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NASA's Shuttle Plans
Gerhardius noted a NYT article (you know the obnoxious deal) about new "shuttle" designs coming out of NASA. The payloads are riding up top to avoid debris.
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As long as we're no longer trying to send up cargo along with personnel, now might be a good time to revisit single-stage-to-orbit designs such as the Delta Clipper and the Roton.
I don't recall any debris problems with either of these designs, although the leg design seriously needs to be rethought. If you have four legs, a failure of any leg results in disaster (witness the spectacular failure of the Delta Clipper). Six legs, on the other hand, would be far more stable...you could lose any three (provided they're not all adjacent) and still pull off a successful landing.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
What they are effectively saying is, the 30 year experiment that was the space shuttle was a failure. Sure, a lot was learned - but now they are going back to the basic design concepts (upgraded with new tech, of course) of the 1960s. Live and learn.
NASA claims that the tile gap filler that has come loose was a result of vibrations on liftoff, NOT the result of falling debris...
So moving the return capsule up to the nose of the craft will prevent repeats of 1986 and 2003, but won't fix every problem. They should instead be trying to build a shuttle that won't rattle apart on takeoff.
Redesign Is Seen for Next Craft, NASA Aides Say
August 2, 2005
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
For its next generation of space vehicles, NASA has decided to abandon the design principles that went into the aging space shuttle, agency officials and private experts say.
Instead, they say, the new vehicles will rearrange the shuttle's components into a safer, more powerful family of traditional rockets.
The plan would separate the jobs of hauling people and cargo into orbit and would put the payloads on top of the rockets - as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.
By making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its price.
"The existing components offer us huge cost advantages as opposed to starting from a clean sheet of paper," the new administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin, told reporters on Friday.
The plan, whose origins go back two and a half years, is emerging at a time when it may help deflect attention from the current troubles of the shuttle fleet.
The Discovery's astronauts are to make a spacewalk tomorrow to fix a potentially hazardous problem with cloth filler on its belly.
Future missions have been indefinitely suspended while NASA tries to solve the persistent shedding of foam from the external fuel tank at liftoff.
The plan for new vehicles is to be formally unveiled this month. Its outlines were gleaned from interviews and reviews of trade reports, Congressional testimony and official statements. Some details were reported on Sunday in The Orlando Sentinel.
On Friday, Dr. Griffin emphasized the plan's safety, telling reporters that the new generation of rockets would have their payloads up high to avoid the kinds of dangers that doomed the Columbia two and a half years ago and threatened the Discovery last week when insulating foam broke off its fuel tank shortly after liftoff.
"As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."
Congress would have to approve the initiative, and many questions remain. John E. Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private Washington research group on military and space topics, said he wondered how NASA could remain within its budget while continuing to pay billions of dollars for the shuttle and building a new generation of rockets and capsules.
Alex Roland, a former historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who now teaches at Duke University and is a frequent critic of the space program, said the plan had "the aroma of a quick and dirty solution to a big problem."
But supporters say it will let astronauts move expeditiously back into the business of exploration rather than endlessly circling the home planet, and do so fairly quickly.
"The shuttle is not a lemon," Scott J. Horowitz, an aerospace engineer and former astronaut who helped develop the new plan, said in an interview. "It's just too complicated. I know from flying it four times. It's an amazing engineering feat. But there's a better way."
Dr. Horowitz was one of a small group of astronauts, shaken by the Columbia disaster, who took it upon themselves in 2003 to come up with a safer approach to exploring space. Their effort, conceived while they were in Lufkin, Tex., helping search for shuttle wreckage, became part of the NASA program to design a successor to the shuttle fleet.
The three remaining shuttles are to be retired by 2010 under the Bush administration's plan for space exploration, which is intended to return humans to the Moon and eventually Mars.
The new vehicles would sidestep the foam threat alt
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Comon, guys! that one was approaching 150 words or so.
From TFA "As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long." That's pushing it a bit, insn't it? This is insulating foa mwe'Re talkikng about, wouldn't the rockets possibly overheat and explode? IANARS but I don't know about this...
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
...see this as a bit, er, optimistic?
By making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its price.
Well, I guess they did say "in theory"...
google search of the NY times page
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
The "cargo on top" is more or less the old Shuttle-C configuration. Not a bad idea, really.
The Shuttle is actually a pretty good launch vehicle. To an uneducated observer such as myself, most of the problems seem to stem from having such a large orbiter which then needs to be strapped onto the side.
And if the crew vehicle (CEV) launches atop an SRB-derived booster, I guess it could actually be pretty cost effective, especially compared to the current Shuttle system.
Safer comes along with the cheaper in this seperation of designs, but it certianly is a return of the Super-apollo designs at the end of the 60's beginning of the 70's.
Personally It looks like that NASA is at the end of their run in innovations of getting to space, they are damned good at exploring other planets and science in general but all of our hope of getting a real reuseable and safe space delivery systems lies completely in the Commercial sector.
Here's hope that someone in industry finds a really good reason to go into space regularly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why call them hew Shuttle ? They look just like an old style rockets, and work like ones. ...
And it seems that there are no reusable parts on this vehicle also.
But anyway, it is goog that the common sense finally works. Efficient designs work better than cool looking ones
"The payloads are riding up top to avoid debris."
Bird Strikes may continue to be a problem.
looks like this.
You can't handle the truth.
Guess my "don't spellcheck" policy came back to bite me in the arse. I obviously meant "is insulating foam we're talking about" and not that gibberish.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Wasn't the reason that NASA went to a shuttle was for reuse? To me, this "new" design looks like the apollo capsules. What is there for reuse and how will they reuse it? And then there is landing....
Do the new ones come with replicators and transporters?
From TFA : By making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its price.
:-)
Yes thereby ensuring that all the "keep prices down" corner cutting that got the shuttle where it is today doesn't go to waste either
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
...these are ancient designs which can be implemented using decades-old technology. The only interesting thing is that now NASA has killed enough people to shift the bureaucracy off its ass. We don't need the Battlestar Galactica hardware to do Apollo missions.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
That's the shortest but barely literate article summary that I've seen in a long time. Does anyone know what it means?
.. and links to other sites that require registration, why not just include a BugMeNot username/password combo in the spoiler text?
Space elevator.
They're cheaper, safer, better, awesomer, and nowhere near as Rube Goldberg-esque as the shuttle. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy explores the topic of a space elevator on Mars in some depth. There it's a problem because it makes space travel too easy.
Read the sig, read the sig, ziggy ziggy ziggy zig!
NASA should send up vehicles shaped like a giant broom and dustpan. There's a lot of dangerous debris up there.
Single-Stage to orbit isnt feasible (yet). We need either a breakthrough in materials technology or propulsion performance. The rocket equation is
... as a single stage ... but your not coming home. Reinforcing the ET takes such a mass penalty your payload is effectively reduced to zero.
Delta-V = g * Isp * ln( MR )
where:
Delta-V: velocity required to achieve LEO (7.6 km/s best case scenario: but you need to add gravity and drag losses, add at least 1 km/s)
g: gravity (9.8 m/s)
Isp: Specific impulse of your propellant. This is an efficiency factor: 1 kg of propellant generates Isp kg of thrust. Hydrogen and Oxygen properly mixed generates an Isp of about 450 [seconds] in a vacuum. That is the upper level of chemical propulsion.
