has nothing to do with stars being seen or not. The sky from the moon looks pretty much like the sky from earth, minus twinkling.
The reason you don't see starts in the photographs is because of EXPOSURE time. Lunar surface == bright, Astronaut in white moon suit == bright, remember this is directly reflect sunlight with no atmosphere to dim it at all.. therefore, the exposure time is very short, and that's why the stars don't register.
This isn't just a theory.. its' the same reason you don't take your picture indoors with a bright window or reflection behind your subject... because it casues everything else to fade to black.
funding? IT's easy to criticize an agency for failing in it's duties when you cut off it's cash supply.
What the people want NASA to do, nasa can't do with the money it's given. Plain and simple.
... because rockets don't have any atmosphere to "push against" in space. It's simple common sense.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Yep they made the best!
Esp putting a C6-3 in a Big Birta ship. Sheech it screamed!
Only problem was trying to keep the rubber bands in the Mars rocket even or the tail fins stuck on a Interceptor. But their version of an 2 pice orbiter always worked!
man... so much for colonizing mars. at this rate it sounds like we'll have our hands full with just LEO for the forseeable future.
i had no idea just how mismanaged our goals are.
or how difficult the managing of our goals is.
but i guess this is our lot until we find some new means of reaching space (elevators, scramjets, slingshots, whatever) in a cheaper, more reliable and more reusable manner.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Although "glitter" is not incorrect, usually in English stars are said to "twinkle", as in the nursery rhyme "Twinkle, twinkle, little star".
Otherwise, good post, I love watching conspiracy theories get debunked.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
from the article :You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.
Bullshit it can't....
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
things, and not journalists.
In fact, let's thank God the only thing we let journalists do is spew out crap like that found in these articles.
~ now you know
Presumably, you're a libertarian (AKA the free market is god). Why then hasn't the "free market" gotten a human into orbit anywhere? Only state-backed, publically funded efforts have.
and you call HIM stupid...
how stupid must one be to bite such pathetic troll?
or have I bitten one myself?
my head hurts!
cheers.
http://www.isro.org/programmes.htm>. html
http://www.isro.org/mileston.htm
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2132831,00
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/param.asp
NASA is just fumbling in the dark. They have no goal, no plan. With the shock of the $400 billion price tag for NASA's reference mission, the next goal in space (Mars) was lost for a generation.
What NASA needs is a president and administrator who will set a goal and push for it to be achieved. NASA is an organization without a purpose, and it needs one before we lose our future in space.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
One of his arguments is that they will still need the shuttle to bring up supplies. No, they already have the soyuz freighter for that. In fact, I think they hardly ever use the shuttle to bring supplies to ISS. It would be very inefficient (the part he did get right). The point of this vehicle is to allow cheaper and more abundant crew transfer ability, especially in case of emergencies.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Cheers,
Ian
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
It's been that way for almost forty years. It's not getting any better. No combination of parts will fix this fundamentally broken technology.
Space travel is like lighter-than-air travel. The technology has been around for decades, and it reached its limits a long time ago. It's possible to build vehicles. But the weight limitations are too severe for them to be more than marginally useful.
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
Yes, sure, but you forget one thing.
Economics.
A Federal agency has to worry about costs much less than a business. And NASA certainly worries about costs. For a business to compete for a chance to go to space, cheaply, quickly, or any other "ly", there would have to be MONEY up there.
Science doesn't pay. The only reason the Russians launch cheaper is because if they didn't, nobody would use them. They'd get NO money, instead of LEAST money. The Russians are Wal-Mart in this respect.
The only money to be made in space right now is in the launching of satellites. So long as there's insurance for those, the Russian cost-cutting is not much of a problem.
Now, show me something up there to go an actually get, that is of worth, and I'll show you all the current aerospace contractors lobbying the government to be cut loose and allowed to leave NASA in the dust.
But until there's a money to be made, business isn't lifting a finger.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Well,h tml
I currently work for NASA and I would like to dispell some of the ugly rumors you are spreading.
1)Space travel is not beyond us (we have already proven that).
2)Furthermore, NASA has been behind all of the most up-to-date space travel(that we know about).
3)Management is not the problem with the columbia disaster, it is only portrayed that way because the media needs someone to blame so people like you can be happy. Everyone involved in the disaster understood the risks and did everything they could to prevent a problem. We are not perfect, but that doesn't stop us from trying to be.
4)NASA does not have a monopoly on space travel. First of all, monopoly only applies to private companies, not government-funded programs (the website is www.nasa.gov NOT www.nasa.com). Secondly there are other space programs in the world who are less advanced, but face it, we are the most wealty country in the history of the world, if we didn't have the most advanced space program, we would have our priorities confused.
5)I think it is a great idea to have other agencies investigating options for space travel, however, do you really want a space vehicle built by corporate America where profits make decisions before safety? The reason NASA is a government-run entity is the fact that they can pursue new ideas and breakthroughs without the pressure of having to create something that is profitable (even though much of what NASA creates is). Take a look at http://technology.ksc.nasa.gov/spinoffs/spinoffs.
to see some of the things you take for granted that were created by NASA. (cordless drills, cellular technology, GPS, Air conditioning just to name a few)
6)You may not know that NASA is operating with essentially the same budget today that it had 15 years ago. Figure in inflation and you may realize how meagre the budget has become. The amount that is spent on NASA from your tax dollars is miniscule compared to our defense budget. NASA's annual budget is 14 Billion dollars, which may seem like a lot, but the treasury department spent 360 Billion in interest, 32 billion in education, 41 billion on roads,400 billion on social security, and 350 billion on the Dept of Defense. NASA's budget doesn't seem so bad, huh?
