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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?"
Just wait until you hear about their Icarus project.
Regards,
--
*Art
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'm a big fan of capsules to go into space. There's no reason why a capsule can't be reusable. They sit on top of the rocket, the best place for a payload. A rocket can be attached to the top for an escape option. They are a lot cheaper. On and on. NASA can still work on reusable boosters, without having to change the basic capsule design.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Kick in the Head
Basically its the TYPE of shuttle, not the level of technologoy
" a highly modified and modernized version of the Apollo Space Capsule"
I sure dont read that as being 50 year old technology. I see it as being a space capsule style shuttle opposed to the current shuttles.
Which would follow along with the seperation of cargo and passengers of previous recent news releases.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
First we bring back the Apple I, now Apollo. Please tell me disco isn't coming back too.
If old technology is good, especially after it is modernized, like giving its computer RAM measured in MB instead of B, what is the big deal? Its not like NASA doesnt spend a lot of money on R&D on products they use, why is it bad just because it is old, it's probably still a very good design.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Does that mean the last 30 years of space flight have been for naught?
No, it doesn't. We've learned a LOT about spaceflight in the last 30 years, from both successes and failures. The shuttle program had both hits and misses, and a lot of important research was conducted regardless.
And I don't think anyones going to mars in one of those little tin cans. Imagine a year in that thing?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
why this would be necessary when we already have the Eagles used on Moonbase Alpha? I mean, they were built more then four years ago and they're still going strong (though they do occasionally get blown up by marauding aliens and stored nuclear waste).
We've been to the moon? I thought Jonathan Frakes proved that it was a 40 billion dollar hoax!
One thing's been learnt (even if it was learnt the hard way), and that's that the risks associated with going into space shouldn't be taken lightly.
NASA beaurocrats got real complacent and lazy, perhaps not with Challenger but definitely so with Columbia. In future, they'll be less reluctant to listen to the advice of their engineering teams and will take fewer risks with the lives of their astronauts.
The lives lost on Challenger and Columbia won't be the last but, hopefully, they won't have been lost in vain.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I can't imagine spending 6 months in something as small as the apollo craft, get the mars, and then come back in the same soup-can-size thing. Anything we send to mars as to be a little bigger, for the crews sake.
In other news, the website reporting this releases their 50 year old bandwidth. Which is really slow because well, there wasnt the internet then.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
It worked. Also a space craft with wings seems to complicate most flight operations as opposed to simplifying them. Is it really more efficient to have the shuttle land than to just fish a capsule out of the water? It seems that numberous take-off and flight issues are created by the addition of wings simply so the craft can land like a plane.
Initially they'd fly with Delta
Bad decision. They should fly with Southwest or Jet Blue.
Avoid Delta. United too, for that matter.
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.
Disco never died - it always smelled that way.
T-shirt in 22nd century: "Disco _still_ sucks." (from an old Omni magazine contest)
Atlas, etc. are good rockets, but they can't beat the sheer power and relatively low G forces of the Saturn V. Since they'll (mostly) be going to LEO, as well as building a capsule that is 5-8% larger to accomodate a 4th passenger, why not take another look at the Saturn series of rockets?
They could use the upper stage as a cargo hold -- arrive in orbit and unlock/unbolt the sides (can't use explosive bolts that close to the ISS) to remove your stuff. Anyone know the diameter of the Saturn V third stage compared to the shuttle's cargo bay?
Chip H.
The capsules are fine for moving people, but space planes would be better as "trucks" hauling materials into space to build upon the ISS.
An active capsule system will also allow for better and more frequent moon visits and (wildly overdue) MOON BASES which could be visited by SPACE PLANES.
Then we'd be Rockin'... If we can build Moon bases, we can then look at Mars bases... We really need to rationalise this who space enterprise thing, and I think developing a multiplicity of space vehicles is a smart idea - capsule people movers, Spaceplane trucks, it all makes sense...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Bell bottoms are back, the Stones are still touring and...
Oh, wait. For a minute there I was expecting this apollo.
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.
...
Great idea. The Rocky franchise bottomed out after Drago broke him in that exhibition. I foresee dozens of Rocky sequels featuring Apollo and other members of the undead...
As long as it is a one-way ticket....two words:
Lance Bass.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"Express elevator to Hell, goin' _DOWN_!"
Sounds like a fun ride. Screw bungee jumping!