MR: Mass ratio. Mass that sits on the launchpad divided by the mass that achieves orbit.
Play around with that equation and you will see STS0 just doesn't work out yet. Our feasible Isp is way too low and our current material properties won't let us build a ship with a MR of over 10 that can return to earth safely.
Interesting factoid though, if you attached the space shuttle main engines to the external tank and just made that a launch vehicle, as a single stage it could put damn near 100 tons into LEO
-everphilski- -- Rocket Scientist
To me it seems the US has gone back to the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) strategy that the Russians have always adopted. To me it never made sense to have the shuttle strapped right next to the fuel and solid rockets. I believe it wasn't ever intended to in the original design...
This way they'll be able to have an escape capsule thus giving them half a chance in the case of a launch error. The shuttle is amazing, but the sooner it's retired to a museum, the better, IMO.
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
The payloads are riding up top to avoid debris.
The proverbial cow has left the barn, time to close the barn door.
Don't worry about the hole in the wall until chickens start escaping.
When will NASA start anticipating problems instead of just overreacting to previous ones?
I'm a big tall mofo.
IIRC, they painted the main tanks on the first 2 shuttle launches, but it was determined that all the white paint they appied to the main tank added to much wieght to it so they went back to brown unpainted tanks.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Is the whole design of the shuttle overly fragile?
I understand that there are some sizable forces acting on the launch vehicle, but how can insulating foam do so much damage?
And, if insulating foam can damage the tiles, what about micro meteors or drifting debris from previous flights?
Isn't there a way to put a shrouding over the tiles that would be jettisoned with the fuel tank? Protect the tiles until the shuttle is free of the fuel tank and solid rocket motors.
Wasn't the reason that NASA went to a shuttle was for reuse?
Yes. It was supposed to same money. It didn't.
To me, this "new" design looks like the apollo capsules.
Me to. So?
What is there for reuse and how will they reuse it?
Not much, and they won't.
And then there is landing....
See also: Apollo.
You could have RTFA.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
It is strange that the new "shuttle" is not going to use something more interesting than just a rocket to lift off, like a SCRAM jet. I thought a SCRAM jet could lift a small new crew vehicle up above 50km and then the crew vehicle with 2 small boosters would disconnect from the jet and use the boosters to accelerate to the necessary speed, discard the boosters and use the remaining shuttle boosters to operate in the orbit. But they are going with another rocket design. Oh well, we just have to wait for the space elevator to be built to have more exotic means of space transportation I guess.
You can't handle the truth.
The most expensive part of the shuttle stack is the orbiter. Re-using the ET and the solid rocket boosters would save years of development time and yes, money.
They need to stick the Shuttle in the smithsonian and stick with the pieces that work.
-everphilski-
I can't believe that people are still denying the truth. Just yesterday, there was a SECOND article about the discover of Planet X. Planet X is returning on it's 4000 year orbit, which means that the race that enslaved us nearly 4000 years ago, the Niburu are coming back. It's not a surprise that we haven't had a successful manned space mission in the last few years. The Bush administration, NASA, the U.S. military and some of the most powerful corporations on the planet are covering this up. Why, you may ask? Because, they have a deal with the Niburu to spare their families from the enslavement when they arrive in a few years time. It is as it was written by the Sumerians and as Zecharaiah Sitchin translated (he is the only man on Earth who can read ancient Sumerian properly).
One of the requirements that the Niburu required as part of the deal is that humans will not make any manned flights off of the planet anymore. This is why we haven't been able to get a shuttle off the ground for so long. NASA talks about the supposed failures of various systems, but it's just a cover-up. Just like the cover-up they pulled off when the manned space station jsut a couple years ago hear strange sounds coming from the outside. The sounds were the sounds of a Niburu operative crawling around on the outside of the station. NASA later claimed it was just a bit of casing that had been damaged and needed to be fixed. What really happened? The anstronauts were reprogrammed to become Niburu operatives and came back to Earth to infiltrate NASA.
What about the dead astronaut found in the Arabian dessert? What? You didn't hear about that? Maybe it's because the Niburu controlled media don't want you to hear about it. They've been stirring things up on the global front to get the commoners at each other's throats so that we are in disarray when they arrive to enslave us. The real story is that a dead astronaut was found in the Arabian dessert after he had unwittingly announced the discovery of Planet X back in the 90s when that comet was going to slam into Jupiter. Why didn't Jupiter ignite into a big sun when that happened? Because the Niburu prevented the ignition with their awesome mind control. But they didn't do it to protect us out of goodness. They did it to protect us as property. So, this dead astronaut was found in the Arabian dessert. And that's why.
Don't fall for the cover-ups. Read the teachings of Zecharaiah Sitchin. And prepare for the intergalactic battle with the Niburu. Our politicians, military and business men have sold us out, so it's up to us to get armed to the teeth and fight when the invasion force comes. One of the most imporatant weapons you can get right now is a telescope and some astrophotography gear. Print out the photos of the impending approach of Planet X and post them everywhere online and in real life. Make sure that everyone knows about the conspiracy. This ain't no time to go wastin' away in Margaritaville.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This has been discussed a lot lately, with a leak / release (I don't remember which) back in April. This article makes it sound like the official announcement is closer, and still close to the details we heard in April. For a good overview, here is the WP entry.
What this essentially is saying is that NASA is deciding, now, that the booster for the next-gen vehicles will be Shuttle-derived. There'd been talk about using the Delta-4 instead. What this doesn't describe is the capsule itself (the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which will get figured out next year.
Personally, I thought the Delta-4 approach showed a lot of promise, but I can see the argument for using current technology (engines, boosters, etc.) because of familiarity and the ability to more easily integrate it into the current assembly process. I'd bet that changing over to Delta hardware would require a lot more work at the VAB and on the pad (not that moving to this would be easy).
Spaceplanes look cool. However spaceplanes are not what we need at this time. We were not in an advanced enough state of space usage to make good use out of it. We had far more need of speciality vehichles but speciality vehicles are BORING. NASA needed to sell itself after the spectacular moon landings. Hence we got the shuttle.
Not only did it look cool, sound cool, and appealed to geeks it appealed to Congress as they spread it out across a great many districts.
We paid the price by being locked into LEO for how many years? If it were not for the occasional Mars landing or some great deep space probes the shuttle would have killed NASA. Instead there were just enough thrilling items left in their bag of tricks to keep everyone from focusing on that fact that the golden goose wasn't so great.
So NASA is getting smarter, or at least the analyst are. Get back to space doing it cheaply with known and easily acquired, serviced, and usuable components. Then maybe we will finally do something in space. If we had this 20 years ago the ISS might have been done during the first Bush's term. (hell it might have even had been built while Reagan was around if we hadn't had to waste so much on the shuttle)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
From the article:
"Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100."
So the odds of a shuttle flight ending in disaster are 1 in 10!?!?
We've had two shuttle disasters, which by their calculations would mean we've had 20 flights. Columbia's fateful flight was number 113, the current one is 114. That has odds of less than two percent of a disaster by my reckoning.
Where did they get their numbers?
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
I know they're falling back to the Apollo-style basics here, but this is still, in some ways, compromising efficiency and performance in light of crew safety, which is important. However:
"A ship in a harbor is safe. But this is not what ships are built for."
