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Lockheed Martin unveils Space Shuttle replacement
Vegan Bob writes "Lockheed Martin released its proposal for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) in a recent Popular Mechanics article. NASA will choose this vehicle scematic or opt for the yet-released Northrop Grumman design in 2008. The CEV will replace the Space Shuttle program, and will eventually go to the moon (between 2015 and 2020)."
A few links right to locmart:
Main CEV Page Has the graphics shown in the other articles, etc.
Couple Page PDF Early on stuff about CEV
Interesting.... This page doesn't say much but what it does say is this, "The Space Exploration Vision Center is now open in Washington D.C. This facility showcases the latest developments in space exploration, concepts and technologies for NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle program, including a full-scale cockpit simulator. Government tours and meetings are available five days a week." I want on one of those tours.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Lipservice and political grandstanding? I don't think there will be political will to carry out even a "footprint and flagpoles" Mars mission in the near future.
The owls are not what they seem
Nothing about this impresses me. The design being the biggest disapointment. Maybe its time to take bids from some of the new areospace startups instead of handing it off to old entrenched Boeing. Those dinosaurs look at space and all they see is nails, so of course they'd want to build the same old hammers.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Is it just me, or does that design look a lot like the Big Gemini? I was amazed at how similar the designs looked, and then I saw this line:
... Nah.)
The CEV is not designed to glide upon re-entry like the shuttle; rather, it will be equipped with parachutes and airbags to set down on land or water. Interchangeable computer systems will increase adaptability between modules.
I'm thinking it *is* a Big Gemini. In which case...
Way to go Lockheed! Reusing proven technology rocks! (Maybe they actually listened to my comments on reusing the design?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why don't we just re-use an updated version of the Saturn rocket and capsule design if we're going back to the moon? It won't have the sex appeal of a new sports space shuttle but it would work.
RTFA man.... and all you other commenters. Not only does it use a thermal shield instead of tiles, there IS a backup Carbon-Carbon shield.
Also, this is not the final design, this is the one that Lockheed submitted for consideration in the competition. Final one to be chosen in 2008 with manned flights by 2014.
I think that it's 'taking us so long to go go the moon' because the moon is most assuredly dead. It seems that the focus of everything is looking for life, which is great. Either that, or long-term bases on Luna, which is also great. If it's the latter, well, damn skippy it should take more than 15 years!!!! We've never tried to exist on another solar body, let alone one without supportive water or atmosphere.
So, in answer to your question, this design is a stop gap measure to longer-term and better technically advanced systems to further our goal of living, flourishing and colonizing space and other bodies.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
We didn't go to the moon for science and exploration, we went there to give the Reds a big fat middle finger.
Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.
Third, the Apollo project cost over $25 billion. In modern dollars, that's aover $100 billion. And believe or not, government spending was more efficient back then. Environmental impact studies weren't necessary, the cost of doing business was lower, the bidding process was simpler and cheaper. NASA's entire budget for this year is under $17 billion.
You can't just reproduce the Saturn V and fly it. The Saturn V was too big for the launch facilities and it had to be assembled with its own tower and hauled out to the launch site.
The Apollo program was also cut short. We'd made our point: America can reach the moon, and the Soviets can't. Neener neener neener. The last three moon missions were cancelled due to budget cuts.
So why will it takes 15 years to get back there? Because none of our current technology is appropriate for the task, the old technology is not only unavailable (there's no more Saturn V's left that could fly) but updating it to modern standards and safety requirements (not to mention refocusing the moon landing to a science mission more than thumbing our nose at the Eastern Bloc) would probably cost as much or more than just starting from scratch.
What's going on: I have no idea, but I honestly don't think they'll even hit the moon in 15 years unless some thing major changes about how NASA or the government does business.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
So they say it could be used for longer missions - but is it big enough. From the diagram it looks like the crew has a place to sit. For any missions, especially long term, the crew really needs a place to move around.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Orbital rendezvous is good for a number of things. It allows you to have modularity so you can assembler larger crafts, add special modules later on that you haven't even thought of now (as more advanced technology becomes available 10 years down the road), use it to dock with the International Space Station, use it to dock with possible rescue crafts, etc.
I think the big point of it will be to either:
a) Dock with new engines for the trip from LEO to the moon
b) Dock with a specialized moon courier to transfer the passengers.
Isn't it intersting, one of the primary goals of the Gemini program was to develop space docking technology? Then they design a much larger version just before the end of the program. Now we're getting a craft 50 years later that looks like the Big Gemini design but with a new body. Coincidence?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If the device cannot land like a plane it has no hopes of recovering anything from space.
Still has to survive re-entry so losing the ability to land like a plane is a great loss. While it makes it possible to land anywhere I dont believe our money is best put to use in this fashion.
Something else I forgot. The carbon-carbon they are proposing won't be made from tiles. They can construct it as a single piece heat shield. The original shuttle designs also called for a seamless thermal protection system, but they went to a tiled design when it became apparent that they couldn't fabricate it in larger pieces. The nightmare of maintaining so many fragile and unique tiles on the shuttle wasn't their first choice. Materials and fabrication methods have advanced a lot in 30 years, so I'm sure that they will avoid unique and fragile ceramic tiles at all cost.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I think there are plenty SR-71's out there that are no longer in service which could commit a few tonnes of raw titanium to the project.
Secondly, who the fuck cares? Wouldn't it be cheaper to use carbon fiber composites and stronger steal alloys where needed. Sure it'll be heavier, but it's definitely a lot more cost effective. Unless NASA has the power to make the government turn over a few decommissioned SR's to them.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
the delta clipper http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/dc- xa.htm
would have been a great replacement for the shuttle. It took a ground crew of 6 and demonstrated quick turn-aroud launches (on the 1/3 scale prototype). McDonnall Douglas made many successful test launches, Nasa crashed it the first time, and the project was cancelled.
Androk
Because someone found something that works better. Its called progress. Better, faster, cheaper.
I've no problem with sticking with what works, but do we just to stop looking when we think we've found it?
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Has it occurred to anyone that maybe there was NOTHING WRONG with the capsule design in the first place, and that the only reason the Shuttle has wings is so that the Air Force could have warm fuzzies about it?
Mabye people like shuttles because they don't leave a trail of trash from here to the moon. Or mabye because less material resources are expended in recycling something that you know already works. Or perhaps because they don't smash into the ground like a meteor if the parachutes fail.
The various shuttles have flown a LOT more than the Saturn V ever has, so I would venture to say there is nothing wrong with a shuttle design. Perhaps one should try focusing on the real problem with NASA, which is the bureaucracy.
My experience with Truax was to get him to cross the street (literally) and meet with Ron Packard -- the congressman who sponsored the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. The LSPA was signed into law. I testified before Congress on follow-up legislation for commercial incentives. While in Washington DC, I met with Dana Rohrabacher and told him of Truax's desire to do a trans-Pacific rocket-delivery system for over-night "FedEx" type services based on a scaled down version of the Sea Dragon -- and indicated the commercial incentives legislation could clear the way for private funding by removing the threat of government competition. Rohrabacher then initiated the DC-X program within his district, which was government funded. I happened to be present at a meeting between a group of investors and a private launch service company (intending on commercializing the MX-missile's production lines for launch services) the day the DC-X funding was announced. The investors decided not to bother competing with the government's deep pockets and terminated the meeting upon hearing the announcement. The potential of DC-X to create new "FedEx-like" services across the Pacific was mentioned in the press.
Seastead this.
Or if there's a follow-up to the X-prize...
The Y-Prize: For the first manned commercial moon landing.
That should be followed up by the Z-prize, which either colonizes the moon continuously for a minimum period of time, or the first manned commercial Mars landing.
Then we move into the Greek letters...
This doesn't sound innovative or cost effective. The shuttle's black nosecone is already a giant carbon-carbon piece, and it's horribly expensive to produce. The closest thing we have to mass produced carbon-carbon parts are brake rotors for aircraft and race cars. On the low end they run about $2500 each.
How hard is it to make a replaceable ablative heat shield anyway?
I think it would be useful to read some news now and again. The X-Prize is akin to taking a go-kart to an F1 race. Sure, you can go around the track, but you're going to get smoked by the big boys. Let's not have any delusions about what Scaled Composites has done. The were suborbital and very low speed. They need another 17,000 times more energy to get into the big leagues.
Secondly, NASA is working with Bigelow. Last time I checked all his materials were directly transfered from NASA. He's taking that work and commercializing it since some senators didn't think NASA should spend their money on it.
Thirdly, you cite one example of NASA using the shuttle to launch a satellite and there are more, I am sure. However, that completely ignores the tens of other satellites launched using ordinary commerical launchers! Turn off your selective memory please.
Because the costs of getting into space hasn't changed much, this is really just a reusable capsule which will be launched on a disposable rocket. The other components will be launched on seperate disposable rockets (or one day, built in space.) It's more efficent than the shuttle, much cheaper and safer. Splashdowns used to be my most favorite part of the space mission and it looks like we'll be having them again. Probably not nationally televised though.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Jerry Pournelle is way ahead of you.
// TODO: fix sig
Maybe its time to take bids from some of the new areospace startups instead of handing it off to old entrenched Boeing.
From TFA: Another announced team is t/Space, a consortium including such groups as Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, Elon Musk's SpaceX, and Red Whittaker[1] (http://www.redteamracing.org/) of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. Some news reports in mid-March 2005, stemming from an interview with New Scientist have reported that t/Space intends to withdraw from the competition, citing a high paperwork burden; however, no announcement of a withdrawal has yet been made by t/Space.
However, as of May 3, it seems that only Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman did submit a bid.
