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The Return of Apollo?
hpulley writes "Bell bottoms are back, the Stones are still touring and Time has a piece on how NASA's _new_ space vehicle may actually be the return of a very old friend, a highly modified and modernized version of the Apollo Space Capsule. Manned spacecraft might actually leave low earth orbit again! Initially they'd fly with Delta and Atlas but more powerful boosters could be developed. We could go to the Moon again, and perhaps to Mars but I'm getting ahead of myself. Does that mean the last 30 years of space flight have been for naught? Expensive steps backward?"
At least they will be getting away from the concept that spacecraft need wings. The whole idea of the shuttle is rediculous because of this. The wings decrease the payload capacity dramatically and increase the propetency for failure even more.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Shoot 'em up, let them drop like a rock. The inherent simplicity of Apollo is its virtue, IMO. The Shuttle is more like the government bureaucratic approch to space travel, while Apollo was designed by engineers back in the good-ol-days.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"No, it doesn't. We've learned a LOT about spaceflight in the last 30 years, from both successes and failures"
Have we really done spaceflight in the last 30 years? Certainly nothing manned, outside of low-earth orbit which is barely space at all. Sure, we've sent tin buckets with cameras to a few more planets, but we were already pretty good at that.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So, we still do things the way they were done 40 years ago. I refuse to believe that the best way to get into space is to fill a monstrous tube with combustibles and light it all up, just to get a few tons of gear in orbit. Before serious interplanetary exploration, we should establish a good moon base, and do vehicle construction and launches from there.
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Not at all. Look at how much we've learned. The experience we've gained has been enormous. We learned that building a reusable winged spaceship is doable, but doing so on less-than-shoestring budget isn't the smart way to go. Once we've established a real infrastructure in orbit, in another hundred years or so, I think a reusable shuttle will again make sense. Right now it doesn't. It was supposed to be cheap. It's not. It was supposed to be safe. It's not as good as it could be. When you think about it, both Challenger and Columbia were doomed by the Rube Goldberg contraption that boosts the orbiter into space. The original design called for a reusable flyback booster as well. That was scrapped early in the program to save money.
The old technology worked, even in the face of catstrophic disaster.
The new technology does not.
Me, I'll put my money on the most successful technology, rather than the merely most recent idiocy.
KFG
And I don't think anyones going to mars in one of those little tin cans. Imagine a year in that thing?
Cramped quarters would be the least of their concerns:
Getting back into space would be impossible with anything the size of the landers we used on the Moon. Anything like the Apollo hardware would be a one-way trip.
Spending a year weightless would probably be cripling without some kind of exercise.
I've read someplace that any Mars mission craft will need some sort of shielded "safe room" to protect the crew from bursts of radiation. That room alone would have to be atleast the size of an Apollo capsule. Also, while space is nearly empty, if you do hit something the damage to the hull could be massive, necessitating some sort of internal sealed room as well.
Then, of course, there's the issue of food. A year there and back would be quite a payload on its own.
Anything like the Apollo tech would make Mars impossible. Way too small.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
The Russian space industry is doing things right in a way that NASA have never managed. The Russians have focused on making spaceflight boring: so boring, in fact, that the last accident in a Soyuz capsule was in 1971. That's a safety record that makes the shuttle look a bit sick. It also helps that the cost is a tiny fraction of the shuttle; I worked out once that you for the price of a single shuttle launch, you could get the Russians to lift about four times the amount of cargo, plus people, in five seperate vehicles and still have change.
From an engineering point of view, the lesson is painfully obvious: generalisation means compromises. The shuttle is trying to be a heavylifter and a man-rated lifter and a space station and a reentry vehicle, so no wonder it sucks. Much better to focus on small, simple vehicles that do one thing very well.
The Russians have the best man-rated lifter in the world: the Soyuz. It doesn't do much, just takes people from the ground to LEO and back again, but it does it cheaply and reliably. They have the Progress, which I believe is the world's only orbital tug; it can launch, rendezvous with a vehicle, dock, undock and ditch safely, all by remote control. No-one else has anything like it. They have a whole selection of reliable heavylifters, although they are beginning to get competition in that area.
If the Russians with their, ah, mostly broken economy can do it, why are the Americans having so much trouble?
I just wish it were politically feasible for someone with money to just buy the entire Russian space industry, lock stock and barrel, and do some decent investment...
Which makes this remark all the more silly:
Does that mean the last 30 years of space flight have been for naught?
Come on. Satellites. Voyager. Hubble.
When you have a bowl of soup, do you eat it with a fork just because the fork was invented thousands of years later than the spoon?
Sometimes an older approach is the right approach for a specific job.
The 50-year old technology is generally more reliable than anything that we come up with now.
As the article states, Russia has had any problems since they've been using capsules in 1971. The US never lost a space crew in a capsule. We've lost two in the shuttle.
Ever hear of the Voyager spacecrafts? They worked for 30+ years with less computing power than your average dishwasher.
To bring it up a few decades, the standard, commercial 80386 processor is more radiation tolerant than some radiation-hardened newer chips.
Old technology doesn't mean out of date.
Your multimillion dollar Boeing 777 aircraft still has windshield wipers.
The shuttle was ridiculous. The only rationalization for the design is if you're going to bring stuff back from space, and to my knowledge, we've never once done that.
No, we are always putting stuff into space, and plain old rockets do that job very, very well.
If the thing took off like an airplane, then that would be different. But it doesn't.
It's almost as if they went to the drawing board asking themselves how they could make a craft that suffers from all the problems of reusable rockets while offering all new problems in re-entry.