I would be fine with the new design concepts if we use a Crew Return Vehicle design. One, it can carry more people and a small amount of cargo. Two, it can also be placed atop like an Apollo-style capsule. Three, it is more reusable. Think of it as a mini-Orbiter.
Reusing and readapting the ET/SRB devices is a frugal idea as well. We just need something to routine get up and back to the ISS. Perhaps we should also look into making an in-orbit shuttle that stays in space and can move between LEO, the ISS, and the moon.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The owls are not what they seem
Now, If I recall correctly, it was a faulty o-ring that caused a fuel leak, which was blamed on a managerial decision to go ahead with a launch in temperatures colder than all previous launches. The cold air caused the o-ring to be brittle and not seal properly. This is a pretty major fact screw up for the NYT! A reference with correct info:
http://www.engineering.com/content/ContentDisplay
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
... they still had foam problems on STS1.
-everphilski-
The new design looks like something out of Star Trek, you have your warp engines at the bottom and on the side there, and now all you need is a frisbee shaped crew capsule! I can't wait to meet a Romulan female!
Blastoffius!
It is very frustrating how people get fixated on the wrong things when something bad happens. As far as I know, debris falling from a spacecraft have caused 1 accident ever (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). That's out of hundreds of previous accidents. Though I'm sure the designs main goal was not to eliminate this problem, it annoys me how they try to sell it on that point.
That the shuttle program is nearing its death date. All the money for building and design are basically being thrown away for a grand return to rockets.
Quite honestly it is upsetting to me that over the past 30 or so years of shuttle experimentation. That the best design they could come up with now is a beefed up Saturn V.
Bravo sir, you have really made my morning.
I salute you!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...I'm surprised I haven't seen this elsewhere in the comments for the earlier stories--but does anyone else think the upcoming landing (fingers crossed!) will be the last one no matter how well it goes? Lots of people talking about if it goes poorly, but I will wager that even after a happy ending, in the attempt to chase down myriad problems to the new standard of acceptable risk, NASA will keep running up against the conceptual flaws in the Orbiter+Tank+Boosters design.
I'm not bagging on NASA--this stuff is dangerous no matter what, and they've done a yeoman's job keeping this rig upright, so to speak. But there have been some very bad priorities pushing development over there (external & internal).
Sorry, I'm tired and rambling, but I feel we may have seen the last Shuttle Launch.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
The main reason they insulate the tanks with the external foam is to keep ice from forming on the outside of the tank.
Ice on the outside of the tank could fall off and strike the underside of the shuttle and damage the tiles, or strike the wings and damage them (see Columbia).
Watch an old Saturn launch sometime, huge sheets of ice come falling away from the thing during it's intial climbout from the tower, but they don't care, because there's nothing important/dagnerous for the ice to hit.
This sentence is actually intelligible to people who know proper English.
Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100.
The whose in this sentence refers to the Shuttle, meaning that it's the Shuttle which has 1 in 100 odds of disaster, not the replacement.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I'm not sure, but I think it is. We are still in the competition phase for the new CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle) contract, and the final award won't be presented until January of next year. The design shown in the NYT article is the one proposed by Northrop-Grumman, but Lockheed Martin is also developing a CEV, one that more resembles a space plane. You can read the article at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/1534 782.html?page=1&c=y for more. It doesn't seem like they say much about how it's going to get into orbit though.
the cable breaks?
Simple designs are sometimes dumb designs too, failure is not reserved for complicated solutions. Perhaps I do not know enough about this topic, but I would guess that cable failure could pose a serious risk to the terrestrial bound.
Please advise.
Thanks.
Why not just fill the registration with bogus information, get the cookie and/or username and/or password, and never be bothered with it again??
This sounds to me like a NASA conspiracy to generate exciting headlines. I even heard they've already sold the story rights to Ron Howard.
How's about this one? Why limit ourselves to "100 tons to orbit" when we can do a thousand tons?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This sounds a lot like the "Big Dumb Booster" design -- a big rocket made of repurposed shuttle parts -- from Stephen Baxter's hard sci-fi Manifold trilogy.
:)
Nice to know someone at NASA is doing their reading.
Wow...reading that was like going to the movies! If you had a paypal account I'd almost consider sending $7.50 for the satisfying read!
The NYT screws up lots of facts lately. They mostly spin left, sometimes right (mostly in the biz section). But between their spins, they more often then not, lose track of important, and easily rememberable and tracable facts.
It's not the paper it used to be.
FINAL-FUCKING-LY NASA gets it!!!!
The single most expensive part of any launch is the simple energy cost to boost a kilo of cargo to orbit. Every kilo you are boosting that ISN'T cargo is several hundred kilos of fuel wasted.
Adding kilos to your launch vehicle to allow it to return to Earth is a WASTE if all you are doing is putting cargo into orbit. Putting a crew return vehicle on every cargo launch is terribly wasteful.
Having a small crew vehicle (where you HAVE to have the kilos to make it return to Earth) and a BIG disposable cargo vehicle is the best solution with today's technology.
Now, perhaps one fine day we will be able to spin a beanstalk and then the economics will change, but for now, this idea is the best one, and I am glad NASA finally sees the light on this!
www.eFax.com are spammers
So what happened to the non-kludge, reusable lifting vehicle? Isn't it about time to build a new one, using existing designs and componet parts?
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
It was originally an Air Force project. When video of the first test was shown at ConFrancisco in 1993, it was said that if it ever got transferred to NASA they'd kill it.
NASA was threatened by the Delta Clipper. A ground crew of 3 instead of 15,000? We can't have that! A NASA employee failed to connect the landing gear hydraulic line for one of the tests shortly after NASA took over the project.
These days NASA is more of a jobs program than a space program.
Might you be willing to share some of the "groovy pharmaceuticals" you are partaking in? If your writings are any indicator, they seem to be of exceptional quality and potency.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Given that the shuttle fleet is nearing obsolescence and that it is a 30+ year old design, it's a good idea to move on. And why not use components that have been proven to work already? It simplifies the engineering needed to construct the new vehicle.
Then there is the private option, one that includes efforts from Burt Rutan, lately of SpaceShip One: Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV). These guys say that they can fill in the gap during the time it takes for NASA to design/contract/construct a new vehicle.
Interesting choices lay ahead.
Single stage to orbit has extremely tight margins on mass fraction, that part of the launcher that isn't propellants. Most SSTO designs seem to require MFs below 2% - 3%, which is really difficult, even with modern composites. They also require high specific impulse propellants, which almost always means cryogenics, like the LH2 and LO2 that the Shuttle's main engines burn. It's proven very hard to design a composite LH2 tank that doesn't leak. The sad irony is that we had a reliable booster in the mid-1960s that was capable of putting about 130 tons of payload into low earth orbit. It was the Saturn - LO2/kerosene first stage, LO2/LH2 upper stages. We scrapped it, including the manufacturing drawings and procedures, so we could build the Shuttle. Some info on the Saturn booster family is at http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm
they've done it this way for a long time.
Wow. But wasn't Planet X / Niburu supposed to pass by us in May-July of 2003 and cause all the fun parts of Revelations to happen, you know, real wrath of God type stuff! Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanos!
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifices, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
But wait... We screwed up the orbital mechanics. And the translation of those ancient Sumerian texts. it's really going to happen Real Soon Now (TM).