Also, I honestly think this Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) idea is foolish and stupid. Most of what I have read seems to indicate that a dual stage system would lower the cost per pound from USD 100k to about $6k and one could have two pieces that are reusable. To me that makes a lot more sense and by all acounts more doable.
If we are serious about keeping the ISS up there, the next generation of space craft could save space to be a delivery and construction/repiar work on satelites and the ISS, then save expiraments for the ISS.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
Yet the reality is that all we know about space is that it is toxic to humans. And still we don't know of any way that we might travel anywhere meaningful in the two to three hundred years we might live as purely organic creatures under the best predictions of biotech (if we could even keep from going insane that long out there).
Face it, humans as they exist now are not getting off of this rock. It is likely we will have to merge with machinery to explore space..in essence, stop being purely organic. It is likely that meaningful space travel will require tens of thousands of years of time out there. This means unmanned is the best way to go, and a hybrid model is likely in the future once you get past all the crap scifi feeds us about present day humans surviving for long periods of time (physically and mentally) in space.
Or at least according to the caption on the picture accompanying that article. It shows one of the capsules floating in an ocean, with the orange airbags around it, but says the photo is from 1974. Considering Apollo 12 landed on the moon on Nov. 14th, 1969, that's quite a feat!
Mod me funny or die, earthling scum.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Not quite.
We're finally seeing an admission from the aerospace establishment that the shuttle has failed as an experiment. Wings on space craft are essentially a burden. Mercury-Gemini-Apollo demonstrated that you could come back to earth -- even in a controlled fashion -- without wings. Shuttle had wings to meet an Air Force requirement on cross range capability. Now the Air Force doesn't even use the shuttle.
So, the immediate future of vehicles intended to reach orbit looks like something that's been proven to work for both the United States and Russia. It's good to see people actually looking for something that works well.
In other ways, though, this development is a further criticism of the NASA culture. Much has been reported about the suppression of dissent in the safety culture. This is one aspect of a larger suppression of independent thinking in aerospace culture. The lack of new ideas shows another aspect. The unwillingness to examine things outside the industry (the "not invented here" syndrome) demonstrates still another.
New ideas and technologies thrive in free atmospheres. People are more willing to try new things. Good ideas get promoted. Faulty ones, even if held by people with power, are more likely to be challenged. For the aerospace industry to succeed, such a model must be embraced, not shunned.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
The Russians have had to do space on the cheap for years, and their response was to stick with the Soyuz capsule, which has now been in service for nearly 40 years, and is one of the most reliable launch vehicles available, and certainly far less expensive than the shuttle.
The last fatal Soyuz accident was in 1971. In 1983, a Soyuz rocket exploded on the pad, but the crew was whisked to safety thanks to an escape rocket, which is lacking on the shuttle. Given the choice, I would fly to space on a Soyuz any day over the shuttle.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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
Can you name any process of making carbon nanotubes 300km high or more yet? I would presume the process may be easier in space but you will also have to contruct it through the ionosphere which may complicate things even further.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The capsule system was inherently "modular" thus the inspiration for this bit of classic SF. The only irony I find in all this is how accurate SF may have once again proven to be.
Just don't tell anyone in Hollywood. After seeing what they did with Lost In space, I don't want even a chance of them getting hold of my fave SF series for one of their ticky-tacky plotless rehashes.
As with so much in life an investment is necessary to get the returns. To really benefit from space we must spend tens of billions on basic infrastructure. The ROI will be worth it. Big projects. A catapult for bulk loads would be a good start and possible with off the shelf technology.
Even better would be a genuine attempt to build a space plane. All the half-assed three or four million dollar projects to date were nothing more than a waste of time.
Best would be to immediately begin work on an elevator. Current best estimates say that an elevator could be built in about ten years, with a budget of six billion. Considering that the US is spending more than $8 billion per month in Iraq, I'd say we obviously have $6 Billion to spend over the course of ten years...
When you think small, you get small results. I don't care if its NASA, or a private corporation, or a group of various space agencies and corporations, but we must begin thinking big or else nothing will ever happen.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Saturn 5, Ariane 4.