7)NASA doesn't just do space travel. There are many other branches that I don't even have time to elaborate about here. Look at www.nasa.gov and look at some of the projects NASA is working on, it may surprise you.
8)Writing your congressman/woman is a great idea, but maybe you should be telling them to increase NASA's already tightened budget so we can enjoy more of the benefits later. The only way to improve is to learn from our mistakes and move on. No one can predict whether or not our research into space will be useful someday, so why not explore all of our options?
--Derek Riley
What surprises me is that it took less than 10 years to go to the moon, with primitive 1960's technology. This project looks like it's going to take just as long... even longer... and this is with more advanced technology, plus all the experience of over 40 years of spaceflight.
Something is seriously wrong...
Could that then be called an mono^H^H^H^H escalator to nowhere?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What we need to do is to invent some launcher that doesn't have to carry so much fuel.
What function does NASA serve?
Could those functions be served more efficiently by multiple, smaller, privately run organizations?
Why spend so much on manned flights when all of the experiments are simple enough to be automated?
One advantage of a privately run organization is that they can take risks.
When did space travel become something that has to be risk free, with every death being a tragedy?
In the year 2002 42,850 people died in automobile crashes in the US . These deaths accomplished nothing.
What if a fraction of that number, say 500 people, died every year in an attempt to increase humanity's capability to get off this rock. Would that be such a tragedy?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
What he says about "advanced technology" is pretty much spot on.
When you look at our "advanced boosters" - in a basic sense, all they are is old early cold-war-era ICBMs, retrofitted with Solid Rocket Boosters. Atlas, Delta, and Titan. The last REAL innovation in US booster technology was Saturn V.
I agree with several points he made - about how VTOHL is kind of retarded. Launching big heavy wings vertically, so the craft can land horizontally is ridiculous. But he overlooks some of the alternatives.
Lifting Bodies - X-33 was a spectacular failure - only because when confronted with adversity, WE GAVE UP. Part of that was the failure of the guys who set the budget unrealistically low in the first place, and let it overrun past the point of credibility. But if you want weight-savings in not sending wings up vertically, that's the way to do it. There's one real technicall challenge - an oddly-shaped fuel tank able to repeatedly deal with the pressurization cycle. And we just rolled over and quit when the first few attempts failed. I think that's sad.
Horizontal Take-off - Pegasus has been a spectacular success. If you're going to put wings on your craft, you may as well Horizontal Take-Off. Most of the launch fuel of getting a vehicle into space is used up in the first 5 miles. I don't know if there's a good way to fix this problem cheaply - we already "blew our wad" so-to-speak, but here's what we can do maybe in 10 years:
Justify the development of a new, VERY large multi-purpose transport aircraft - like the Galaxy C-5, only, in order to take advantage of economy of scale, use the same principle used in the JSF program. One plane that fulls multiple roles. Here are the roles:
Heavy Bomber (to replace the B-52).
Cargo Transport (to support loads the C-5 cannot handle)
Commercial Passenger plane (I know, we can't justify the Boeing double-decker, but at one point, it was at least worth thinking about).
Launch Vehicle Deployment.
Currently, the Pegasus can loft a tiny 1000lb payload into orbit. It's taken up to 40,000 ft by an L-1011, which is a pretty large plane. A plane on the scale of what I'm talking about could horizontally loft a next-generation spaceplane up to 40,000 ft, separate, and return to the ground, for mere peanuts compared to what it costs to prep your typical Atlas/Titan/Delta/Arianne. From 40,000 ft, scramjets can get this plane to 80,000 ft and Mach 8-12. (another technology we would need to develop, but it will save the weight of carrying oxidizer). Booster rockets can get it to Orbit. (either a SRB strap-ons, or perhaps the scramjets can be fed oxidizer).
Admittedly VERY complicated technology, but this is the evolution we were looking at 15 years ago with VentureStar, and other variants. And they were abandoned, due to lack of vision at the federal level. This lack of vision stems from a lack of a pissing-contest with the Russians, like we had when we were going to the moon.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When a private corporation builds their own launch infrastructure, vehicle, and private orbiting hotel, then maybe you have a point. Until such a time, please accept the fact that public money from all the world's governments funded all the research, physical infrastructure, and maintains the functioning systems we currently use to get us into and out of space. You can't just pay for a ticket and call it "private enterprise" without recognizing this fact. Well, you can, but you're deluding yourself.
Here's an analogy: we've just created the first trains and you want to fight over proprietary track size instead of laying down new track. Let's build the infrastructure first, then we let private companies use the track to move goods at a profit. Or in this case, first we fund the basic research to get viable transport systems into space, then we let the private companies sell payloads at a profit. We may be at stage two already (ready to hand some of the technology over to private hands) but we certainly would never have gotten there without public funding.
JMO,
--Maynard
First flight already. More at http://www.avweb.com/news/atis/181827-1.html.
That's a general aviation plane, lots of catching up to build spacecraft.
They use the Russian Progress M1 to ferry supplies and fuel, and to provide for reboosts when it's there. It's also used as a trash container, and is jetisoned to burn up in the atmosphere when it's full.
That said, the Progress carries something on the order of 2-3 tons tons of cargo, fuel, and water. Total Payload limit is 2230-3200 KG, which includes the fuel necessary to rendevous with the ISS; 1700 - 1950 KG, 185-250 of which are available as surplus fuel for the station. It has a maximum pressurized (dry) cargo capacity of 1800 KG, and up to 300 KG of water.