I'm heading to my basement right now, my tinfoil underwear & hat firmly affixed by duct tape. If my employer asks, tell him that Planet X is coming and money and work and living are now meaningless.
All along, they's tricked us.
It's my understanding that they didn't have these problems with the old freon based insulation. Even though we know freon is not the most environmentally friendly substance known to man should NASA be allowed to use it for the few shuttle's they launch every year? What are we willing to trade to maintain the ability to put people into orbit? It seems that switching back to the old formula and limiting shuttle launches would buy time to research a workable alternative to the freon based foam without losing our ability to get people and supplies into orbit or to the Space Station.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Admittedly we have been stupid in the past - commercial interests have been allowed to create huge volumes of truck traffic across the US and Europe that are effectively subsidised by the rest of us - but it is hard to believe that a similarly environmentally damaging new technology could be adopted wholesale by commercial interests nowadays without a great deal of economic analysis and regulation.
Strangely, I'm not trying to be negative about space exploration. I do think there is an important role for NASA. It's in continuing to do clever missions (Mars is a huge scientific success story that is under-promoted to the general public) while investing heavily in basic physics to find out if it is possible to find ways of getting large payloads off the Earth without destroying the environment in the process. What exactly will we learn from building bigger Apollos? It isn't giant SUVs that advance automotive technology, but the constant research into more efficient engines, fuel cells, renewable energy sources etc.
Although the Russian effort was in some ways commendably simple and reliable, it's dependent on cheap energy. It's like the people who keep trying to build new steam railway locomotives because, basically, they like them. They keep promoting the simplicity of the concept while quietly ignoring the fact that they use several times the fuel per passenger mile or tonne mile of the most clapped out Diesel-electric. It's a dead end.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The Shuttle has a great deal of maneuverability while in space both for rendez-vous with sattelite positions or the ISS, and for re-entry positioning. This was one of the design principles that allow for much more spontaneous (read, easier, not easy) reshcduling of re-entry and deployment. Even the Soyuz capsules seem to have some kind of retro-rocket design. The crew capsule nor the main booster seem to have (given the pictures on the NYT site) no retro-rockets visible. Any ideas on where they went, what they're doing instead or how they're going to steer that thing once it gets up there?
The best explanation I have heard is that the physics haven't changed.
We nailed the physics getting Apollo up.
So yes, at first glance it looks like Apollo/Soyuz. But instead of re-inventing Saturn V, they are taking the advances in engine design and applying them to the new rockets.
Makes sense to me, use the parts that worked well (boosters, capsules), ditch the parts that didn't (space plane).
I remember very clearly the first time I saw the shuttle concept proposed. It was 1967, I was in first grade, an avid follower of the Apollo missions. The "Weekly Reader" had a concept drawing of the shuttle, and I thought, "No way is the re-usable part going to work, look at what the apollo capsules look like after re-entry!"
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Lets face it, you must first follow the money. Sure, it sounds like a good idea to reuse the currect parts of the shuttle to leverage existing parts and technology. But we are looking at a 35 year old design. We can't come up with anything better? Maybe it's not cost savings...
It turns out that (ATTFA) Dr. Horowitz, one of the leading proponents for the resue of old technology, turns out to be the head of "ATK Thiokol, where he now leads the company's effort to develop the new family of rockets". Hmmm, I know, if we just modify the ones we've got in stock, we can sell them all over again to NASA. That'll keep out costs down and minimize the possibility of competition. Sounds like a great solution Dr. Horowitz...for your bank account.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...and book the astronauts on Virgin Galactic. They have a 100% reliability record.
I like this seperate vehicles idea. It's nice and modular so that if NASA ever does develop its own SpaceShipOne style crew vehicle, it doesn't have to redesign anything having to do with the cargo section. Maybe we can finally leave Earth orbit with this.
I love how the unwashed masses of Slashdot "knew all along" that the Shuttle was "teh suck" and why didn't NASA ever do to get stuff into orbit instead.
Is anyone on here even an engineer? Is it too much to ask for someone who knows SOMETHING about aeronautics to weigh in? We're left with the punditry of people who've played Flight Simulator and read Heinlein novels...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
In looking at these plans, I can't imagine how this is not a hole-in-one for NASA. It goes along with the less-is-more approach that made three astoundingly successful Mars rover missions. The shuttle was great and all, but I don't understand people saying "This is like taking a step back." If it doesn't blow up, then I'd say it's taking a huge step forward. And this new design has (potentially) five times the cargo capacity of the shuttle. This is enough to get me excited about the space program again.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
However, either of these designs will require serious reconstruction work at canaveral: they are substantially taller than the assembled shuttle, and so will not be able to be built in the present shuttle assembly building, nor be able to use the present launch pad.
A: Russian rocket burn in the atmosphere, Shuttle is reusable.
Q: What is the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?
A: Astronauts burn in the atmosphere, cosmonauts are reusable.
Other than at the ISS, we won't have any platform for performing experiments in space, now that we're reseparating the cargo from its users. Wonderful idea, NASA.
What we've basically created are resupply modules for the ISS. I don't see how this is in any way a Shuttle replacement.
Is the whole design of the shuttle overly fragile?
It's not so much that the Shuttle is fragile, it's that getting to space is a rough ride. Shuttle hardware is pretty solid stuff - but those solid rocket boosters are more like semi-controlled detonantions than anything else. If you've ever heard a launch, that "ripping" sound you hear are shockwaves from the solids. They will pretty much shake the sh*t out of anything. In this case, they rattle the tiles in the heat shield to the point where it opened up a small temporary gap long enough for the gapfiller to shake partway out.
I've flown experiments on the Shuttle and when we qualify payloads for spaceflight we have to run them through qualification tests that include shake tests. Let me tell you, that can be rough.
A more general point to remember about any space launcher is that due to simple physics ( the rocket equation) any launcher has to be more than 90% pure fuel. The mental image I like is: is take a gasoline tank truck, get rid of the tractor part, and strap a lawn chair to the end. Now imagine riding that to 17,000 mph. It's hard to make a rugged vehicle that is mostly fuel tank - you have to try and make things both lightweight and strong. In the case of the Shuttle it also has to be reuseable. That last part is what is turning out not to be possible with the technology of the 70's and 80's.
I understand that there are some sizable forces acting on the launch vehicle, but how can insulating foam do so much damage?
You will notice that this time the foam didn't do any substantial damage. Last time it may have been ice, or ice-filled foam that hit the wing (remember the tank wall is at liquid hydrogen temperatures). In any case, the foam is hitting the heat shield going several hundred mph with respect to the Shuttle (even though it only fell off a second earlier, the relative acceleration is substantial). Think of the heat shield as tiles made out of pumice - very light, very resistant to heat, but relatively fragile to hard impact. "Why not use steel?" you might ask - but the problem is again physics. At the temperatures the shield gets to it will simply melt. "Why not cover the shield until it' needed?" - too heavy for anything other than a small capsule. So now that NASA has gven up on re-useable spacecraft, that's what we'll see. But make no mistake - capsules mean the complete end to any dream of space becoming affordable, routine, or accessible to anyone other than goverments or those with as much money as a government. Kiss your idea of a vacation in space goodbye forever.
And, if insulating foam can damage the tiles, what about micro meteors or drifting debris from previous flights?
