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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?"
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.
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
"why has a profitable private space business/exploration model been found?"
Maybe becuase one doesn't exist. People love to compare the new world to space, but the problem is they are very very important differences. The first was the fact that the new world already had an indiginous(sic?) population that was explotiable. The second was the fact that the new world was literally overflowing with gold. It was profitable to send ships there, not for reasons of industry or developement, but simply becuase it was the equivalent of a large bank. Anyone with a handful of guns and a big enough ship could steal as much they wanted. The reason trips to the new world became privatized so quickly is because it was believed that there was much wealth that was so easy to access. Basically, the immediate benefits (historically, business has always been short sighted) very obviously ouweighed the risks. Most to the early explorers and many of the colonists all went "to get rich quick." Even then the first 100 years or so was dominated almost exclusively by state sponsored explorers.
Now look at space. It has about the same risks, the same costs, etc BUT without the obvious benefits. Imagine if cortez conquered the aztecs only to find that the entire empire's wealth consisted of nothing more than worthless rock. Do you think the spanish would really have built a new world empire if they didn't think the benefits of one were so obvious? How do expect to make money off space? Mining the moon? It is far cheaper to mine the earth. Pure science is not going to bring investors. Secondly, there is the fact that there was competition when it came to the new world. If you didn't do it, your enemies would have. No such competition exists in space. China is decades away from colonizing space, the EU is even farther behind. There's no rush. Lastly, there is the fact that we are technoloigically not up to the task at all. We could build colonies on the moon. For what purpose, that's anyones guess. The real material wealth of space isn't on the moon. It is at mars and the asteroid belt and Jupiter. We are no where near where we need to be technologically to get there effeciently let alone set up a true colony. Imagine if instead of sailing to the new world, the only way to reach it was by riding a horse. That is basically how it is with the space program. The only difference is you have to carry all your supplies on that horse. When the explorers got the new world, they initially didn't have to build colonies, the natives already had. They just had to steal them. In space you got to build it all yourself. Not only can no company afford to sponsor that much technological research, no counrty can either (at the moment). Most of the comercial space attempts you have seen so far have been somewhat silly from a business aspect. They are developing a technology with the hopes that sometime in the future, someone will come up with a profitable use for it. Once they accomplish it and discover that as far as near earth stuff goes there is no comercial use for it, it will probably come to an end.
To answer your question, we havent goen into space for the same reason we never really colonized antartica: becuase no one wants to live in hell and there is no way to convince people that space is a land of milk and honey. No one wants to live in a place where they know they won't eventually be better off. Maybe if the standard of living falls on earth to the point that living in a barren rusty frozen wasteland is preferable is to living on earth, people will start going to the moon and mars but at the moment, quite honestly, what's the point? (Note: phantom killer asteroid is not going to scare people into doing it.)
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy