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NASA's New Space Wheels
jvarsoke writes "ABCNEWS.com has an article on proposals for NASA's next generation Space Shuttle. But the replacement for the 1970's era wonder look a bit like a step backward baring one exception. Choices are a splash-down capsule, a"half-cone lifting body" (sounds bumpy), and two aircraft landing types . . . and what's that in the upper left corner. Could it be? The Farscape 1 module?"
It always amazes me how science fiction drives innovation in real science. This is certainly not the first occurance of this, and to cite a well known example, the automatic door (like the ones at supermarkets) were un-thought of until Star Trek.
... the country is cutting taxes... is running up huge debts... unemployment is rising... the rich are wasting vast amounts of the country's money on useless trinkets, and now the space pioneer that was NASA has fallen behind Europe's ESA/Russian space programs to the point where it is using 1960s rockets compared with ion engines.
Just like quantum computing will make the 9 GHz processor irrelevant.
It's going to take longer to do the elevator than it will be to design a new shuttle, at least with the way NASA works.
Honestly if you look at how things are going the space race has been re-born. Instead of the USSR now we are up against earope and China and Russia...Oh well they say competition is a good thing.. I agree. Maybe now we can actually look to the future and travel somewhere other than earth orbit for manned flights. If space is the last frontier why arent we following Horace Greeleys advice (go west young man) and why has a profitable private space business/exploration model been found?
NASA would like to have the Orbital Space Plane flying by 2008. John Junkins thinks it's possible.
"If we can go from the drawing board to the Moon in 10 years, we can do this in five years," he said.
I'm glad to see someone getting aggressive on the topic of a time frame. AFAIK, the ISS won't last forever, so as long as we have problems getting people and things up and back from it, it is going to waste.
It seems to me that NASA has been farting around for decades. It's an embarrasment that in 2003 we don't have a multitude of different vehicles available for all sorts of specialized space missions. NASAs mandate ought to be the development and maintenance of a large fleet of spacefaring vehicles. Systems need to be developed so that a launch can happen anytime of any day so that the problem of how and when to get up there becomes a matter of deciding when your cargo is ready.
And if you don't want NASA do it themselves, then this stuff should all be outsourced to the big Aerospace players.
How much of the space shuttle's "heavy lift" capability is wasted on the airframe and landing gear? A lot. Indeed, the SRB's are a giant fudge factor to get the whole mess off the ground.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Dont think taxi, think 747 vs Freight train. When a freight train crashes, it usually doesnt make the news unless there was something toxic on board or somone gets hurt. Theres a much lower margin of safety on a freight train so cargo can be hauled much more cheaply on a freight train than on a 747. You can also haul alot more freight on a freight train. But freight trains are slow, so people want to go by plane instead of train. In the case of space transportation, anything that humans have to fly on has to be tested more and has to have higher margins of safety than something thats only going to be rated for freight. More testing and more engineering means more expensive. And the bigger and more xcomplex the vehicle the more expensive it gets. So the space shuttle costs hundreds of millions to refurbish. What makes the news: Space shuttle blowing up or unmanned rocket blowing up? Unmanned rockets blow up alot more often than the space shuttle does, but they are cheaper to launch. So if you launch cargo along with humans you essentially have to certify the whole vehicle, including the cargo for human spaceflight (you cant have thse stuff in your cargo bay blowing up either) If you seperate out the two, even if you use expendible boosters, you can launch more cargo for less cost than if you launch both together. You wouldnt try to move a piano with a taxi, but if you want to get crosstown in a hurry you take one.
Yes I know this is not true. The disprove(?)
But still it is funny. I watched Jay Leno for a while and he just wouldn't quit with jokes about the space station mir and how it was falling apart. Of course zero jokes about the over a dozen people blown up aboard the space shuttles.
Exactly what is the body count on both sides? And how does the body count stack up to the amount of time spend in space?
So once again the americans are looking to go the high tech way. Sure the russians have proven time and time again that the old pod on a rocket works best, hell the russians have got an escape mechanism, their crews aren't doomed to burn up without at least a chance of escape.
A space plane just for piloting people up? Cause the existing soyuz module is not big enough. Okay here is a bloody simple solution. Add more modules!
When was the last time you saw on say a passenger ship just ONE big lifeboat? Multiple small ones are way easier to implement and provide reduncancy.
Oh well no doubt the boys at nasa know better. After all it is not like they haven't learned from past mistakes eh?
The space shuttle was a great idea. It was part of a huge project to go into space and the shuttle would have been the first of a whole fleet of vehicles to allow this to happen. Instead it became the mainstay of american space exploration and it this role it fails. It is like SUV, nice in theory but in its attemps to be all things it fails at being good at anything.
Of course the article points out the reason pretty well. Lack of funding. I guess the americans just made so many jokes about mir that they thought they had the space race won and they no longer had to do anything with it. Pity.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A few weeks ago I was at the 2003 MAPLD (Military and Space Applications of Programmable Logic Devices) conference, and one of the talks was by Roger Launius, chief historian for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He talked about the history of NASA, in the context of the Columbia disaster, what he thought lead to the failure, and where NASA could go from here. His outlook was pretty grim, but he made excellent points, which enraged a large portion of those attending the conference, half of whom were NASA employees.
Essentially, he said the Shuttle failed (and he didn't just mean 'crashed', he meant, failed to live up to its hype, to do real scientific work in space, and be cost effective) because it was designed wrong. It was designed to be all things. It was designed to transport people into space. It was designed to transport cargo into space. It was designed to conduct research in space. By trying to do all of these things, it failed to do any of them well. He made a number of other vary salient points about the reasons we should or should not send people into space, and the impact of public opinion and politics.