Looks like the startups tried but said, screw it your bureaucracy sucks. We will just do it ourselves again.
chown -R us
Helium-3 and, most probably, fusion power in general, is a red herring. It makes for a good excuse to get up to the moon to do things that ought to be done, but it's not our answer.
We don't need fusion any time soon to solve our energy problem.
The problem with fusion is that plasma dynamics are not as easy as we thought they were going to be in the seventies. We have yet to break even. And even the types of fusion that are supposed to be low-temperature and not produce neutrons still produce a lot of neutron radiation. It'll just get worse if we scale it up to power-generation levels.
We can solve our power problem right now, with fission power. The problem isn't that we don't know how to do a proper fuel cycle with reprocessing, stimulated rapid decay with a neutron bombarder, breeder reactors, etc. The problem is, people have been spending money that could be spent on progressivel better and more efficent reactors and an economy based on this... on generally stupid stuff that hasn't shown to be any better of an idea than old fision power.
Gentoo Sucks
Do modern safety requirements = Shuttle?
One glaring safety issue that I can see is that the Shuttle lacks the crew-saving 'abort modes' that Saturn V and even Gemini / Mecury had ie: The Launch Escape Tower.
If anything had gone wrong ie: vehicle exploded on pad / during initial climb, the Launch Escape System would drag the capsule clear of the rocket and then land using the normal parachute system.
The Shuttle has very limited launch abort modes and very optimistic ideas about how the crew could leave the vehicle. Ultimately, if the Shuttle's main tank burnt fast / exploded on the pad, that would be curtains for the crew. As Challenger demonstrated, the Shuttle is vulnerable during ascent too where a catastrophic failure of the SRBs would destroy the entire vehicle and crew.
If you search around, you can find the NASA descriptions of both Shuttle and Saturn V abort modes and just in the way they read, you can see that the Saturn V escape system was a *serious* concept whereas the Shuttle abort modes are no more than lip-service to any significant malfunction.
Although the NASA launch escape systems were never tested on an exploding rocket, the Russian space program did demonstrate on a couple of occasions that the escape towers (I think on N1 boosters) worked. This is the same launch escape system used on manned Soyuz flights to this day.
If someone told me I had to ride in a rocket to LEO tommorow, I would choose a Soyuz flight over a Shuttle flight purely for the ammount of 'options' provided throughout the flight.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Well, that's debatable. Ask this question: how willing would the USSR have been to launch all their nukes at us on a moment's notice? See, we had pretty good protection due to M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). They were, for the most part, sane human beings. They didn't want to die. So they never launched at us, knowing that we'd launch right back.
:)
With the terrorists, M.A.D. is no deterrent. They actually want to die in the act of killing us. I believe their psychotic frame of mind actually makes them more dangerous than the USSR ever was. If they get ahold of just one old nuke (and face it, the security for old missiles in parts of the former Soviet Union is downright scary), they wouldn't hesitate to use it.
As far as wiping out the species, all they need is one good biological weapon that spreads faster than a cure can be found. New advances in biotech are pretty awesome, but sometimes you gotta wonder if we're just opening the door to destruction. All it could take is one idiot madman to take us all with him.
(Brought to you by the "Make George Bush Dictator For Life Because He's The Only Guy Who Will Protect You" campaign)
Of course, there are obvious comparisons to Lookheed's LS-200 "Starclipper" proposal of the 1960's: LS-200
But the best analog is probably Dyna-Soar, the USAF spaceplane of the 1960's: picture, site...
The Death of Dyna-Soar
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was early last December;
It was felt that very shortly, we would be employed no more;
Every day we feared the morrow; vainly we had sought to borrow;
Funds to budget us tomorrow, for our work on Dyna-Soar...
On the sleek and winged spacecraft we called Dyna-Soar...
Cancelled now, forever more.
From off the duct I pulled the shutter, when, whith many flirt and flutter,
Out there flew a stately raven, of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But with mien of Lord or Lady, perched beside my office door...
Upon a bust of Eugen Sänger, on the bookcase by the door...
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
"Prophet !" said I, "Thing of evil !, tell me, agent of the devil,
Whether McNamara axed the program, or just cut us back some more ?
Will he make a presentation, to Congress for appropriation ?
Does he plan continuation, after Fiscal 64 ?
Is the funding in the budget ? Tell me, tell me, I implore..."
Quoth the Raven, "Never more".
Oh, the sleek and winged spacecraft we called Dyna-Soar,
Cancelled now, forever more.
(hopefully not a future statement of the CEV!)
Simon ;)
and will eventually go to the moon (between 2015 and 2020).
Whereupon they'll be given a warm welcome by Mike Melville and the crew of Tycho Station, who'll present them with their very own "Welcome to the Moon, Inc." wings.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
You mean we could have afforded two or three Apollo programs if we had forgone Bush's Oil Crusade?