Absolutely. Micrometeroid damage is definitely a risk. That's why the Shuttle always flies payload bay first when in orbit - to minimize the chance of damaging the heat shield. But there is always a risk of something going wrong in space. That's why its rare and expensive.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
The question is not what happens when the cable break, the question is what happens when people actually take the 10 seconds it takes to read up on the answer that is all over the web, easily located by anyone having heard of Google, in a shorter time than it takes to grunt out steaming piles of ignorance on Slashdot.
I wonder -
how much to refurb the remaining Buran orbiters?
could we can the engines and mate a US orbiter to Energia?
instead of developing a new system, why not license and build our own Energia's (or do what the Russians do and just steal the plans).
It is proven technology, and supposedly the Cold War is over. Oh yeah, national pride and all that...
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Goes to what I've been thinking for years. Separate the cargo from the humans. They have vastly different and sometimes conflicting needs and the launch vehicle design to support both is much too complex. Use Big Dumb Rockets (BDRs) to lift cargo (heavy), smarter, safer ones to lift humans (light).
The idea of a runway landing orbital vehicle is nice and, IMHO a great goal. But it turns out to be harder than originally thought. The vertical, rocket assisted capsule design seems to be good compromise for the short term (5 to 10 years).
In the medium term (say 10 - 15 years), advances by companies like Scaled Composites (http://www.scaled.com/) show that runway-to-orbit-to-runway is possible, but needs more work. Eventually that's how we'll get to orbit; using small, "space planes" to take humans to meet with low earth orbiting platforms that were launched with BDRs. We're good at putting together stuff in orbit and we're good at rendezvous and docking.
None of this is new. It's based on concepts from the Apollo days. Remember Earth-orbit-rendezvous? Heck, the Russians have never left the basic capsule design.
Keep It Simple (Stupid) is especially important for manned space flight. It'll never be safe, and the American public has to accept that there is risk, but the less complicated it is the less chance of something going wrong. And the cheaper it will be
When will it be ready? 2010 is our preferred target, 2012 would be acceptable.
Signed, NASA.
That's the problem: There's (optimistically) ten or twenty years of development engineering to do before work can actually begin on producing a space elevator.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
It's OK, NASA figured out how to rendezvous in space with two nearly simultaneously launched vehicles in a little program called Gemini.
I think they were successful, might have to check Wikipedia though
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
I think that because of Star Trek, we are all beholden to the idea of anti-matter propulsion. That may come to pass in some distant future, but right now, it is a fairly unrealistic blue-sky idea.
I would put my chips on nuclear fusion as the long-term future, whenever we develop a replacement for chemical rockets. May years ago, Space.com cited some NASA experiments in the field:
NASA engineers are developing a radically new type or rocket engine that harnesses the power of stars to cut travel time to Mars, for example, from the current nine months down to three months. Called the gas-dynamic mirror engine, it traps and heats gas to temperatures as sizzling hot as those found at the core of the sun. That's hot enough to allow for nuclear fusion by combining lighter atomic nuclei into heavier nuclei.
Within a few months, a six-foot long model of the engine will be fired-up by injecting a superheated gas confined between powerful magnets at either end of the engine. Within a couple of years, the engineers hope to achieve a sustained nuclear fusion reaction in the hot plasma.
The article also mentions a fusion/anti-matter hybrid, but the former sounds like it holds more promise in the 30-50 year time frame...and who knows what future developments may hold?
In the near-term, solid rocket boosters put a lot of energy into the nozzle, so to speak. The current Shuttle gets roughly 80% of it's ascent propulsion from the solid rockets that are strapped aside the fuel tanks. That's a pretty powerful combination. The problems with solids are legendary, most notably the lack of any capability of trimming, reducing power or turning them off. The Shuttle is the only launch system that's man-rated that uses solids in a significant way, but this technology is tried and true, considering it is a veteran of many a shuttle launch. While the Challenger failure was a result of the SSRB's, it was a materials issue and not a flaw in the basic package.
Doesn't anybody else see it? The whole purpose of the insulation was to prevent the shedding of ICE during launch. If you put the tank into the booster, there's no need to insulate it since the ice shedding isn't an issue.
The other thing is that all they are doing is getting us set up for a man rated version of the Atlas V or the big Delta. This is a push from the dumb booster crowd to take over the manned launch capabilities also
The premise that the payload is at the top in order to avoid falling debris is stupid. The payload is at the top because the fuel is at the bottom. The bottom, you know, WHERE THE ENGINE IS! Putting the payload anywhere but at the top would be extremely foolish, as you would have to pump the fuel around the payload to get it to the ENGINE.
Geez.
This cargo vehicle look very similar to russian Energiya rocket (discontinued due to lack of money) and have the same carry capacity - 100 metric tonn. Wondering if there is connection here. Crew vehicle look similar to Zenit rocket - heir of the Energiya program.
The SRBs fall into the Atlantic and get hauled back to shore. The external tank falls from a great height, breaks up in the atmosphere, and sinks to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Easy--DON'T. :-)
Please don't take this personally--but I've been stewing about this for two decades. Um, anyway--since you asked...
I never cared about the damned ISS, not even when it was spectacular and named Space Station Freedom. The fact is, it's not good for much of anything. About the best utility it could be to any other aspect of a space program is as a kind of lifeboat (somewhere a mission can fail to that doesn't involve re-entry), but even tat won't work. If your mission is failing, how are you going to get from your current orbit to that of the Station? Sure, maybe it will work a small percent of the time, but not enough to justify building and manning the thing!
All the ISS is doing is advertising. Big Deal. We're getting much better science, much better PR, and much better astronaut survival rates from the unmanned Mars missions. When we do get around to Mars missions, they won't be benefitted in any way by a space station. But look at what the station is doing to NASA: They're actually going to axe funding for the Voyagers! This is crap! It's a pittance the Voyagers require, but right when they are crossing OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM, generating a wealth of previously un-dreamed-of information, their funding has to be sacrificed to NASA's idiotic shuttle+station scheme.
We *have* reliable orbit technology. Had it since the sixties. We *have* reliable earth observation technology. Every damned agency of the Federal Gov't seems to have its own satellite.
Feh. "We need the shuttle to get back and forth to the station. We need the station in case something happens to the shuttle."
Research is just about the last refuge of justification for the station. But we know what happens in orbit (and presumably, beyond orbit, where the ISS will *NEVER GO*). Bodies degenerate. Ever-more refined programs of exercise and vitamin supplements are approaching a limit. We do not have the answer to degeneration, but when we have some plausible candidates, then we can put a man or three up in some kind of Soyuz -esque thing.
But hey--thanks for responding to the post
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Other than at the ISS, we won't have any platform for performing experiments in space, now that we're reseparating the cargo from its users. Wonderful idea, NASA.
Take that big cargo module from the heavy lifter. Make it airtight and stick an airlock on it. Fill it with air. Bingo, instant experimentation area.
Skylab was essentially a shuttle fuel tank that they didn't jettison on the way down and was modified afterwards as a space station.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100
Is it just me or does 1 in 100 seem pretty high?
They new vehicles derived from Shuttle components. See an Orbiter or anything else in those pictures?