The Italian built (US owned) Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules, that fly on the space shuttle, and can be docked to any ISS port for an extended stay can carry up to 10 tons of cargo in 16 standard space station equipment racks. They can carry self-contained experiments or equipment upgrades in these racks and just float them into the ISS and plug them in. They are also capable of carrying refrigerated storage compartments to carry fresh food to the ISS.
Info on Progress M1
Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules Information
As a former employee of Lockheed Martin. I can tell you that this has been in the works for a while. A few years back they where working on a smaller version of the X-35 Shuttle to use as an escape vehicle for the Astronauts onboard the ISS. Seems that since the X-35 was written off for now due to the cost. A much smaller space plane would fit right into the project plans. This would save them money and accomplish the goal of transporting the Astronauts to and from the ISS after it's construction is complete. Seems like they could still use some of the proposed X-35 technology (Ramjets and such) on this smaller vehicle. Might as well use this project as a stepping stone to replace the aging Space Shuttle.
It's a pet project of mine, but I think it bears commenting on: The space elevator.
I think it may be a _very_ good option for the nation's space needs.
More information can be found here:
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
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
I think several of his complaints are incorrect.
First, he claims that the OSP is bad because it only ships people, not cargo. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. Manned spaceflight is more expensive than unmmanned flight. It is a waste of money to send anything on a manned flight that could be sent on a cheaper unmanned one. The Russians have already demonstrated that cargo can be taken to the ISS with an umannned system. Satellites can be launched without using a manned vehicle. The only thing that can't be launched on a cheaper unmanned vehicle is people. Therefore the most economical system would be one where the manned rockets were just for ferrying people. That's what the OSP is; yet he seems to have a problem with that. If we start trying to make the OSP do everything, then it will be an expensive boondoggle like the Shuttle. Unfortunately we probably will have to fly the shuttle a few more times to get the rest of the station modules up, but it doesn't make sense to add billions of bloat to the OSP to give it the capability to add the last few modules to the station. Bring up cargo with unmanned vehicles. Bring up the last few modules with a few Shuttle flights (with minimum crew) if necessary. Keep the OSP small and only use it to do crew rotations. That's my $0.02.
He complains about not understanding the plan for the escape system. That is his inadequacy, not the OSP's. The original plan I saw (which was called the Orbital Space Plane because it was Orbital Science Corp's proposal) had a rocket on the spaceplane that was used as an escape system for the manned section in case of a booster failure, and was fired as an additional stage after the booster dropped away if there was no booster failure. He says this introduces an "extra" failure mode. Well, yes and no. If you are concerned about mission success (getting the OSP in the right trajectory) then I guess it does add additional failure modes. If you are concerned about keeping the crew alive (which the crew would probably appreciate being top priority), then it adds a "new" failure mode but not "more" failure modes. Sure, there is the chance that the escape system/final stage rocket could blow up and destroy the vehicle. But if any of the other stages blows up, then having that escape system turns those from fatal disasters to non-fatal mission failures. Since the escape system/final stage should be a reliable, evolutionary rocket design that gets a lot of attention, the odds of it failing catastrophically should be much smaller than the odds of one of the booster stages failing. Adding this system will, therefore, slightly increase the odds of a mission failure, while greatly reducing the odds of a crew fatality. Whether that is an "extra" failure mode depends on if you are looking at mission failure or crew loss. In my (and certainly the crew's) point of view, having an escape system is essential to the design's commitment to the safety of the astronauts.
He claims that the OSP is not much more technically sophisticated than the Dyna-Soar. That's fine with me. The point of the OSP is to reduce cost and reduce technical risk. At the time, the Dyna-Soar was ambitious, costly, and risky. With today's technology it is a cheap solution with low technical risk. Why would we want to introduce new technical risk if we don't have to?
He also complains about the possibility of the OSP being built with a reduced size that would require more than one launch to perform one crew rotation for the ISS. I agree with him that that would be bad, but I don't yet know how likely that is to be a problem. Something to watch out for, but I don't think it is as likely as he seems to.
He would prefer a capsule to a lifting body for reentry. A capsule is not necessarily bad, and I wouldn't dismiss it just because it is "old tech". The choice, however, is a complex technical trade off and not the sort of thing that can just be decided with a knee jerk reaction, nostalgia for the "good ol' days of Apollo",
..spaceflight has advanced over the last 50 years..
..;).. maybe the army/navy should start using those apollo boosters for weapons delivery. :p
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
According to space.com the schedule for the OSP has been changed from 2010 to 2008.
"The USA has been flying a fleet of twenty-year-old X-planes, and we're running out. Half the people I know have been trying for all their lives to build a better rocket ship. I can't find the energy to be enraged."
-Larry Niven
Display some adaptability.
The conclusions at the end of the article are pretty decent. Using refurbed (or updated versions of old) Apollo-era capsules is a good idea. Wings on spacecraft are there because the USAF mandated that spacecraft be piloted by ... you guessed it ... pilots. Pilots fly things with wings. They were horribly opposed to the "spam in a can" image being laid out for them in the 50's. Much of the crap in NASA's systems are a direct result of pilot intervention being mandated by the USAF.
If I was scheduled to go to the ISS, I'd want the dirt-simplest flight equipment available. I'd definitely want the reentry profile to be *fundamentally* stable - just like the Apollo-era return vehicles. I don't give a crap where it comes down - that's what we have aircraft and helicopters and boats and trucks for.
Back in the sixties, during the "cold war", it was a matter of national importance that we "dominate" space and the funding was set appropriately. There was a lot of funding for training existing engineers and also encouraging students into the engineering field.
