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Low-Cost Space Shuttle Replacement Proposed
FleaPlus writes "The Washington Times and Space.com has an article on a plan for a low-cost shuttle replacement by t/Space, an organization whose team includes AirLaunch LLC and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites. Instead of a one-size-fits-all craft, t/Space's plan is to build an air-launched four-person capsule termed the Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV), specialized for carrying people to and from low-Earth orbit. Once in orbit the CXV would dock with a separately-launched Crew Exploration Vehicle (likely built by Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman), which could be optimized for traveling between Earth orbit and the Moon. The CXV would also be able to dock with a space station or serve as a crew lifeboat. The group, which has already received some NASA funding, calculates that it can have the system ready by 2008 for $400 million, with a per-launch cost of $20 million (compared to ~$500 million per shuttle launch). Development would be done under a competitive fixed-price (instead of cost-plus) contract."
ALL STATIONS: Prepare for saucer separation sequence!
According to star trek producers, this sequence was so expensive in special-effects, that it was hardly performed during the seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next generation... Funny that in real-life it might be cheaper...
Space exploration suffers from the lack of investment coming from major industries worldwide.
The times when a whole country like the US started a program to put a man on the moon are long since past, now, it's up to the corporations to take over, but they have nothing to gain from this except for the publicity and the somewhat useless benefits of zero-gravity research (don't get me wrong, i think z-g research is important, but the benefits are seldom).
What would happen if there was a legislation that allowed a company to claim a part of another planet, provided that (1) they can get there first and (2), they actively use it for a purpose (like mining, among many others). Such legislation would surely have to have many different conditions and establish a common ground for all corporations in the world, and i cannot see the entire universe of implications, but i can't stop thinking that this would push space exploration projects and would put us on other planets.
Now, whether we should be destroying other planets aside from "ours", that's an entirely different matter...
The future will take care of itself.. It has in the past
This might be a silly question, but if they do get the NASA contract and develop a 4-person capsule with a per-launch cost of $20 million, would they be allowed to also use the same capsule design for commercial uses, like space tourism? We've already seen a number of people eager to shell out $20 million for an orbital flight, so I can imagine that the number eager to spend $5 million for the same flight would be much higher.
Hmm... I wonder if this would be able to dock with a Bigelow inflatable habitat.
The russian Clipper (Kliper) lifting body space capsule is already being built. There is no need for the yankee to reinvent the wheel.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/kliper.html
By the way, air launch is one of the most dangerous methods. In-flight collision is invariably fatal. Remember the drone that killed the SR-71 motherplane? The idea is silly.
$400 million seems like an awfully low price to start up a viable (ie. not a slowly dying legacy) space program. Put in perspective, the population of a mid-sized town could easily fund that and provide something to give the whole world (or for the more cynical, at least Americans) some hope in what people can accomplish.
Are they accepting investments/donations?
...is, whether NASA will retain exclusive rights to the vehicle.
$400mln to develop, probably below $100mln to build next, once first one has been built, ground infrastructure of some $50mln required... I guess there would be quite a few companies willing to invest some $200mln to provide orbital tours, maybe later build "orbital hotel" etc. The investment would probably pay back in 20 or so flights, maybe a year...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Lets just hope that the STS can support upgrades easier than the shuttle can, as I recall there was a story not so long ago about NASA having to scrounge off e-bay to find replacement 8086 chips that are no longer made.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
If you used a giant rail gun or gauss cannon (hey, it can double as an ICBM launcher so that NASA won't need to pay for it) before the rockets fired you could probably save some cash in the long run. And as long as you fired it slowly at first you could withstand the forces. Not to mention, you could use it to almost completely launch satellites into orbit but just giving them a heat shield and a couple of rockets to move into position.
I read somewhere (no ref. to hand) that 1/3 of the fuel is used just to clear the tower. Wouldn't it be much more efficient to pump fuel from the tower until the shuttle is at least a few meters off the ground?
I think the sensible way to travel between the Earth and the Moon is to set up a space station, we'll call it the MoonBus, that flies a figure-eight orbit between the Earth and Moon. (It could use ion-engines and solar panels to keep it on the unstable orbit.)
By building a stable platform in the Earth-Moon orbit, we could provide safe and comfortable transportation. Once the station is in place, it would require only a minimal amount of fuel to get people to the station and from the station to the Moon. Over time, we could continue to add to the station itself, building our capabilities.
I got this idea from a book that Buzz Aldrin published a number of years ago. In his book, he proposed a somewhat similar scheme for moving people between Earth and Mars. Once the fixed assets are in place, the cost for moving additional people goes way down.
The main point is that we need to be building our capabilities for doing things in space, not reducing them. We need to establish goals that help us develop a space industry that might help reignite our economy. We shouldn't be giving over the exploration of space to the Chinese or anyone else.
Since we face some unknown risk of extinction from asteroids, perhaps we should have a set of prizes designed to develop an ability to move asteroids. Why not set up prizes for things like building structures in space? For establishing a mining base for water on the Moon? For creating a simple habitat that makes a figure-eight path around the Earth and Moon?
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Yes. Putting things in orbit is expensive. But you can get most of the advantages of LEO by merely going to the stratosphere.
A large solar collector stationed at 30 km up would be above the weather, and while it would still have day and night, and least day would be a few percent longer, and by allowing the collector to follow the sun, you could have noon-like light for most of the day.
You would want the lift gas to be hydrogen rather than helium. Reason 1 is that it's cheaper, but reason 2 is that the installation would need some propulsive abilities for station-keeping against wind. What I envision is electric engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells, so that the lift gas and fuel are the same. During the night, you consume hydrogen to remain on-station. During the day, you have electrical power to re-hydrolyze the water to regenerate lift and fuel. And, at 30 km, the pressure is too low for hydrogen and air to support combustion, so the flammability issues you'd have at lower altitudes are moot.
Another aspect of this design, or solar satellites, is that at 30 km up, you can see a few hundred km in any direction. At LEO, you have a horizon of about 1000 km, if I recall. This allows you to beam power to any antenna in this radius, so in order to be economical, this design need not compete with the price of power produced by large coal, nuclear, or hydro installations, but rather, with the price of power on the spot market. A high-altitude power plant could put power wherever it is needed (and by corollary, wherever it is most valuable.)
The problem is, this bid isn't cheap. 20 million dollars per launch, 4-6 people, no cargo (their proposal is to have all cargo launched on unmanned systems) seems to imply a cargo capacity of around 1200 kg at 16,700$/kg. These are Space Shuttle prices. And for such a small craft, 400 million dollars development cost is quite extreme.
They're using an outmodded reentry design (the bell-shaped reentry design wasn't chosen by the US, Russia, and China for no particular reason - they did extensive testing, and it proved to be the most efficient, most reliable shape), and they plan to make reusable capsules out of it when capsules have seldom proven realistic to refurbish for a second flight in the past. Furthermore, they plan to do this on their very first space attempt. Quite doubtful, to be honest.
High recurrant prices, companies with no background in orbital launch and only a background in unscalable suborbital (i.e., "high risk", and an implication of higher costs than predicted), questionable reusability (which generally implies higher costs than predicted), and high capital costs. I would be quite surprised if NASA ends up accepting this.
And before people start up the Rutan hero-worship ("he can do anything!"), Rutan did almost nothing compared to real spaceflight. He built an aircraft around an unscalable purchased rocket engine and a nitrous tank. He made it out of the same sort of materials that he builds all of his aircraft out of (which aren't even close to what you need for reentry, the biggest spaceflight difficulty, and where most of the actual engineering problems lie), and his purchased low-ISP high-tank mass engine isn't going anywhere close to orbit, no matter how it gets tweaked.
The only really major accomplishment that he did was to create the world's first fully-private supersonic aircraft, without supersonic windtunnel testing - an impressive feat, mind you, and one that is quite a testament to the power of modern CFD software. Also, stably dropping a powered craft from another isn't a typical engineering problem for a private builder to address, and while they had stability problems on engine start, they did pull it off successfully.
I'm you from the future! We have to finish our time machine before the Angels of Destruction find the portal!
Carmack's space ship designs suffer from much bigger problems - namely, that he can't even seem to decide on what propellants to use after all this time ;) In general, he keeps repeating the mistakes of the past (vaned thrust deflection, many of his propellant choices,etc).
He seems to be taking a more mature design approach of late, however - regeneratively cooled, LOX as an oxidizer, gimballing instead of vanes, etc. It still won't be easy, and his design still isn't orbital-scalable, but he should be able to at least get somewhere now.
I'm you from the future! We have to finish our time machine before the Angels of Destruction find the portal!
While it's a ride an astronaut wouldn't be happy about taking, most items we'd want to put into orbit can either handle the trip or can be disassembled into chunks that can.
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Rockets aren't good enough.
That leaves rail/coilguns, JP Aerospace (BTW, I've heard there are other blimp-to-orbit projects), and the Space Elevator.
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I think you could pretty convincingly make the point a vertical stack is much safer than the STS design. A vertical stack would definitely have prevented the Columbia's destruction and would have given Challenger a fighting chance.