"This paper investigates means for achieving human expeditions to Mars utilizing existing or near-term technology. Both mission plans described here, Mars Direct and Semi-Direct are accomplished with tandem direct launches of payloads to Mars using the upper stages of the heavy lift booster used to lift the payloads to orbit. No on-orbit assembly of large interplanetary spacecraft is required. In situ-propellant production of CH4/O2 and H2O on the Martian surface is used to reduce return propellant and surface consumable requirements, and thus total mission mass and cost. Chemical combustion powered ground vehicles are employed to afford the surface mission with the high degree of mobility required for an effective exploration program. Data is presented showing why medium-energy conjunction class trajectories are optimal for piloted missions, and mission analysis is given showing what technologies are optimal for each of the missions primary maneuvers. The optimal crew size and composition for initial piloted Mars missions is presented, along with a proposed surface systems payload manifest. The back-up plans and abort philosophy of the mission plans are described. An end to end point design for the Semi-Direct mission using either the Russian Energia B or a U.S. Saturn VII launch vehicle is presented and options for further evolution of the point design are discussed. It is concluded that both the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct plans offer viable options for robust piloted Mars missions employing near-term technology."
Read the whole thing here
This is from 1993!
The Case for Mars is good, but perhaps even better is Zubrin's Entering Space.
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?
Your multimillion dollar Boeing 777 aircraft still has windshield wipers.
Yeah, but at least they're high enough off the ground so that those damn squeegee guys can't reach 'em.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Much appreciated!
...though I don't doubt that will make a few mistakes similar to Hubble's curvature, and watch our first few NASA elevators come crashing down... (duck!)
I agree wholeheartedly: A mars mission would be as much claptrap as our moon missions were. Pointless to any real space development.
Much better would be to start a moonbase.
Indeed, when it comes down to it, why bother sending men at all, initially? Send some radio/robotic controlled smelting factories, mining equipment, and transport equipment, and establish the base before you ever put anyone up there. Then send supplies and stock the place. Once that is all ready, then and only then send people. After that, get some real industries going, up there, such as better nanotube construction.
Meanwhile, down here on earth, start using our earthbound nanotube construction to make taller and taller launchpads [it turns out that, done right, nanotubes are about as strong compressively as in tension]. Those launchpads will amount to huge savings in rocket mass.
At some point, between the earthbound nanotube production, and space-based nanotube production, we should be able to get an actual space elevator going.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
I believe they reused gemini and appollo capsules with minimal retrofitting.
Uh, no. Each Gemini and Apollo (and Mercury) mission flew with a different spacecraft. They were somewhat customized to each mission (eg during the Apollo series, weight reductions were incorporated in successive model series to allow more payload, etc.) Various parts were only meant to be used for one flight -- and a good many such parts never returned to Earth. The modules that did are all in museums now.
As it stands the cost to "re-use" a space shuttle is rediculous because of the area of the heat shield.
Actually, aside from minor problems with being hit by ET foam at 500 mph, the Shuttle heat shield is one of the few parts that pretty well works as advertized. The Apollo era heat shields were an ablative material that worked by burning off (slowly!), the Shuttle "TPS" (thermal protection system) is pretty reuasable.
It's just about everything else on the Shuttle that has to be refurbished or disassembled and inspected before the next flight. (As for the so-called reusable solid boosters, that operation has been described as "more crash-and-salvage rather than recover-and-reuse".
-- Alastair
You will agree with me the first time you get on one and find out that the jerk who got off on the previous floor pressed all 677,803 floor buttons on the way out.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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 US never lost a space crew in a capsule.
Not in space, no. We lost Grissom, White and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 capsule fire on the pad. 16 PSI pure O2 atmosphere (for ground test) and a hatch designed to open inward didn't help. (And yes, they changed both of those, and much else.)
-- Alastair
Like a space shuttle, only instead of reusable tiles they use ablative poorly-researched Greek mythology.
As mentioned briefly in the article, I would say that a *rocket-propelled* spacecraft with wings is a burden - it just doesn't make sense. However, if they could get something that takes off like a plane, then has a weaker rocket stage once it gets into the thinner upper atmosphere, that could be doable. Similarly, it could fly upon a very shallow re-entry, potentially preventing heat buildup, allowing it to land quite normally.
Ultimately, I think something like that is what they want, but is supposedly 20 years away.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"explain that to my 1998 Ford Ranger? It's built like a truck."
I sure would hope that the Ford engineers would reach a point where a truck would be built like a truck.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The structure of the capsule would be modified so it could handle the 105 kilopascal (15 psi) air pressure used in the ISS today, rather than the 34 kPa (5 psi) pure oxygen environment that Apollo used. - The Space Review
Hmmm - I thought they went to a Nitrogen/Oxygen mix after the Apollo 1 fire?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
"So definetely as a mankind we did not stand still."