I lived through that. I still have many certificates and recognition papers from NASA that was awarded to me in High School ( I usually took the science fairs ). I don't see that any more, or at least not near the level of encouragement to get into engineering as I received.
Instead, as we passed from the Gene Krantz philosophies ( "Failure is *not* an option!") to the Dan Goldin business philosophy ("Faster, Better, Cheaper!"), it seems to me that Engineering has lost a helluva lot of its appeal, becoming much less a work of art and much more as mundane clerical work.
Personally, I have a hard time recommending any of my younger friends to go into Engineering unless its what their heart is driving them to do, as it did me. Engineering for me turned into a constant battle to justify my existence, eventually leading to my dismissal. Although I loved the artistry of design, there are a lot of starving artists out there. I never liked the idea of cutting corners to make something right now, but not made right. It went against the very core of my psyche to do so. I felt that when you were creating an artistic effort that would eventually be copied, possibly millions of times, one weighed the one-time cost of the effort of doing it right against the integral cost of fixing something not done right, integrated over all the things made that had to be fixed or replaced. My own analysis damn near always echoed those old cliches: " a stitch in time saves nine", "haste makes waste", and "if you don't have enough time to do it right, you must make enough time to do it over."
So we have these aging scientists and engineers who have actually done it, but many of us are now in completely different fields. I can show you engineers that used to build the systems in the 70's that are now working as greeters in Wal-Mart, or as countermen in hobby-electronics stores.
Although I loved working in the field myself, I can't see me trying to re-enter it as my experience is mostly with the older tools - tools I understood very intimately and had complete freedom to open up and re-code their algorithms if I discovered the mathematical functions inside did not accurately model what I was seeing in practice. The new stuff - I have no earthly idea how it works, or how to open it up and change it if need be. They would laugh me out of the building if I showed up with my trusty old Borland C++ compiler and VGA graphics packages.
Its going to be interesting, given the level of intimite knowledge required to do analysis of spaceflight sophistication, if the engineers they get can make enough time not only to understand the physics of the phenomena they are working with, and also keep abreast of the software packages they are allowed to use on the job. It took me over ten years before I felt I understood just some of the physics in my area, despite the fact during the entire time, I did not have to learn DOS over and over again, or have my previous tools fail to operate because I went from DOS 3.30 to DOS4.0... Or endlessly battle licensing issues.
The new guys have it a lot harder than I ever did.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Get together the same team building the International Space Station. Japan provides the tech, America the money, Russia the (shoestring budget) design, Ukraine the lifting body, etc. China favors modernizing the Soyuz and going its own way, so more power to them. India does not have a published design on a launch vehicle that I am aware of. If the rest of the advanced nations are to work together on a mars mission and an international space station, let's also work together to standardize the LEO and HEO (high earth orbit) vehicles we use to get there.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
If only NASA could win the X-Prize, the 10mil would more than triple their current budget :(
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Thanks so much for playing :)
Ahhh, Trolling the Trolls (or somesuch). Amazing I'm getting paid while doing this...
You shot your counter-arguments in the foot as you uttered them:
Oh, so a plane doesn't need winds and wheels. Somebody tell Boeing.As long as you insist that a reusable spaceship land like a plane, then sure, you'll probably want wheels and wings. On the other hand, if all you require is that it take off and land repeatedly and reliably, then wheels and wings aren't a requirement. The DC-X project worked; DC-Y would have worked except that it was cancelled because it didn't have wings... Remind me again -- what use are wings in a vacuum?
Newsflash, Shuttle is man-rated. Jeffrey Bell says Station is not.Try reading what he wrote: He was referring to vehicles (ie, the Shuttle AND the OSP), not the Shuttle and the ISS. The Shuttle is already damn expensive, and if we can't cancel it because the so-called replacement (OSP) can't do the same things (ie: move cargo to LEO) then we have to keep flying shuttles until we run out, plus develop and run an expensive OSP program too. That might guarantee employment for astronauts and lots of NASA managers, but is that the best use of our money?
Bell may not have written what you want to hear, but that doesn't make his facts any less true. Don't get me wrong -- I want to see a reliable, reusable replacement for the shuttle program as much as anyone -- I'm just tired of seeing people die because of NASA's fscked up decision process.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
Irrespective of this guy's opinion in this article, I simply wonder where the real problem is. Since the beginning of space shuttle programme there have been exactly two ways to get someone into space and back. One has been in a capsule with ablative heat shield on top of a standard rocket and the other has been in a glider with fragile tiles on top of or strapped to a standard rocket. Specifically, both have been expensive and both have had pros and cons.
The fact that shuttles have crashed is not really shocking, given how long they've been in service. There have been crashes with Soyuz capsules as well.
What seems to me to be the problem is that there is simply a lack of money. The fact that there is a lack of money is partly because of spiralling costs, but also due to an incredible inconsistency of policy and bad planning.
Consider that ESA started working on Hermes almost 20 years ago. While the author states that this vehicle is also lacking in saftey, the fact is that the vehicle is not here, now as ESA abandoned it due to spiraling costs. Consider that the Russians had a working shuttle , Buran, capable of automated flight also around 15 years ago, and built with typical Russian solidity. That is now for sale on ebay, because no one wanted to fund it. So we have two possibly better or at least alternative shuttles that were killed off due to lack of funding.
Prior to, during and since that time, many nations have being studying alternative methods of human spacefilght. The Dyna-Soar, the lifting body studies during the 60's, the Delta Clipper, the British Hotol, the X-what have you. They were all dropped due to lack of funding. Has anyone, ever, considered how much money has actually been wasted/spent on these studies?