Let's ground the damn things already.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Very shortly after the Columbia accident, a handful of old veteran astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin (likely the smartest engineer of the original astronaut groups) and John Young (first pilot of Columbia and the only astronaut from the original groups to fly Gemini, Apollo, and the Shuttle) were consultants to determine if Apollo technology could be used for a low budget to-and-fro human transport, as well as a rescue vehicle that could be mated as lifeboats to the International Space Station.
This, I thought, was a great idea. After the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, the Command Module (CM) was drastically redesigned for safety and was a winning design throughout the program. It especially showed its toughness during Apollo 13. The CM was completely powered down after the accident, and, 3 days later, was restarted on its reentry batteries (with a tiny bit of juice from the Lunar Module), and no electrical shorts occurred despite the heavy condensation in the spacecraft.
The Apollo CM design is tried and true. I prefer it as a lifepod, and NASA should reconsider the viablity of a combined vehicle that launches (with an orbiter atop) like a heavy plane to high altitude, where it serves as the launcher for the orbiter, which can use conventional and disposable boosters for the return trip. I still believe that glider vehicles make more sense and provide more abort options. Consider that Columbia and her sisters still have more ways to bail or return than a typical airliner.
No aerodynamic vehicle can survive with a damaged wing, in any case, which is why a CM-style rescue vehicle and parachutes are appealing. I just don't like the use of old ballistics like the Atlas (which have a nice record of exploding). Man-rating rockets like these is a pain in the ass.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Probably one of the issues requiring a carrier was that the capsule's exact splashdown location was not known, requiring the recovery fleet to have extensive search capabilities.
With modern technology, the capsule can tell the recovery fleet where it is.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Do you mean the one little problem with this idea, the good ol' "it would work great if we had this magic stuff that no one has invented yet and we have no idea if anyone will invent it" problem?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The real issue is not capsule vs. winged, the issue is whether or not you want to be able to accomplish a controlled, low-impact landing at a precise location. If you want to be able to re-use your spacecraft you pretty much have to be able to avoid bodies of water, large boulders, cliffs etc etc. A low-impact landing is important so that you don't break things when you land. As shown by the Shuttle, extensive refurbishment before every flight is a good way to make this too expensive. Almost as importantly, you want to be able to put down close to recovery facilities so you can get back to flying again quickly.
Now, to get such a precise landing requires mass. If you use wings, they are heavy. If you insist on a capsule then you'll either have to have a big para-wing (heavy, complex to deploy, perhaps not so reliable), or landing rockets (heavy, and definitiely complex). Either way, you pay a mass penalty.
The point I want to make is that you shouldn't be arguing over wings (at this point in the deisgn process), you should be deicing whether or not you need controlled landings.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Clearly the most informed and intelligent post this far and deserves to be modded up. That IS the entire issue that many of the armchair aerospace engineers here seem to be missing. There was a MISSION REQUIREMENT to build something reusable and something that could with more assurance could be brought to very specific landing fields. There was also a requirement to be able to payload thing into space and BRING THEM BACK. This mandates pretty much everything that's in the shuttle right now.
But as with most things, people aren't looking at how to design a different craft to meet those requirements, they are instead saying that the requirements arn't what they'd have done. Well see - that's why they're called requirements. If you have a mission that requires something, you have to build a vehicle that does that. To do otherwise would be like saying 'well helicopters are too slow so they get shot a lot so instead of making a helicopter we made a jet'.
If you're going to debate things, at least debate within the parameters of the original requirements - not just your own desire to orbit the moon. While I would certainly argue that the shuttle and the saturn/titan programs should have been pursued in parallel, to suggest that only one of them makes sense defies reason.
Yes, I remember. Literally. Because I lived through it. I'm an old fart. I remember watching Alan Shepard's flight on TV and dreaming about someday working in the space program myself.
When the day came that I could, and the offer was made, I had to turn it down because I could bear the idea of associating myself with the shuttle.
Some of my oldest friends, we're talking from childhood here, do. None of them are especially happy about because every one of them knows they could do much better.
You seem to have missed the point here. Look, when people talk about ressurecting our rail system they don't mean that we should replace all of our modern trucks with 1950's railroad technology. They mean we should return to using rail as a concept for mass transportation of goods and people with new and up to date trains because it's a concept that works.
No one is suggesting that we return to using 1960's computers, radar, engines or space suits.
What they're suggesting is that conventional payloads on top of a conventional rocket booster is a superiour solution to getting masses into space and returning a live crew.
And they're right. Apollo never had a tile fall off, a wing fail or some Rube Goldberged solid booster glued onto the rocket explode and set off the liquid fuel in the main tank.
The only failures of Apollo systems were systems that are still necessary for the support of a live crew; and those systems are already markedly better.
So is our recovery technology. We recover the booster shells from the space shuttle. What makes you think we couldn't recover them just because they launch a capsule instead of a "plane?"
Need I really go into the expense and support staffs required just to deal with the ludicrous heat tiles after every flight?
The shuttle does many things poorer than a capsule on top of a booster can. It does nothing better than that system does. It is more complicated, less sensical. . . and fails in ways that conventional boost system can't while retaining all possible ways a conventional boost system can fail.
It's silly.
You want a reusable space plane? Fine, so do I. I remember how completely cool the X-15 was. Let's build an up to date version. I'll help. For food.
You want to put a pile of hardware into low earth orbit? Fine. Put it on the nose of a rocket and send it up. It's the right thing to do.
Each technology according to its abilities, each mission according to its technological needs.
KFG