"We" stood still. At best, we were marching in place. We got more experience in the Earth orbit matters, not space. "To boldly go where the Gemini capsule had gone before many years ago" is not any sort of advance.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
There are some real reasons it would actually take LONGER to build a SV today than it used to...
1)Environmental Laws - some stuff isn't allowed to be used anymore (asbestos anyone?)
2)Infrastructure. The US has lost a LOT of it's Mfg infrastructure in the last 30 years. Just as some LOW tech examples - You could not build the Golden Gate Bridge or the old GG-1 Railroad engine anymore! The steel mills and forging mills don't exist - not only in the US, but ANYWHERE. It would take TIME to build new plants, then you could start building the special tools, then you start building the rockets
It's the classic old problem in mfg. You have to build tools, to make tools, to make the product. Once the final Mfg tools are made - the first tools aren't needed, and they take up valuable space and maintainance money, so they are often scrapped. The problem is, if that 2nd generation of tools is also scrapped, your back to square 1
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Here is one of my favorite web sites, which this article reminded me of, and which I thought some of you might enjoy: http://www.astronautix.com.
The place is filled with tons of mad info about programs that are, were, and never got out of blueprint stage. I am sure this will satisy those readers for whom the two paltry links in the story are far from satisfying. Lotsa cool pictures and thingies.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
It is kinda interesting that now China is aiming for the moon, and the US decides (kinda outta right field) to bring back the system the got them to the moon long ago. Maybe a hint of jealousy?
This could be cool.
J
If you think the space shuttle was for naught, you might look at what the shuttle was designed for? Why do we have pickup trucks, 4 door sedans, station wagons, sports cars, buses, tractor-trailers, and trains? Different vehicles, different purposes. Maybe you should have asked, "What if NASA had split time, money, and resources between two big projects over the past 30 years?" Or, maybe you should have asked, "What if NASA has spent MORE money on two big projects? Would we still have the USSR and the cold war?" Now that technology has advanced, we might see some gains from moon visits. However, the liberals will not like "wasting" money on frivolous trips to the moon. They definitely won't like non-reuseable rockets. They'll whine and complain. A trip to Mars? Bah!
-- No sig for you!
"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it's his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World
"If that's what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles."
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Niven's "Bottom of a Hole" (or a similar sounding title). Two men are talking, one very old man (about 150, I think; born pre-WWI) and one younger man, born after the colonization of the solar system. The age difference isn't addressed again until the end, and you've kind of forgotten it by that point.
At the end, the question of "Why explore, why seek esoteric knowledge?" comes up. The younger man asserts that entering space was not to seek esoteric knowledge, that the benefits of going into space are obvious, and lists them.
The old man counters by asking, "But did they know about all that before they went?". The younger instantly replies "Of course they did!", then remembers the other man's age, and adds, "Didn't they?"
The rest of the story was OK...not great. But that last line stuck with me.
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
We came pretty darn close to losing Apollo 13 in space, though.
Not that that comparing these stats really means anything. People die on tugboats and on cruise ships, but comparing those two numbers won't tell you which is "better". Space is dangerous. We can make it safer, but some people are going to die. It's about time we get past that.
The Russian Shuttle was built like a tank. Since it was built after the majority of our own shuttles, isn't its heat tiling superior? Perhaps NASA should acquire it...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
http://www.wilhelm-aerospace.org/Space/Gemini/Gspa cecraft.html
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Listen, the rational part of me says -- of course we went to the moon, there's 10000 facts to back it up. But the emotional part says: WHY THE HELL don't we ever go back? I was like 2 when we last went.
Especially given all the neg press Nasa has, and even if its a huge waste of money and we won't learn anything, could somebody explain to me why we at least just don't go back *ONCE* every *THIRTY YEARS***, just to give people like me assurance, yep, they didn't bullshit me, we CAN do it.
Oh, wait. For a minute there I was expecting this Richard Hatch. =)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Remember this?
The people here who bellyache about cost and danger and whether it should look like a plane or not, should look at this. It was a very serious contender for the X-33 program. It is a SSTO vehicle which is far more manueverable than the shuttle and far safer. And until an unfortuneate accident in 1997, the US had an actual working model. It is used to carry people into orbit. You want payload? Use a Detla V or an Arriane. You want a reusable work horse for people? Strongly consider reserecting this.
Oh and BTW
Space travel will be dangerous for the forseeable future. People will die. Maybe less people would die if we are more concerned about discovery and science and exploration than about cost. It's going to be expensive, but as one earlier poster pointed out, we are likely to get more out of a few billion spent on space exploration than we do out of the 8 Billion per MONTH spent in Iraq.