For me personally the concept of a two stage, conventional rocket powered glider where a larger unmanned booster took off conventionally from a runway and the second smaller manned glider seperated at high altutude with both landing conventionally on runways was probably the most practical. I further imagine that with all the enormous amounts of funds that were simply thrown away in developing alternative after alternative without having a coherent goal this type of orbiter/lander could now be in service today
Reusable capsules.
That's my personal sect. Reusable capsules stacked originally on an Atlas V, and eventually on a two-or-so stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle.
I find my faith wavering from time to time, though, as I consider other possibilities...
It's also the same reason we don't see any stars during the day from earth... (except Sol, of course)
after all, they are still up there.
Aren't we lucky that we have the [Soyuz] that actually DO work?
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Keep it simple stupid.
And if you still want your plane.
http://www.buran.ru
Corporations and bureaucracies both have to worry about their funding from year to year. It's funny to claim that corporations only care for profits, in the same article in which you ask readers to ask Congress to increase NASA's budget. The fact is any endeavor requires money.
NASA is just having a lousy time spending it, because it's mostly earmarked for attempting to use experimental prototypes as operational vehicles cost-be-damned (Space Shuttle: $6 billion per year), for throwing good money after bad (ISS: $10 billion before any metal was cut, and a whole lot more since), and for design studies with no concrete product or actual tests (The "Venturestar" version of X-33).
Today's level of funding would have been sufficient for Apollo missions (assuming that today's NASA could work to the same efficiency as the 1960s NASA, which is probably a false assumption at the root of the problem) every few months, or to launch the unmanned probes that NASA is still quite good at every few weeks. It would also have been sufficient for NASA to have taken the X-33 program seriously (fund all 4 proposed initial vehicles for $4 billion, with the understanding that only the two best initial efforts would be funded for larger test vehicles, and perhaps only the best of those would be funded for an orbital prototype) and replace the Shuttle with something cost effective in a decade.
Of course, I'm just bitching because I don't know how to fix it now. Back when there were four large aerospace firms (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas) with an interest in creating new launch vehicles, funding competition between them to do so probably would have worked. Now mergers have brought us down to two companies who both have a multibillion dollar vested interest in the status quo, and a bunch of a little scrappers competing for the vastly less difficult XPrize goals.
Here's an article on what the Russians nearly did during the 1980's:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/lks.htm
The Chelomei LKS--had it been properly funded and developed--could have been the natural successor to the Soyuz spacecraft. If it had actually gone into operation right now we could have LKS spaceplanes docked at the International Space Station, not updated Soyuz spacecraft.
For a business to compete for a chance to go to space, cheaply, quickly, or any other "ly", there would have to be MONEY up there.
Money is not the issue. If you can't call out at least three ways to make substantial revenues ($x > $1 * 10e10) from space in less than five minutes of trying, then you aren't smart enough to be commenting on the issue. The problem is getting permission from the US government to go after it, which it currently isn't giving.
The current aerospace contractors are quite happy turning out overpriced parts for NASA under marginally competitive contracts (I've worked for a military contractor and got to see this process from the inside) and simply don't have it in their corporate cultures to try for anything that the government hasn't asked for. Those companies don't even understand the concept of investment any more ("It might cut into profits!" -- actual quote). Why bother, when you can get the government to take all of the risk and pay you cost-plus for doing a half-assed job at something less difficult?
I've got three separate interrelated business plans for exploitation of space located resources and the number one risk at the top of each risk list is: a hostile US policy towards commercial space exploration. I am not unique in developing these plans, nor am I unique in my analysis of the obstacles in front of me.
So the real work at making money from space will happen from other countries. Which will eventually threaten the US's dominant economic role in the world (well, if the US doesn't change it's collective mind in time...).
Regards,
Ross
"Apparently when developing you budget for new space vehicles it doesn't matter what technology you put in, just how much it weighs."
Yep, pretty much. There is a saying in aerospace:
"Aircraft are bought by the pound."*
There is a good reason for that. The same trend seems to be true for spacecraft.
But to answer your complaint, in making my "back of the napkin" estimate I considered not only the technology, but also the nature of the organization doing the work. An evolutionary vehicle (one based on a previous vehicle) built by a lean organization (like an X project) has R&D costs of about $20,000/lb. A non-evolutionary vehicle built by a bureaucratic organization (like I think the OSP will be) runs up to $100,000/lb for R&D. My guess may be high because I don't know the real structure mass of the OSP and because I am pessimistic about NASA's management of the project but the guess should be, as we say, good enough for gov't work.
*Dan Raymer modifies it by adding "like bologna".
We're not committed to spending what it will really take to do what we want NASA to do.
Exactly! I've been reading a few of the posts which dispute the parent and all of them are ludicrously incorrect. By no means could Apollo have been done on anything close to today's NASA budget, nor could many of the other great steps in space flight. For a little reality check, over the course of about a decade, the Apollo program cost the US the equivalent in circa 2000 dollars of $3.96 Trillion. Yes I didn't misspeak, Trillion. Now how exactly does that justify claiming that the Apollo project could be run on the shuttle budget of a few billion a year? The entire NASA budget of what was it? 8? We're talking of almost $40 Billion a year. How the hell are we supposed to fund the physics, material science, engineering and development work necessary for a new generation of vehicle with such measily funds?
And one last comment to those that say that the silly notion of space flight is beyond us. Its not. The space shuttle runs on 1970s technology. The fastest plane is still the SR-71 created back in the 50s. If we were to throw even a semblance of the funds we used on those programs at NASA they would do amazing things. With the loss of the Cold War we lost the justification for spending silly sums of money on great causes, and furthermore the problem greatens when most of the technological advances of such programs are taken for granted by people. Velcro (a crappy example I know), advanced plastics, composite, and countless other advances are all due soley to the amount we expended on NASA in the early days.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
subject only.
