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Back to Moon in 2015?
Mistress.Erin writes "NASA has announced they may send astronauts back to the moon as early as 2015, and may build an international base once they get there. From TFA:"The next mission to land a man on the moon will take place in 2015 at the earliest, the new chief of the United States' space program said on Monday, adding the mission could be followed by the construction of a multinational space station there. But NASA has not yet decided what vehicles will be used to reach the moon, or what will succeed the aging space shuttle fleet, which is due to be retired in 2010.""
Saturn 5 was good only for putting a man on the moon and returning him home. Effectively Zero payload capacity for pretty much anything else. As a technology, it's a dead end and not good for anything else.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
NASA has a rebuttal page dedicated to the "The Great Moon Hoax"
2 .htm
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_
What, did we lose the Saturn blueprint or something?
.. though whether they're useful is a different story..
No. Urban Legend. The plans are still on microfilm
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Why the moon?
Babysteps. Since the 1960s we've lost the capability to send anything large on an interplanetary cruise. In fact, we shelved most of the technologies that would allow us to perform such cruises quickly and efficiently. As a result, we need to rebuild our space infrastrucutre. Part of that rebuilding is an inexpensive method for getting to and from the moon. CEV Spiral two will most likely use nuclear engines for moving passengers to and from the moon. As we gain real world experience with those engines, we can begin contemplating the task of sending a manned mission to Mars.
The key thing to remember about the current CEV program is that it's built on real technology we have today. This is a big change for NASA which has always expected some sort of miracle technology for their next vehicle. The bright side of this change is that we'll have the CEV completed in a relatively short period of time, and it will cost a reasonable amount compared to the $$$ that went into the Shuttle program.
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Not true. The Saturn V was a superb super-booster that was capable of lifting just about anything into orbit. For example, a Saturn V was used to lift the entire Skylab Space Station in one flight. Von Braun was also a big proponent of using a Saturn V to lift a Mini Orion into orbit for interplanetary travel.
The reason why the Saturn V *seems* useless is that the primary focus of the Apollo and Gemini programs was to develop the technology and execute a plan to reach the moon. If the Saturn V was still flying today, you can bet it wouldn't cost several billion dollars to get the ISS up there. We'd launch the stupid thing in two or three pieces, only minor assembly required. Compare that to the dozens of shuttle flights and Russian launches necessary to get the current structure up there. And it's not even done!
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The Saturn V wasn't the only piece of technology we used. There's also the landing vehicle, the lunar orbitor, etc. We don't have any of those things laying around and the people, facilities, and processes involved in engineering them are dead, retired, or demolished. Kennedy's moon mission was just about getting there and bank so we could thumb our noses at the Soviet Union. Neener neener neener. If we go again, the mission is different. This time it's about conducting science and testing vehicles and technologies for taking us to Mars and beyond.
Kennedy's moon landings were a stunt for international bragging rights. If that's the only reason we wanted to go again, it'd be much easier. Also, we know much more about the hazards of space travel now, and have to re-engineer ships to deal with it. The attitude of this nation is MUCH different now than it was in 1960. Government regulations are far stricter, and the loss of crew is less acceptable (not that people ever ACCEPTED the loss of a crew but the flak NASA catches for it now is far worse than what they got 40 years ago).
Computer technology is different and probably incompatible with the hardware systems of those old monsters, and the launch facilities in Florida aren't big enough to launch a Sat-V anyway (they never were, either, the Sat-V had to be rolled out with its own tower).
So you can't just rebuild everything, it's not that simple.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I love the Liberty Ship concept. Unfortunately, there's only one problem: Gas-Core Nuclear Rockets are as of yet unproven. Many engineers have their doubts that they will even work. (Although I think with enough money behind it, the concept can be made to work. ;-)) As a result, the GCNR proposal is a bad idea for early space access. It would be another miracle technology that may or may not pan out. It's a much better idea to wait on the GCNR rockets until a market exists.
In the meantime, we should be able to build some very nice first-gen super-boosters by chaining a few of these babies together into a second stage. Once you have the OOMPH to get the rocket off the ground, you can ditch the first stage and coast a massive amount of cargo to orbit on your afterburning engines (~500 Isp). Once sufficient velocity has been built up, you can drop the afterburning and take the cargo the rest of the way on ~900+ Isp engines.
