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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?"
"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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
"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
we havent goen into space for the same reason we never really colonized antartica: becuase no one wants to live in hell ...
OMG! Antarctica is hell? That means hell has frozen over! And that girl who said she'd sleep with me just as soon as hell freezes over; it's finally going to happen! This is the greatest day of my life!
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
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