Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"Could it be? The Farscape 1 module?"
Dibs on Aeryn and Chiana! (You can keep Zhaan, she wouldn't shut up: "Oh great Spirit, grant me this orgasm blah blah blah..")
Trolling is a art,
At this rate it'll take years before we make a warp drive.
... 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.
As much as I like(d) Farscape, the upper-left design isn't new. It's actually been around a while, as well as a few variants (like the exact same thing with the wings not turned up). Some designs were bigger - presummably to hold far more cargo - and some were smaller - designed only to carry a few more people than currently possible.
With new pressure on NASA, news ideas are cropping up about using the old Saturn Vs or new variants to carry only cargo and then to taxi people into space using some of the designs here. It may be safer, but will it cost less? Taking a New York taxi a single mile is expensive enough! Imagine the fare on this taxi (and their "luggage" going in a separate one).
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.
It always amazes me how science fiction drives innovation in real science.
Fiction? You haven't snuck around Area 51, have you?
/me wraps another layer of tinfoil on the hat.
Trolling is a art,
Given how long it takes to ready a shuttle for flight and that there was certainly not always one standing by ready to go up, this 3 man limit was just as true before the last shuttle disaster as it is now. Why were there more than 3 people in the ISS crew before but there can only be 3 now?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Um... automatic doors were marketed by Horton Automatics back in 1960... and were invented in the 1950s. Well before Star Trek.
...what they really want is a monorail. Oh yeah, and more asbestos. Then they'll show that Space King who's boss.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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?
I wonder if they'll get any funding. NASA seems to have a plethora of ideas, but all you hear about is their budget being cut. So far ever Nigeria seems to be having a more solid space program.
Anyone remember X-34?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
from the Enterprise intro? Isn't that shuttle-jet craft we see in the intro going to be built? I mean, it's in Star Trek history, so it must eventually happen, otherwise Star Trek's just a bunch of science fiction!
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.
yes, but I bet they didn't make the proper whooshing sound as they opened.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
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
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.
You've got it backwards. The Farscape module was based on the (now cancelled) crew return vehicle for the ISS. The vehicle was dubbed the X-38 through its testing-- here's a quick link:
X-38 Stuff
I hate getting this kind of thing from network news sites. So I tend to not read them and just look for the link to the horse's mouth. I didn't see a link to the NASA site that might carry this graphic and their own interpretation of it. Does anyone have a link at nasa.gov?
.org registry?!
[Off-topic]
While looking for the above link, I made the terrible mistake of trying nasa.org, which turns out to be a blatantly commercial site with horridly multiplying pop-ups to boot. How did these bums get a
[/Off-topic]
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
There must be some kind of commercial incentive to go to space. The moment the private business steps in, there will be many various designs tried, built and flied. The best one will win. /.?
Space needs a race similar to what happened in aviation in 1900-1920s. Everyone got excited, startups were popping up left and right, people WANTED to fly.
Government bureucracy with no incentive to do the thing right is not a way to progress in space. Any congressmen reading
I personally am looking forward to Xprise launches. Maybe then public and business will take notice.
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.
Automatic doors were invented by Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt in 1954, and lifting body aerodynamics (like the shape of Farscape-1) were invented by Dr. Alfred J. Eggers Jr. at NASA Dryden in 1957.
If you're launching vertically, the wings give you no extra lift capability. While you're in space, the wings are just dead weight. When you aero-brake in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the wing edges are where the bulk of the orbital energy gets dumped and has to be dissipated - Columbia's problem obviously was with a wing edge. The only time wings have any advantage is in the final descent stages, where you get much greater maneuverability and a gentler approach and landing - and it looks cool too. But parachutes and retro rockets as used by Soyuz, or just parachutes as used by all the US manned flights before the shuttle, seem to work well enough.
Mass estimates come in at about 3 times higher for a winged vehicle than a capsule; that's from experience with the Shuttle and European, Japanese, and Russian winged vehicle designs. Is the maneuverability advantage and slightly lower G-forces on re-entry sufficient justification for the vastly greater expense?
Energy: time to change the picture.
I hate how the images never link to bigger versions that you can actually make out. So I found this for everyone to look at. I got it here.
Hate to break it to you, but 'get by with out the shuttle' is excatly what this is supposed to do.
Todays shuttle is a halfway house between very different requirements; It was to carry people, it was to carry cargo, it was to be reusable and it was to be cheap. Managing one, two or possible even four of these is possible, but all four at the same time is very, very difficult to do. This new generation spacecraft removes one of the original requirements - as it's not supposed to be a cargocarrier - and thus makes it much easier to make a reuseable personellcarreing spacecraft thats reasonable cheap to operate (cheaper than the shuttle at any rate).
And as long as the US goverment has decided that a permanent base in space is needed - even if I think the ISS is a far cry from what it should have been - then some way of launcing and recovering the astronauts are needed. Yes, there is the russian Soyuz, but while arguable the most successfull spacecraft of all time with more than 230 missions flown, it's also the oldest spacecraft in operation (the design streach back to the late fifties) and it's not reusable. Or you can try to hitch a ride with the chinese, allthought I have doubts they'll let americans ride with them... all those little differences you know. And the ESA are playing with manned spacecraft too, allthought only on the drawingboards right now. So, all in all, grounding the shuttle and not replacing it with a better, more up to date manned spacecraft will leave the US in the mercy of others as far as manned access to space goes.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
because it's a heavily politicized bureaucracy.
the capsule replacement was always intented purely to support a low earth orbit space station. a space station that congress didn't want to build. so the ultimate craft was designed to land like an airplane, and featured some fudged cost-effectiveness numbers so that it would be popular enough to greenlight. the resulting bureaucratic design being the cause of countless safety failures and unnecessary risks.