There. I feel better now.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
I think that was just for ground testing. IIRC, the problem with the fire on the ground was that they were running with 15 psi (one atmosphere) pure oxygen. In space, the pure oxygen at the lower pressure wasn't as big a risk, I guess.
" Given the choice, I would fly to space on a Soyuz any day over the shuttle."
Bottle of vodka? $16 rubles.
That pretty Ludmilla sitting next to you in babushka-and-spacesuit? $30 a night at a Tel Aviv brothel.
Lance Bass, earthbound and angry because you stole his seat? Priceless.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
After Apollo 1 they did use a Nitrogen/Oxygen mix on the launch pad, after they got into space it was yet again a pure oxygen environment if memory serves.
"You say my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it?"
That's not even remotely correct. The tether is under tension, and to lower the remote end you would need to lift a mass that is heavier than the tension of the cable, which would be hundreds of tons if I remember correctly. Angular momentum does come into effect, but for different reasons. For example, if you were to lift an entire mountain into space (a piece at a time) the rotation of earth would slow a tiny bit. Also, the tether will swing like a pendulum if the elevator launches aren't timed right (but it would be a small easily correctable effect).
What happened to this idea?
Very long railgun on the ground, gently ascending up a hill?
Sure its a big initial capital investment, but after that you're just paying for the power.
And the vehicles can then basically just be gliders.
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
...we're back to following the Russian's lead on spaceflight? Kennedy is rolling in his grave.
mbbac
The orbiter itself may not rationally NEED wings, but the launcher should, unless you're talking really massive payloads. Here's why: The typical first-stage rocket booster uses most of its propellant just to get the first few dozen feet of altitude and few dozens of feet per second of velocity. If you use an air-breathing first stage (such as Scaled Composites' X-prize candidate, which uses a turbojet carrier plane as the first stage, or Orbital Science's Pegasus satellite launcher, which is lauched from a jet plane), you eliminate a LOT of mass. An airplane is just LOTS more fuel-efficient than a rocket at 40,000 feet and below. Use an air-breather from zero to 30,000 feet and 250 knots, and a rocket for the rest.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
This isn't that difficult. Your problem is you're assuming the same craft should be used for takeoff from earth, travel to mars or wherever, and then reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. If you use different craft for different tasks, you can get a much better solution.
A large, reusable, interplanetary craft should be built in orbit, using the space station as a building site. This craft doesn't have to endure the rigors of takeoff and reentry, so it won't be a problem using it over and over. The only problem is getting all the parts up into orbit to build it, but we're already getting experience with that in building the ISS.
Tiny, expendable, reentry capsules can be used to ferry people back and forth from Earth's surface. Stick one on top of a rocket, send some people up to the ISS, and they'll get in their interplanetary craft and go to Mars. Some other people, who just returned from Mars, will hop in the newly-arrived capsule and drop back to the Earth. A few extra capsules could even be stacked on top of one rocket to provide some spares to be kept at the space station in case an evacuation is necessary.
Note that this was not during a piloted mission, but rather during a ground exercise and is little more than a simple industrial accident that happens every day in workplaces around the world.
Note further that this was not at the full development of the technology, but in it's very early experimental phases.
The issue was solved by not feeding raw oxygen into the capsule (which was never done, nor even contemplated, during an actual mission and which many had advised against even in ground tests) and by the installation of a simple inside door handle.
Door handles are a functional technology of thousands of years standing that have yet to be overthrown by some doofy modern technological fashion.
They are simple, robust, inexpensive and possess an unmatched functionality.
As does a conventional rocket ( whose technology is now more advanced even than Saturn and Apollo technology).
The shuttle is, and always was, a barbaric kludge of various disparte technologies whose sole purpose was to follow a particular fadish notion that we should have a "space plane."
It is not a space plane. It's a van with stub wings attached to the outside of a cob-jobbed booster system of obvious and fatal failings that "glides" back to earth rather than use a parachute just so that we can pretend it is a space plane.
The X-15 was a space plane.
The "Space Shuttle" is an engineering abomination and what you get when you let a governement agency subvert good engineering principles for political purposes.
In short, it is the proverbial White Tiled Elephant that started out with the specs of a mouse.
KFG
Of course, the shuttle never has flown a polar orbit, and SLC-6 at Vandenberg has it's own little hard-luck story (don't build your launch site on Indian burial grounds). The short of it is, the military got spooked about the reliability of the shuttle after Challenger blew up, decided it wasn't worth it to fix the problems at Slick-6, and have used Titans ever since. For the shuttle, that was a lot of very lucrative business lost.
Were it not for Challenger, the shuttle might have operated out of Vandenberg. What would public perception of the program be like if that were the case?
Here's a listing of all military launches using the shuttle.
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
The space shuttle was originallt speced out to be a REUSABLE spacecraft, just check the tires, top off the fluids, and it's good to go again.
In part, that changed during it's design when it turned out that reusable in that sense just wouldn't work out for some of the parts.
In other cases, we found out that in practice, various other componants were not really reusable.
Instead, the shuttle was actually REBUILDABLE though it was mostly designed to be reusable.
It probably would have worked a lot better had it been designed to be rebuildable from the start, and it certainly would have been cheaper than rebuilding a craft that wasn't designed to be rebuilt.
For an example, replace the very expensive and fragile (as it turns out, too fragile) heat tiles and carbon panels with a cheap ablative resin. On landing, sandblast the char away and re-apply. Instead, since it had to be reusable, they went with the much more expensive and risky tiles and panels.
Another interesting idea might be to leave parts of the thing in orbit. Each flight could dock with the service module and use it for the duration of their mission, then disconnect and leave it for the next crew. The part that returns would need to carry the expendibles, and have the self contained capability to return should something go wrong. That may or may not be useful (after all, space is a hostile environment, so unpowered equipment may not be durable enough to use again without serious work and time that is not available or worth it), but it's an interesting concept to consider.
That would also shift the burden of redundancy somewhat since it would no longer be necessary to trade off capacity vs. more redundancy. In theory, the entire service module could be replaced in orbit if it came to that. Even life support provisions could be provided. At the end of a mission, just before seperation, any reserves that were not used in the mission could be transferred to the SM for use on a later mission.
Another interesting option after further research is to actually use tethers to transfer momentum from the returning capsule to the SM in order to get what amounts to a boost for nothing.
I don't think that NASA has done absolutely NOTHING in the last few decades, it's just that by sticking with the shuttle as-is, it hasn't been able to take much advantage of the things it's learned. A more modular system is in order so that they don't get stuck again with an all or nothing technology update. Capsule, booster and SM should be seperate projects which are updated and improved more or less seperatly.
From the ISR space elevator FAQ.
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What about conservation of angular momentum?
When an elevator ascends the ribbon, it must be accelerated eastward because the Earth's rotation represents a larger eastward velocity the higher you go. The required eastward force on the ascending elevator would have to be provided by a corresponding westward force on the ribbon.
If you go through the math quantitatively, the angular momentum for the climbers requires a pound or so of force over the one-week travel time, and we do that easily with our many tons of material in the anchor and the counterweight.
The quantities really are tiny, but just to be complete, a climber going up pushes the entire elevator slightly to the east, causing it to lean. However, the ribbon recovers for the same reason that it stays up in the first place. Centripetal acceleration is acting on the upper two-thirds pulling it outward, and the lost angular momentum is replaced very quickly (essentially as fast as it is lost). The ribbon will never lose enough angular momentum to even deflect a single degree, let alone fall. The extra angular momentum is stolen from the Earth's rotation.
***********
I don't have time or a good recollection of my college dynamics class to verify this, but it seems they have it worked out. I'd be more concerned with the part about "dodging a satellite every 14 hours."
Simply google for "saturn v blueprints" and you'll find any number of sources debunking that "the Saturn V blueprints were destroyed" nonsence.
The difficulty with reviving the Saturn V is not in the absence of the plans... those are safe and sound; but in the fact that the Saturn V was built with 1960's technology, most of the parts aren't made anymore, and many of the companies that made parts of the Saturn V don't even exist anymore. Furthermore, the production facilities that made said parts have long since been either shut down, or retooled. And NASA's own facilities, including the all-important Launch Complex 39, have long since been modified from Saturn V specs, for use with the shuttle.
With all of the modifications to the design that would be necessary to start production on a new run of Saturn V's, on modern production lines, with modern manufactureing techniques, with modern components and electronics; it'd be easier just keep the basic math, but design an entirely new rocket. Certianly, it'd be a damn sight easier than finding vendors to recreate the '60's era parts to build new examples of the original design.
But not a whit of the Saturn V design or data is "gone".
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...