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Actually, he didn't dismiss you. If he had, he wouldn't have bothered responding to your post at all.
True, but he did make the typical knee-jerk reaction of Slashdotters- which is to brand an unpopular or controversial opinion or question as being a "troll" just out for reactions. This is particularly so of what I call Space Fanboys, who think that any geek who isn't in absolute favor of space-ish things must be a heathen or troll. I DID post it to get opinions, and freely admitted so- I didn't do it just to get a rise out of people, like a troll does.
Oh, so we've already discovered everything we're going to discover in space, then? You sound like those people who wanted to close the Patent Office in 1901 because there was 'nothing left to invent'.
No(hello, straw-man argument), I never said we've learned all we could. He said we were going there: "To learn how to make things that will work in space, to learn how to deal with the effects of long term spaceflight, and how to determine materials for worthiness."
I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"
Basically, if your reasoning to get to the moon(again) is so we can learn how to get to the moon, that's a cyclic definition/justification; It'd be like exploring the desert, and justifying it by saying "we're there to learn how to explore the desert". When you've learned how to explore the desert, then what do you do? Explore it- except you've been exploring to learn how to explore. See the problem?
Please help metamoderate.
John F. Kennedy Address at Rice University in the Space Effort September 12, 1962
President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb. Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.
We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far out-strip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about to years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait.
But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward-and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it-we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag o
I was under the impression that the reason we don't currently have nuclear outfitted space technology (not counting decay powered satelites i.e voyager) was that if the Challenger/Columbia thing happens again it sprays the planet with refined nuclear material.
That impression is quite wrong. Nuclear technology has not been used because:
1. It hasn't met the mission profiles. (It was even considered for the Shuttle upper stages.)
2. People are afraid of nuclear.
In the case of CEV Spiral Two, the engines would be used for pure orbital work, so there would be little to no concern of any materials reaching Earth.
If anyone knows of a way to get thrust from fission I'd love to hear it.
Man, I thought I'd gotten everyone around here trained in how Nuclear Thermal Rockets work. Here's the short of it:
Most nuclear reactors derive their power production from the thermal aspect of the reaction. As the core heats up, the heat is pumped into a generator where a turbine is turned. During the push to reach the moon, some enterprising engineers figured that if you could heat a propellant using a nuclear reactor, you could dump as much thermal energy into a working fluid as the materials could withstand. The result is that massive amounts of thrust can be obtained by simply heating a stream of hydrogen, oxygen, or even plain old air. (See: Project Pluto; rather nasty weapon that was.) Since hydrogen and oxygen can't become radioactive, there would be little issue of spreading nuclear materials. Unfortunately, there was a Graphite Ablation problem from the heat, but the modern TRITON engine fixes that by utilizing Tungsten cladding.
Does that answer your question?
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Add to that the outer space treaty and several other treaties that significantly limits any rights to claim land in outer space, and it's quite clear that this guy has no basis in international law at all.
Orion has largely been replaced by Medusa; its pusher plate absorbs more of the energy, all of its structures are in tension (lightweight), crew is further from the explosions (less shielding), and it scales down better.
There are many fission-related engines. Offhand, I can think of solid/liquid/gasseous/plasma core, antimatter-catalyzed microfission (there's also microfusion - basically, you use a miniscule amount of antimatter in a trap to start a fission or fusion reaction), photonic rockets (you take the heat from a nuclear reactor and radiate it in one direction with a giant solar-sail-like device), fission-fragment rocket (you encourage particles to boil off the surface when they undergo fission; being ionized, you can control them magnetically), and nuclear saltwater rockets (one of my favorites. Dirty as heck, but the reactants have the energy to escape the solar system. Basically, you use a water-soluable uranium salt dissolved in water kept in neutron-absorbing capillaries. When you want thrust, you force it from the capillaries into a big thrust chamber, where it goes critical)
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Did you mean "studying in the _US_ as an alternative to a U.K university. . ."? Granted Cambridge and Oxford are in a class by themselves. What I'm talking about is universities like New Mexico State University. We have on the order of 10% of our enrollment (out of 16,000 or so on the main campus) coming from countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Kuwait, China, etc. There are hundreds of universities in the US with similar stats.
Of course, I imagine England is similar, too.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.