A similar design (although suborbital) is that of Pioneer Rocketplane. In Pioneer's version, the rocketplane takes almost off empty of rocket fuel and flies to 30,000 feet on conventional jets. It is then fuelled up for rocket flight by an air tanker carrying liquid oxygen propellant. Nifty, eh?
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Are you sure you're not a CIO of a Fortune 100 company? Because I did this search and came up with squat. And why post AC if you give your name? Why give your name at all? Ostensibly, you want to lend credibility to your post. But what credibility do you lend when, if you do work at NASA, you are, as far as I can tell, a nobody there. Reminds me of the time I was in the Army, drove home for the weekend, still had on my BDUs, stopped at a gas station. Girl says, "You in the Army?" I look down at my uniform and say, "Uh, yeah." Whereupon she asks me, "You know Bob?" You too should get together. She lived in Georgia ten years ago. Based on that information, you shouldn't have too hard a time finding her.
Possibly the fact that over the 10-15 years of the Apollo program we spent the equivalent of $3.96 Trillion in 2000 dollars. Yep, thats over $300 Billion a year. whats the current budget? $12B?
:(
Thats whats wrong. If we spent even a semblance of what we were spending then great things would be accomplished, but without the challange of our Cold War enemy well we just don't seem up to the task. Shame really
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
That way, something would actually get itself done !
....
Have you no sense ?
No government + big money organization would ever stand for something like that happening ! Not in a million years.
Wait ! Maybe if you pressed the idea for a whole new civil service branch for every celestial body - and sub-branches for every orbit.... With the requisite and attendant budget and materials / services required - installations, transfers, day fees, moving allowances, etc.
Egad ! Yes ! It just might work !
If you can't fight them
For goodness' sake !
Be logical !
A) NASA was was never the same again, since their last German engineer died.
B) The only people that have proven themselves capable of coordinated techological feats against overwhelming odds, lately, have been, reputedly and by internationally recognized and public acclaim
- Osama
and
- Kim Jong Il
Therefor(e)
The only *logical* solution, if humanity is to really get out to space in any big way, still in this century, is to get klazy Kim very interested in it, pronto. I dunno. Convince him that the only best defence against "liberation" is to be able to move the whole country to Europa on an hour's notice. Or something.
Years ago, my campus newspaper had a profile of a professor who had just been awarded funds to do a study on women's attitudes towards fitness and their negative images of their bodies.
It seemed like a good idea to me. But a female buddy came in, looked at the article, and was outraged. "What an obvious waste of money! Yada yada yada." I asked, and she explained to me why she thought it was a waste of money.
Another gal comes in. My buddy shows her the headline of the article that outraged her. The other gal agreed that the study was an outrageous waste of money. My buddy left. The second gal finished reading the article.
So, I asked her why she thought it was an outrage. Guess what? These two gals both thought they were in complete, loud, certain agreement that the study was an obvious waste of money, that there was no doubt as to how the money should best be spent.
But in their discussion with one another they never actually said why it was an outrage, and although they thought they were in complete agreement, their views were diametrically opposed.
One gal thought it was obvious the money should be spent teaching women to be more comfortable living with their bodies current shape and level of fitness. The other gal thought it was obvious the money should be spent teaching women to develop better fitness habits.
People who thought they agreed whose interpretations were actually diametrically opposed.
So, Miket01 and the a.c.? You think you are united in your outrage? Your views might be diametrically opposed
Money is not the issue. If you can't call out at least three ways to make substantial revenues ($x > $1 * 10e10) from space in less than five minutes of trying, then you aren't smart enough to be commenting on the issue. The problem is getting permission from the US government to go after it, which it currently isn't giving.
Care to list these?
Last time I checked, the ESA wasn't limited by the US government's wishes regarding space launches.
The old favourite money-maker was solar power satellites. You'll have an interesting time convincing me that the cost of building these amortized over their lifetime is less than the cost of the same amount of power generated on earth, even without considering the cost of the receiver arrays on Earth.
The new favourite money-maker is finding a metal-rich asteroid, towing it into Earth orbit, and mining it. The problem is that this requires an *incredibly* huge investment - you have to bring high-Isp engines big enough to move an asteroid out of Earth's gravity well. This is assuming that you still plan to do the smelting on Earth - smelting in space requires you to haul up even more equipment. I am very skeptical of the investment paying off, as metal ores aren't exactly expensive here on earth (it's one of those "make it up in volume" proposals).
The new (or at least, new-again) favourite is the space elevator. The problem is that unless you have a good reason to haul *lots* of cargo into space, the elevator won't be profitable to build. It too will have to amortize its costs over a relatively short investment window, and it will need to be maintained. The costs of construction and maintenance must be amortized into the lift price for cargo. The amount of cargo that _can_ be transported is limited by the amount of time taken to lift it to geosync (not LEO - it won't have enough transverse velocity to stay in orbit). The total amount of cargo that can be on the elevator is at most comparable to the mass of the elevator itself, and probably much less (the elevator without cargo really pushes materials limits even with magical defect-free long-chain nanotubes). This limits throughput, putting a lower limit on cost of lift even under the best of conditions. In practice, unless there's a good reason to put things in space, volume will be even lower (driving costs up even more if you want to pay back the investment cost, which lowers volume again...).
You're not the only one who's put a lot of thought into ways of making money from space. As far as I can see, most of them presuppose a reason to be in space en masse in the first place.
And then.