Geez, are five-year olds in charge of this place? At Slashdot, ignorance wants to be free.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Soviets tried a spaceplane (Buran), heavily copied from the U.S. Shuttle, and quickly decided it was too expensive to operate. Didn't even have to risk human lives to figure that out -- the first flight was unmanned and remote-controlled.
The US has spent about $145 billion on the shuttle program so far. There have been 113 flights. So each flight costs around $1.3 billion.
The USSR (and Russia, during 1991-1993) spent around $15 billion on its shuttle program. There was only one flight. So that single flight cost $15 billion.
Of course, there is something to be said for the "quit while you're ahead" strategy...
K.I.S.S. never got the Russians to the moon, and it didn't get them into space first...they just had a bigger rocket than we did at the time.
Your post is endemic of the thinking that has borne this bastardized project...NASA and America should lead, innovate, take risks, and reap the rewards...not de-evolve back to those hideous rockets 'like the Russians'....gimme a BREAK!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I keep hearing this accusation that the shuttle design is "flawed" - particularly the part about how the "payload should be above the boosters".
This is the kind of "in the box" thinking that prevents progress.
Goddard's original design had the thruster at the top of the rocket, and the fuel tanks actually sat below, in the stream of the rocket exhaust.
This design was necessary, to provide stability in flight; the problems of steering and guidance by fins, gyroscopes, and gymballed nozzles had not yet been solved.
Of course, when you start talking about rocket designs of more significant power, then the exhaust becomes a heat problem, and you have to move the payload out of the way, which introduces a stability problem; which is what Goddard worked the rest of his career solving.
The issue with the shuttle is; it's an incredibly complex machine, and some of the problems it was designed to handle are very difficult problems. Personally, I wouldn't blame these problems on the configuration of the orbiter, booster, and external fuel tank. Fundamentally, it's not a "bad" configuration. It becomes a hazard when you combine that configuration with the hazards of ice forming on the external tank, and an extremely fragile Thermal Protection System on the orbiter. Saying that the problems with the Space Shuttle are all caused by configuration is a gross oversimplification of the problem. The Space Transportation System as a whole, is a complex system, and each component is engineered with certain trade-offs. Perhaps all of them together, in sum, equate to a hazardous system. When you have a hazard, you look at the easiest and most effective way to solve the problem. A complete redesign, including re-arranging the basic configuration of the vehicle, is an overreaction to this hazard. Switching from paint on the external tank to insulating foam, perhaps, was an underreaction, because it moved the hazard from launch time to 60-150 seconds into flight, from slow, falling ice, to high-speed foam. The ultimate solution may turn out to be as simple as re-formulating the foam. (the original freon-based foam was more successful at sticking to the tank). It may turn out to be more complicated, like re-engineering the orbiter's Thermal Protection System.
And of course - we'll never see an attempt at something like that, because the simple-minded folks will stick to the conclusion that it's better to simply redesign the whole thing.
The end result may be semi-reusable. May be cheaper per pound than the shuttle. But it won't have the payload capacity, nor will it have the flexibility. Personally, I think that the nation, as a whole, would be better served by approaching the old design with new technology (as in the X-33 approach). The state of materials science has advanced significantly in 30 years. As has propulsion technology, and even aerodynamics. An effort to build the same shuttle, with the same configuration, with fresh ideas from these advances could possibly yeild a vehicle without the same hazards, possibly with a cheaper operating cost, quicker duty cycle, and greater flexibility than the shuttle we have today.
In my opinion, using this "throwback" design will represent a huge setback to the spacelaunch industry. It will be adequate for servicing the ISS. It will be adequate for placing small crews into orbit. And it will be more cost-effective than our current shuttle. But it doesn't represent a technical advance. It's a retreat. It will come to represent the symbol of where Mankind said; "That's it, we tried to go farther than this point, and we failed. Let's stop here."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Skylab was essentially a shuttle fuel tank that they didn't jettison on the way down and was modified afterwards as a space station.
/ skylab-station.htm
Um, no. Skylab predates the shuttle by about a decade. I believe the station was built from a modified Saturn V third stage shell.
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/skylab
Those solid fuel boosters use liquid oxygen and hydrogen, right? However, I suggest before you start being too rude to people who actually (1) have science degrees and (2) have been following the space programs since 1958, you might want to learn to spell. naturally,occurring,occupies,earth's,Because.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Bureaucracies tend to advance a subset of similar ideas whose only advantage is that they've worked up till now. When those ideas exhibit fatal flaws, possibly because the Gods of Science do not sufficiently appreciate the proletariat of implementation, designs for a leaner, meaner, higher, faster, sleeker shuttle seem hubresque. What's the fascination with bringing the damn thing back? What's wrong with designing a re-entry pod with only one function (to get back), and a cheap voom tube to get into space and get recycled into the infrastructure of the space station? Go up big, come back small.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Makes sense - they have better engineering, and we buy all our other technology from other countries now, anyway!
I definitely agree w/ your criticism of NASA, but I sincerely hope your 'solution':
Here's hope that someone in industry finds a really good reason to go into space regularly.
doesn't happen...
here's the problem: right now(and as far as i can tell, it won't change in the near future), the only viable reason for a business to go into 'space' (like SS1) is for SPACE TOURISM...
basically strapping a bunch of rich people who saw 'The Right Stuff' too many times into a plane similar to the x series of 40+ years ago and doing non-orbital 'spaceflights' 'WHOOPEEE! THAT WAS SO WORTH THE HUNDRED THOUSAND'
NASA needs to be REBOOTED...let's forget all this 'beat the russians quick and dirt' BS of the cold war...we need real innovation, real exploration, risk taking, and we will reap REAL rewards...
I don't object to rockets out of hand, they may work in the short run, but it is infuriating to those of us who know how much of a bastard plan NASA has come up with...for decades we've been working on new and better ways to get into space (platforms, etc.), and what does NASA do? Go BACK TO OLD-SCHOOL ROCKETS???
It stinks of the kind of thinking that scrapped the x-project in favor of traditional rockets...it stinks of over-celebrated wimps who have lost the ability to think big...it stinks of POLITICS, which is unfourtunate, but not beyond our control...WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN...LOBBY FOR SPACE ELEVATORS!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
Our current material technology will not create the elevator on earth. It will require a great deal of material discovery to come up with something lighter and stronger (perhaps spider webbing, or maybe the nanotubes, but we are still not sure about that). However, this makes good sense for the Moon. At this very minute, we have the material that can be used. IOW, it is ready for a very cheap price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Where isn't this true? People always bitch about the nature of big organizations, but I haven't met a big program that isn't full of this sort of thing. Government or private sector, US or Europe, It doesn't matter. Yes small organizations are nimble, but have implicite limitations. Large organizations are inefficient, slow to change, but can do things that small ones can't. The fact that the shuttle actually works (mostly) is testament to that fact.
Man, next you'll be telling us that we stopped going to the moon because the aliens don't want us to be there.
Hey, reliable and mature tech is great.
How many of us still have 486s still running while the new fangled models go up in smoke after only a few years?
Cheap, reliable, and perdictable.
If it gets the job done for the right price, why change it?
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
New design? Looks just like reworked "Titan" and "Titan II" rockets.
)
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(rocket_family
By the way, my ass could use a good redesign too...
MOD PARENT UP
Through a bizarre cyclical logic, the shuttle is there to service the ISS which exists to justify the continuation of the shuttle program.
Redirecting shuttle/ISS funding at other scientific research here on earth would be much more useful.
Watching the launch of this latest one, a friend of mine told me,
I mean, it's expensive to redesign---so I can understand the delay---but by now there's so much new stuff you probably have a good chance of getting something much better. So, good luck to them!
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
They did a bond movie with the current shuttle - moonraker. In a way it kind of looks like a rocket powered tampon.
This writer is off the mark. Goto the site and see what ATK suggests.
They are using the booster from the shuttle (combined with one of several H2/O2 2'nd stage) to launch ppl into orbit. The solid engine rocket is well known and inexpensive. More important, it is the safeest approach at this time, In addition, they do not care wether a capsule is used or a small space plane. They are simply suggesting seperating crew from cargo.
As to the cargo, they are suggesting doing several steps to get to the final in-line cargo configuration. After that this rocket should have similiar capabilities as the Saturn V.
Now, if the big ship is doing cargo only, and the little rocket is doing the crew upload, then they will almost certainly need a different rocket for the moon/mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
rense.com
NASA Transmission
Showed Distinct UFO
webmaster
8-2-5
Tonight at approximately 2:15 Central time on DirectTV Satellite channel 376 (NASA) they were broadcasting a shot from the Shuttle/Space Station of the darkened earth, where only the city lights could be seen apart from the faint corona around the edge of the globe. I could not tell if this was live feed or not. This went on for roughly five minutes or so from the time I tuned in and then suddenly, an extremely bright, solid white disc appeared in the lower portion of the screen and shot inward, toward the earth, at terrific speed (leaving a tracer on the camera in its wake). As soon as this happened, the feed went black and returned to their standard map of the globe showing the orbital paths of the shuttle.
If anyone was taping around this time, double check your tape for this. It was definitely not space debris, was perfect in shape, appeared to be self-luminous and moved at a terrific velocity away from the camera, toward earth, getting smaller as it went. Below is an illustration of what was seen.
The problem is that the calculations are too close to show whether you could put a useful payload into orbit. You wouldn't be able to tell until you built and flew something.
Of course those calculations are with off the shelf technology. You need a proper X program (not a high-tech jobs program like X-33 *gag*) to resolve whether the concept works, or at least to resolve what technologies need to be improved to make it work.
Remember, for a long time it was authoritatively believed to be impossible to fly faster than the speed of sound. And even after that was accomplished, for a while the only payload was the pilot.
Whenever I read one of these NASA "next generation" designs that are just reengineering old technology, I wonder when they are going to bite the bullet and go for nuclear rockets. Experimentation in the 60s produced a crude solid-core reactor engine called NERVA, but it was heavy and underpowered, and would have released a lot of radioactive pollution. There are much more promising designs now. One is called a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor, also known as a "nuclear lightbulb."
Basically it's a big quartz bulb containing gaseous uranium such as UF6, confined to the center of the bulb by a buffer gas swirling around the inside. The UF6 cloud heats up to 25000 C, about 7 times the melting temp of any solid core reactor. It emits intense ultraviolet, which passes through the quartz and is absorbed by slightly doped hydrogen flowing over the outside. The hydrogen heats and expands rather than combusting, exiting the nozzle to provide thrust. No need to carry liquid oxygen. The nuclides confined within the bulb do not enter the exhaust stream, and the hydrogen exhaust itself is not radioactive.
Here is a really interesting article that describes a detailed design for a fully reusable GCNR rocket based on the Saturn V form factor, able to lift 1000 tons of payload into orbit (ten times NASA's latest new design) and return intact to a powered landing in the manner of the now defunct Delta Clipper.
GCNR rockets would not only be able to launch entire space hotels in one shot, their enormous lifting capacity would also make Mars missions practical. Proposed 2-year Mars missions using traditional planetary gravity assist trajectories would give the crew fatal radiation doses. A GCNR rocket could carry a fantastically equipped Mars mission with a foot-thick layer of water/ice shielding, on a point-and-shoot trajectory that takes three months each way. But that's another topic all its own.
Sure, anything nuclear creates a big PR problem, but NASA is supposed to be all about public education as well as putting things into space. I had hoped for more guts from their new leadership.
We've been mucking around in earth orbit for decades. It's time we built real spaceships that can handle really significant cargo.
so we're replacing a 30 year old design with 50 year old technology
yeah, because re-entry by doing a flying brick into the ocean has always been a good idea
god I can't wait for a commercial venture to put nasa in their place
lately they've been proving to don't have to be a rocket scientist to actually BE a rocket scientist!
this may be info gotten by the english ufo hacker, and sat upon until now, i do not know but htats wha tit feels like, it doevetails with other stuff i have from older and other places...this came to me anon and I have not had time to review thoroughly but some loox good. One thing i will tell you is this...kill your tv and WATCH THE NIGHT SKIES, you will see the other airforce, the nwo air force, alluded to by gm and which is what got him busted really...we have been kept out of it all, except to finance it...financed our own overthrow, we did...dark side of the force, bad, bad... http://www.drboylan.com/xplanes2.html Secret Air Force Mach-50 Plane, Other Exotic Classified Aerospacecraft, And the U.S. Antigravity Fighter Discs Deployed With Star Wars Weapons To Fight In the Gulf War Secret Air Force Mach-50 Plane, Other Exotic Classified Aerospacecraft, And the U.S. Antigravity Fighter Discs Deployed With Star Wars Weapons To Fight In the Gulf War (Or, Everything you wanted to know about anti-gravity, but is classified) by Richard Boylan, Ph.D. Let me start this report with a word from UFO investigator Doug Parrish, who states: On very good authority I have been told in the last year from someone who knows but obviously must remain unidentified) that the United States Air Force currently has in its hanger(s) (an) aircraft which (is) (are) capable of Mach 50. That's 50 times the speed of sound. If we regard the speed of sound as somewhere around 770 mph, then Mach 50 becomes 38,500 mph. That's three times around the world in two hours. As far as I know, this is an intra- atmospheric aircraft that takes off from a large base in the Far West. - Doug Parrish Dr. Boylan states: Now I am going to present some information I have obtained elsewhere. Some of the unacknowledged "exotic" aerospacecraft in the military inventory are: 1) the Aurora, 2) the TR3-A, ("Pumpkinseed"), and 3) the military X-33A spaceplane prototype of Lockheed-Martin's X-33, a single-stage-to-orbit aerospace vehicle, as well as 4) the Lockheed X-22A two-man antigravity disc fighter. A fifth, about which almost nothing has been revealed, is: 5) the Nautilus, a secret military spacecraft which operates by magnetic pulsing. It operates out of the unacknowledged new headquarters of the U.S. Space Command, deep under a mountain in Utah. It makes twice-a-week trips up to the secret military-intelligence space station which has been in deep space for the past thirty years. The Nautilus also is used for superfast surveillance operations, utilizing its ability to penetrate target country airspace from above from deep space, a direction not usually expected. Arguing for the craft being described as being the Aurora would be its speed, which would make it capable of achieving, (I believe the German rocket scientists' term is brenschluss), escape velocity, i.e., ability to leave the pull of Earth's gravity. National Security Council scientist Dr. Michael Wolf, (of NSC's unacknowledged SSG ("MJ-12 ) subcommittee,) has stated that the Aurora can operate on both conventional fuel and antigravity field propulsion systems. He further stated that the Aurora can travel to the Moon , a statement I doubt he would make unless it has already made the trip. The TR3-A, which has also been identified as the Pumpkinseed, a reference to its thin oval airframe, has been reported to be a superfast plane. Whether the TR3-A is the plane which Doug Parrish's informant mentioned, which can do Mach 50, I can't say. But it is reported to be quick. My ex-NSA informant, Z , also confirmed what black-projects defense industry-insider Edgar Rothschild Fouche wrote about in his recent book, Alien Rapture : the existence of 6) the TR3-B, a large triangular anti-gravity craft within the U.S. antigravity fleet. This fleet also includes: 7) the B-2 Stealth bomber, made by Northrop, the Lockheed X-22A two-man antigravity disc, the large space- faring Nautilus, manufactured by Boeing and EU's Airbus Industries, 8) Northrop's disc craft, (d
Light Happens.