To keep this OT, I'd have to say, considering the historical perspective I learned from Dr. Launius, I like the capsule approach the best for transporting humans into space. It's cheap, it's effective, and it's less likely to break. I'd like to see NASA design vehicles that are inteded for a specific purpose, and do that purpose well. We have a space station for science that can only be done by humans in space (which there isn't much of...how do you really do microgravity experiments with people on board bumping into stuff, and jarring the place around?), we need a low-cost vehicle for transporting cargo, and a high-safety vehicle for transporting humans.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Interesting spin on this -- didn't this already get hashed out in this prior article that the capsule may well be more a "Right tool for the right job" issue?
It basically boiled down to aerodynamic control surfaces allow you to control your landing more precisely, but introduce a *lot* of complexity and weight (increasing your launch cost) as with the present Shuttle. A capsule based approach can be done much more simply but has issues to work out in the landing (ocean landing is probably easy in this day and age -- no need for a Carrier Task Force for every pick up... except when the trajectory is off for some reason and you move a couple of hundred miles... land is also doable).
All that aside -- this isn't the design contest for the USS Discovery. This is for a cheap, stable orbital taxi effectively. If a more "backwards" design gets NASA up and back cheaper, it seems to me that this makes what should be the *next* steps easier (building some type of assembly station in orbit or getting back to the Moon..) and that's where the steps forward should be taken.
Or the X-30? X-20? Apollo 18?
Unfortunately, the history of the space program, aside from an exciting-but-wasteful run like the moon program has been par for the course for the space program. We have some idea that needs some investment, but no real desire to follow-though with funding beyond a point.
I have a dream that, if we were to have built the X-20 back in the sixties (as opposed to Mercury), and grew from that, we would have a sustainable, safer space fleet today. We might have a diverse set of launch vehicals--truck-like shuttles with large payload bays, smaller crew-transport vehicals, etc. Rather than using the first-generation winged space vehical, we'd be on the fifth or sixth. A space station would have been operational for a while. The moon might not have been a flash-in-the-pan.
Unfortunately, there is no commitment. I dare say that the long-term strategy of the government is to phase out that capability. The Susan B. Anthony dollar coins had the Apollo 11 mission patch emblem on the "tails" side--an eagle landing on the moon. When the SBA was replaced with the new one, the Apollo 11 eagle was replaced with just a gliding eagle.
Not only are they taking away the future, they are trying to forget the past.
The Space Shuttle is a giant screaming space boondoggle whose main justification is the support of the other giant screaming space boondoggle, the Mostly American Space Station. Now that we've gone up into Earth orbit and found it's not a whole lot of fun, there's no use in continuing to put people up there for the sheer sake of putting them up there. It's doubly not worth putting them up there in reusable vehicles that look cool but end up wasting money compared to expendable vehicles unless one uses flight schedules generated by 1975 NASA engineers which expect Shuttles to launch on a manic schedule more characteristic of cocaine-addled weasels with ADD than giant experimental engineering endeavors.
The NASA manned missions office ought to toss the Space Shuttle, toss the Mostly American Space Station, toss all this Orbital Space Plane crap, get the simple capsule, and then concentrate on developing pre-colonization Martian missions. Earth orbit is for robots, and space planes suck.
H4x0r Economist - k33ping d3m0cr4cy l33t 51Nc3 1987
Here's a thought, let's imagine how much more money there would be for building a new shuttle if we weren't invading other countries...
"did get off the ground, but never more than a low hover."
The functional test that destroyed the DCX involved lifting to a hover, rotating around a horzontal axis, translating laterally, rotating back to vertical and translating down and laterally again. The destruction was caused when a landing strut failed to 'lock', and the whole thing toppled over.
The thing about the DCX is that it was unmanned, SSTO, powered throughout and scarily good, but it didn't impress people that liked the renderings of the X-33. Gotta remember those oversight committees love renderings.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
Actually, science tends to drive science fiction - it's just that the general population is exposed to science fiction more than science fact, and the fact side of science spends a long time in the "Will it even work?" stage, where science fiction just skips to the "It works and it's really cool" phase before science gets to the "It works, but it sorta blows up on us most of the time" phase.
Sure, Jules Verne had submarines and spacecraft in his books, but there were actual ideas about space travel and submarine travel years ahead of him, and even a few working submarines. Even Star Trek and Star Wars' faster-than-light technologies were based on speculation on the subject (Star Trek's warp drive was based on the idea that you could somehow shorten the distance between two points, and Star Wars' hyperdrive was based on the idea that space has some underlying level in which distances are compressed, allowing you to travel between two points in real space in fairly short times by jumping back and forth between space and hyperspace)
As for lifting body craft, they're a fairly old idea. People have already mentioned that there were one or two X-plane lifting bodies, and Farscape isn't the only science fiction to have them. Star Trek Enterprise has one in their "history of travel" thing during the theme song.
Back in the 70's, there was a movie loosely inspired by the Apollo 13 mission (although definitely not based on it). In it, an Apollo craft was stranded in orbit, and there were several attempts to rescue the crew. One of them involved a four man lifting-body spacecraft that NASA managed to design, test, and build in a week thanks to the Mystical Magic of Cinema. (If I remember correctly, it was a Soviet Soyuz mission that finally succeeded, though). Can anybody remember the name of the movie? AMC or TCM or some old movie channel played it a few times when the Apollo 13 movie came out, but I haven't seen it since.