There *is* a Japanese shuttle (taxi-style) project.
It *is* much neater and more compact than the
Sanger - Tsieh (or Tsieh - Shuttle behemoth.
The electronics, specially, seem much more economical.
Port Arthur, Tsushima.
History.
Monod'oh!
There ARE competent engineers within NASA that have been trying to get the agency to realize the foolishness of abandoning the Saturn 5 booster for years. There are people that realize that ONE Saturn 5 booster that launches two vehicles (a big reusable man-rated ship, and a spam payload can) would be the solution to all of NASA's problems. Hell, some have even suggested that with some attention to return (a huge parafoil) the Saturn 5 itself could be reused.
The problem is that NASA brass haven't been listening for the last two decades. There are too many employees and too many congresspersons with a vested interest in maintaining a very costly and low yielding Shuttle/ISS system. NASA isn't about space anymore. It is a big piece of congressional pork that allows California, Texas, Alabama, and Florida representatives to demonstrate that they are bringing home the bacon to their respective districts. Until more people send more letters to their representatives demanding innovation and change at NASA, it will never have a reason to change. Screw human exploration, screw progress, just keep the dollars rolling into the money-pit called NASA.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
OSP is not the problem - ISS is!!
what the heck is the ISS for anyways? what a useless piece of junk!!
OSP is just a fool's errand.
Best thing to do would be to launch cargo into orbit with unmanned systems. If these unmanned systems can become partly reusable, good. Then to ship people up and down, build a small fully reusable spaceplane where they only take people and perhaps a little cargo (like for equipment they need). This way you don't have to launch one big shuttle which, no matter how cool I think it is, would cost too much.
It's a good idea. In theory. At least with the history of the orbiter behind them they might have a slightly better idea of what they're up against. Even today a heck of a lot of technology is still too immature to warrant a big step in a big step in ability. What we're looking at here is probably going to end up as a refined "shuttle lite" - it'll probably be cheaper, work a little better, be more refined, but without the big bells and whistles you expect. Forget SSTO (single stage to orbit) - that won't be around for a heck of long time yet, especially because Scramjets and CCEs (combined cycle engines) are still unproven. Sure, they have tried in the past (e.g. HOTOL) but the leading edge tech was just out of reach - and I've only mentioned engines. And while I'm at it, wasn't the X-37 project (as well as the X-38) cancelled due to lack of funds about a year or two ago? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it - if they can pull this off, with not too much overspend it will be pretty damned good, but, in this day and age, with the kind of stigma that is attached to this industry by the press and other sources of uninformed opinion, it's a lot harder to be optimistic.
> Frankly, if you're proNASA you're pretty much a communist ...because the commies did a pretty good job of setting the standards in Earth orbit, as I seem to recall.
4000 TONS launched from the ground - admittedly via nuclear propulsion, which might cause a few environmental objections - using EXISTING technology.
If we are going to be really serious about space travel, it's time to look beyond chemical rockets with insignificant amounts of payload.
Do a google search if you haven't come across Orion, it's an incredible idea.
Yes, Harry Harrison produced a documentary about this very plan. Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers was a documentary account of this 747.
good points. i think for fuel they're still using liquid oxygen, which as you note creates some huge logistical issues WRT the standard refueling process.
curses. and i thought maybe i was onto something there, too.
[sighs]
ed
Space Travel is beyond American politicians (most politicians for that matter). It needs to be done by professional engineers and scientists working for private organisations.
Actually, I am a little concerned about sharing my ideas in a public forum, but I'll give you the broad hint.
Aside from improving the two you already mentioned with new technology to make them more compellingly profitable, why not pick and choose exactly which asteroid components would be 1) most easily extractable and refinable once located and 2) most valuable when already in orbit per unit of mass.
Here's the hint: don't limit yourself to metals. My prediction is that metals will not be the first decent sized market for non-terrestrial located resources.
Your criticism also managed to dismiss small unit resource extraction and space-based fabrication remarkably quickly. Don't make the relatively common mistake of assuming that a smelting system in space will even slightly resemble a smelting system on earth (especially in mass). Important differences include lack of gravity, unimpeded access to the sun, a lack of ambient oxygen or nitrogen to assist or interfere in reactions... A space-based small unit asteroid processing system will look rather unfamiliar to any modern expert in ore extraction and material processing.
Start reading NASA reports about automated lunar factories (circa 1981), then use some of those ideas as starting points to what you might do with your own one hundred ton payload in a radically different environment and you may just catch the bug yourself...
Regards,
Ross
The problem with both power and resources from space is getting it back down to Earth at a cost that's less than that spent on going up to get them in the first place.
I'm all for mining asteroids, but it only seems plausible to be to do so to have raw materials available in orbit, for building things that will stay up there, or on the Moon.
Bringing a significant amount of material back to Earth, without losing most of it, is extremely expensive. Beaming down power, hell, setting up a franchise of nuclear plants would be cheaper and simpler.
I'm very PRO space, from exploration to colonization. I'd go up in a heart-beat given the chance. I just don't see it as a source of a whole hell of a lot of things right now. Reentry is a bitch until we build that silly elevator.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Sounds like you were figuring on the cost of buying and lifting the solar cells into orbit using something like the Shuttle at $4000/pound and $10/watt.
Try rerunning the numbers using the following assumption:
Expensive? Certainly.
However, you're biggest flawed assumption is that major aerospace corporations will do anything that doesn't provide a guaranteed profit with either the taxpayers to make up cost overruns or customers ready to buy.
I think that the first trillionaires will be making their fortunes in LEO and outwards. If a multi-billionaire with guts and willing to wait 10 years for a significant return on investment another 10 for real money to roll in exists, he could get started on this now.