This BS ruined our capability to do much of anything for 20 years while we floundered until the ISS rekindled public interest in its primary function.
We got to the moon in 10 years because the people (and thereby elected officials) were behind it. NASA either has to fix its bureaucratic problems (impossible), privatize the space industry (desireable), or rekindle public interest in beating the Chinese to permanent moon settlement (short sighted, too expensive).
Look at the smaller cheaper autonomous initiative (good idea) at NASA that was popularized with the Mars Rover, and was subsequently killed in its crib by the follow-up failure of the polar lander (tragic).
The true irony is that NASA is organizationally incapable of doing things fast, or cheap, as the polar lander should have shown. All that money, all those procedures, committees, and double-checks - and still a small problem got by and resulted in the loss of a $100 million dollar craft and the priceless research it could have done.
The best solution is for space to become privatized. Public money is best spent elsewhere, and private industry is more suited to rapid expansion, evolution, and reaching cost effectiveness. Look at what the privatized airline industry did in only -50- years after the Wright brothers first flew. From Kitty Hawk to Chuck Yeager in nearly the same amount of time that we've been to the moon and done nothing.
Why should we continue to let Boeing and the like purely profit from programs like the x34 which get cut before they can produce. Why not share risk/reward more?
Consolidate the agencies with control over spacecraft (to make privatization pluasible), set rules regarding space related patents (to ensure that tech falls to the public domain quickly), and set -international- rules for extraplanetary rights and coordination.
I don't want to have to learn mandarin to vacation on Mars.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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
From a post I did about 3 weeks ago:
/.ers and other have been saying - it is a "capsule" so it is more efficient in space and it is a Single Stage to Orbit vehicle with the safety of completely powered landing and flight in the atmosphere. I would expect that Macdonnell Douglas could have a prototype built and flying again in 6 months and that, with enough engineering and money, a production model could be built in 2 to 3 years.
I don't know why NASA or an areospace company (Macdonnell Douglas, are you listening?) is not considering revitalizing the Delta Clipper. It was a capsule shaped Single Stage to Orbit (SSO), re-useable space vehicle that was actually built and was flying throughout the 1990's until an unfortunate accident destroyed it. Apart from the strut breaking that caused it's destruction (an engineering problem that is likely easily fixed), it performed exceptionally.
Consider the costs of revitalizing this "existing" project compared to re-designing and re-creating a new shuttle from scatch. Which do you think is cheaper? The Delta Clipper allowed for totally controlled flight to and from orbit, a lot safer it seems, than an uncontrolled glider.
This idea seems to have the best of apects of what
Can the other four say that?
Hell, strap on a new areospike engine and NASA might actually enjoy a few years of spacefaring success, like they used to in the 60's.
Just a thought...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Researchers at the University of Texas have created a process where they can create nanotubes at 70cm per minute. Once a bunch of good production engineers get their hands on it, I could see them uping that figure to 10 or more meters per minute. Plus, once researchers figure out how to "knit" nanofibers together, then the benefits of parallel production come into the fold.
Here's a link to that story: link
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Good article on a NASA-funded research project, Laser Propulsion Group is studying what may become a new type of rocket engine. They use powerful lasers firing pulses that last only tenths of nanoseconds -- tenths of billionths of a second -- at a wide range of target materials.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-02a.html
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...
Source: here
During Soviet era russians never admitted that it had happened (at least in the Soviet Union)
I also always thought that it was just a rumour until I found out that my dad knew his dad
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.
For those of you who wondered...
Here are some ideas that have already been turned over and rejected (and might have to be revisited!):
There are variations of the Apollo
Rescue plans/variations
The original Alpha lifeboat
And Alpha lifeboat's replacement
And, of course, the Saturn V variants
Happy surfing!
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
It will be cheaper, faster to develop since it needs less parts. It will carry more given the same launch rocket. It will be safer because it is easier to make a capsule with a continuous intact abort feature (i.e. you can evac the crew any step of the flight).
Just think about it. A top mounted capsule can be ejected upwards in case there is a problem with the booster, afterwards it safely lands using a parachute.
If there is a problem with the shuttle booster or other side mounted vehicle, you can probably kiss your ass goodbye.
The wings are a nuisance while taking off. That is the reason why the Shuttle is mounted sideways on the rocket instead of at the top. The original X-20 Dynasoar space plane was planned to be top mounted until someone figured out that having wings on the nose of a rocket isn't a good thing because it makes the whole thing unstable. There is a reason arrows have the feathers on the tail instead of the opposite.
So you carry wings, a reinforced hull to support the structural stresses wings provove, wheels, etc. All just for landing?
A parachute is much simpler, cheaper, and doesn't use all that space and weight! You could also use landing rockets like the DC-X used, or a parafoil (a sort of a cross between a parachute and a wing) with some skids like the X-38, etc.
Why must a space vehicle look like an airplane? An airplane does not look like a train, a train does not look like a boat either.
The main medium is different, the vehicle is supposed to fit to the medium, not the other way around. In space wings are just as useless as wheels on a boat at sea.
For more info on all I talked above, just check out the excellent site Encyclopedia Astronautica.
I'm going to guess that you're talking about Marooned (1969).
Right time period, but I've never seen the movie (and I didn't come up with any other matches).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?