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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.
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.
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
We've been to the moon? I thought Jonathan Frakes proved that it was a 40 billion dollar hoax!
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]
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.
I've posted responses to this effect before, but , yes I agree. Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars Outlines a plan for reaching the red planet using existing technology, including a modified skylab-like capsule that could be shot directly from earth and use gravity assist to fall out of earth's orbit into that of Mars. Great book, great ideas, very do-able plan for reaching Mars soon!
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.
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.
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
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.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but after recently reviewing the film footage from Moonbase Alpha, I've joined the group of people who believe that the whole thing was a hoax.
I'd love it just as much as the next guy if our government really had built a moonbase, and Eagles, and everything else back in 1999. However, if you carefully look at the coverage of the events at the moonbase, there are just too many inconsistencies that can't be explained away: Serious violations of physics; handwaving passing for engineering; predictable news stories that seem contrived; people with stilted behaviours (as if they were bad actors) who wear clothes that have never been in fashion; images that just basically look faked.
I've read the websites that cast doubt on the whole scenario, and I have to say that I agree with what they're saying. Until somebody shows me some real compelling proof, I highly doubt that any of that stuff actually existed.
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?
Well, they used to send an aircraft carrier loaded with about 5000 sailors and various support ships just to fish 3 people and a capsule the size of a Volkswagen out of the drink... that's pretty complicated and expensive.
I say the capsule floats... why not just put an outboard motor on the thing and drive it home? You could do some fishing while you're at it...
On second thought, maybe there's a solution somewhere in the middle.
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?
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.
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!
"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.
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."
It was called Buran, it most definitely flew in space. It was an unmanned flight, a few orbits, then back again for a remote op landing. It worked, but the Russians realized it was too expensive. I was all for the shuttle, but if all we're doing is moving personnel, Apollo is the way to go. If it was built to today's standard's it would be a robust, reliable system, without Too much of the complexity that was necessary 30 years ago.
BTW, the Buran's been converted to a restaurant, and resides in Gorky park now.
The party's over
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
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
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...