You are also making the assumption that space power doesn't have to be done. The oil will run out sooner or later. Perhaps sooner, I'm seeing the words "peak oil" from more than one source.
We can work on replacing fossil fuels with power from orbiting power satellites now or we can wait a few years until the choice between a new power source for civilization and the end of technological society is obvious and the amount of money required to make it happen immediately is so great that the societal investment will require pushing the economically marginal into starvation.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Sounds like you were figuring on the cost of buying and lifting the solar cells into orbit using something like the Shuttle at $4000/pound and $10/watt.
Whereas you are proposing to lift a fully automated lunar mining facility, refinery, and solar cell fabrication facility *and* parts for a railgun into a lunar transfer orbit.
I think my way is cheaper.
Aside from improving the two you already mentioned with new technology to make them more compellingly profitable, why not pick and choose exactly which asteroid components would be 1) most easily extractable and refinable once located and 2) most valuable when already in orbit per unit of mass.
Ah, so you *are* assuming that the materials will be used in space.
What makes you think there's a market up there?
Supplying metals, hydrocarbons, and dirt for space construction assumes that we have something very large we want to construct. Anything not "very large" would be cheaper to construct with Earth-supplied materials, as you wouldn't have to lift the production facilities.
Supplying air is useless - we can already recycle this at perfect efficiency given power.
Supplying water is similarly not useful - it would cost less to lift a distillation rig than it would to send a water extractor out to whatever your proposed source is.
Food cannot be found among the asteroids - it's either lifted from earth, or (should we ever build a very large station) grown in situ as part of the organics recycling process.
What is this market that you're trying to supply? I certainly don't see one that exists at present, or that can be predicted to exist without making some shaky assumptions.
Your criticism also managed to dismiss small unit resource extraction and space-based fabrication remarkably quickly. Don't make the relatively common mistake of assuming that a smelting system in space will even slightly resemble a smelting system on earth (especially in mass). Important differences include lack of gravity, unimpeded access to the sun, a lack of ambient oxygen or nitrogen to assist or interfere in reactions... A space-based small unit asteroid processing system will look rather unfamiliar to any modern expert in ore extraction and material processing.
You still have to either haul your asteroid into Earth orbit, or send all of your refined material back in transfer orbits. Good luck on making that, combined with your facility lift costs, less than the cost of just lifting material from Earth. If the destination is Earth, good luck making it cheaper than terrestrial mining and refining.
You are also assuming that your hypothetical solar furnace smelter can work in closed-loop mode without significant weight addition. If it can't, you're stuck - you need to send up all of your smelting reagents, or you need to send up an organics refinery to process hydrogen, carbon, or some other suitable substance out of your asteroid - which now has to contain hydrocarbons, which drops the ore yield for the asteroid you pick.
I am confident that a practical asteroid mining facility will cost much more than you are assuming. Do a detailed design and cost breakdown for yourself if you don't believe me.
Start reading NASA reports about automated lunar factories (circa 1981), then use some of those ideas as starting points
I will believe the cost and complexity estimates for fully automated lunar mines/smelters/factories when someone manages to build a fully automated terrestrial factory with the same capabilities. Until then, I stand by my assertation that they'll be extremely expensive and have a very heavy set of starting components.
Automated lunar factories have been proposed far earlier than 1980. It's one of those things that'll be really cool if it's finally built, but for which the cost and complexity estimates have been going up every time a new study is done.
If you're building something Really Huge in space, it's cost effective to think about building mines and factories on the moon (probably manned, as that _reduces_ the cost and complexity). For anything smaller than "really huge", you're better off lifting the materials from Earth.
Seems to me that the orbital space planes have a problem of carrying rocket fuel and orbital propellant for the ride from LEO to HEO.
Could this problem be eleviated by an automated "Tug" that the plane would dock with in LEO and then be moved to HEO? Seems to me such an orbital vehicle could also greatly help with gathering up larger pieces of space junk and do the job of Orbital Recovery Corporations SLES for government projects... Maybe also bring down the price or increase possible payloads by other orbital launch systems to help supply ISS.
Any idea's or am I just way off?
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Only if you assume the infrastructure will be used only for the purpose of building powersats and will be thrown away immediately afterwards.
Tech Public Policy stuff
China is planning [peopledaily.com.cn] on becoming a lot more active in space shortly. I sort of feel this will give the US a huge incentive to give more funding to NASA, there's nothing like competition to get the money pumping in.
I think my way is cheaper.
Only if you assume the infrastructure will be used only for the purpose of building powersats and will be thrown away immediately afterwards.
a) It has a finite maintenance lifetime. Even the most aggressively designed self-maintaining plant (which makes the design at least another order of magnitude more complicated) requires specialty parts that must be produced on Earth.
b) It produces power satellites at a limited rate. The power satellites produced over the lifetime of the plant may very well weigh _less_ than the lunar mining/smelting/fabrication/launch facility. It's straightforward to make solar collectors light weight, either by using thin-film cells or aluminized mylar concentrating mirrors or both. Your lunar facility, on the other hand, will be _heavy_, as it must deal with very large amounts of bulk material, and be spread over a very large area (especially the mass driver used for launch).
Do the math - figure out how many satellites you need for your target market and their mass. Then figure out how big a mining facility you need to build them within a reasonable length of time (as both your satellites and your production facility have finite lifetimes).
Lunar material supply is only practical if you need very large amounts of relatively non-specialized material in space. This means "giant space station" or "city on the moon", neither of which would pay for itself, and so neither of which is currently planned by the private sector.