Why are they designing a new cargo lifter. Does anyone why they would do this in place of the EELV project that is already successfully on track to lift cargo of this size?
Also, the report incorrectly says "as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003." The new designs will do nothing to protect from a Challenger style accident. The only difference is that lives will not be lost in that case. A big difference but lost of a payload is not inconsequential. Don't forget that standard rockets can also go boom or fail to reach orbit.
Space travel is not safe. There's around a 2% chance that a ship will be lost. But imagine if we grounded every airplane for years any time there was an accident. Or cars. Oops, Bobby Joe in Memphis just had a blowout, everyone off the roads until we can redesign the tires. We need to accept that there is risk. Sure, solve the problem, but in the mean time keep flying.
I know some engineers. Here is a working spec. Shuttle Replacement
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
(Soft knocks at the door)
HAL 9000: Who is it?
DAVE: It's me, Dave. Open up, man, I got the stuff.
(More knocks)
HAL 9000: Who is it?
DAVE: It's me, Dave, man. Open up, I got the stuff.
HAL 9000: Who?
DAVE: It's, Dave, man. Open up, I think the cops saw me come in here.
(More knocks)
HAL 9000: Who is it?
DAVE: It's, Dave, man. Will you open up, I got the stuff with me.
HAL 9000: Who?
DAVE: Dave, man. Open up.
HAL 9000: Dave?
DAVE: Yeah, Dave. C'mon, man, open up, I think the cops saw me.
HAL 9000: Dave's not here.
DAVE: No, man, I'm Dave, man.
(Sharp knocks at the door)
DAVE: Hey, c'mon, man.
HAL 9000: Who is it?
DAVE: It's Dave, man. Will you open up? I got the stuff with me.
HAL 9000: Who?
DAVE: Dave, man. Open up.
HAL 9000: Dave?
DAVE: Yeah, Dave.
HAL 9000: Dave's not here.
DAVE: What the hell? No, man, I am Dave, man. Will you...
(More knocks)
DAVE: C'mon! Open up the door, will you? I got the stuff with me, I think the cops saw me.
HAL 9000: Who is it?
DAVE: Oh, what the hell is it...c'mon. Open up the door! It's Dave!
HAL 9000: Who?
DAVE: Dave! D-A-V-E! Will you open up the goddam door!
HAL 9000: Dave?
DAVE: Yeah, Dave!
HAL 9000: Dave?
DAVE: Right, man. Dave. Now will you open up the door?
HAL 9000: Dave's not here.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
This one takes elements from the current shuttle for the payload booster, and the Apollo capsules for the crew. By this point we know the rockets and boosters work and most of the kinks have been worked out. We also know the Apollo style capsule is relatively safe so long as you don't have exposed wiring and a high oxygen environment.
I suppose that now that the ISS is pretty much intact, there isn't any need to be able to perform research on the transport vehicle.
Did somebody say Souz?
Paint yourself into a corner, burn the bridges!, and you will feel the liberty of a man who has nothing to lose!
duh!
Oh, wait... it doesn't exist... or DOOOEEES iiit??
I was discussing this article with a friend, and mentioned that it seems a lot of the inefficiencies and maintenance problems and whatnot that the shuttle has was how it moved away from just using physics in favor of the spacecraft, and trying to control it.
;)
The beauty of Soyuz is and has always been that you sort of fire the rocket and it does its thing and then you're in space. The re-entry capsule is designed so that it more-or-less "automatically" ends up in proper position for re-entry heat shielding. Yes, you don't have as much control as you would in the shuttle, but do you really need it?
This is a move towards the truly tried-and-true method of launch and re-entry. Physics / Mother Nature / God / Whoever allows this to happen in a reasonably well-understood fashion, and by stopping the fight against it, we get improved cargo lift capacity, and substantially cheaper crew lifts in return.
This could be one great legacy Bush could leave behind. Oof. Kinda hurts to say that
The shuttle was not a failure. The failure was not having the balls or the smarts to think of something better, sooner.
Jesus H Frigging Bill Gates, the State of California can't even build a bridge over the f***ing San Francisco Bay, how can we expect a large space agency constantly bent over to Congress' bidding to get things right?
And every IT project I've ever worked on, the more people it had working on it the more f***ed up it was.
Let's put space exploration in the hand of private research institutions where it belongs. Rutan for President.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The past two and a half decades have seen NASA throwing billions of dollars at a succession of "high concept", advanced space-plane ideas (National Aerospace Plane, various X-planes)... none of which proved feasible and were all ultimately cancelled by Congress. That's a lot of money that could've been spent either improving the Shuttle program or in developing a realistic successor to the Shuttle. It's about damn time they broke that cycle.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
The crew rocket will be using the solid rocket engines. Safe, Simple, Soon. These are from the Shuttle. Likewise, the cargo rocket will be shuttle-C (sidemounted, robot controled, not coming back to earth), and will slowly convert to an in-line mounted cargo rocket Using the same engines and boosters.
I would say that the shuttle has proven the engines and the boosters. Now, we are moving to a better config. In fact, the crew rocket will be cheap to send up and down esp. compared to other approachs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The carbon-carbon tiles are fragile just like foam. Even something like lightly pressing your thumbnail into it will leave a divot. Read the Columbia Accident Report if you don't believe me.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
i say to myself SCHTUP as i hit my forehead hard... it all becomes clear, the doggone gol-darn DOGON are returning -- too bad they are amphibians and the oceans are full of beer cans and raw sewage. I think if you watch the night sky and read less stichkin you will be much less prey to nefarious and spooky stories which will no doubt lead to some sort of social aberration manifesting as perhaps a rubber booted raincoated clown on a pogo stix, or even worse, as an aide to a politician in washington! there is magick at work no doubt and it does not look benign from my peephole, and if you are really interested in foreknowledge of events and astro-nomix (And your place within) start here: http://www.enterprisemission.com/egyptair.htm
Light Happens.
The good news is, this gets us back to roughly where we were in the 1970s with our Saturn rockets. The bad news is, this gets us back to where we were in the 1970s. It's kind of like asking if the glass is half empty or half full.
Yes, now we can finally put the disastrous Shuttle program behind us -- after 25 years and countless billions of dollars wasted going in circles, it's about freakin' time. At last the long nightmare can end.
And now we can pick up again where we left off. And yet, one could have hoped for so much more. There are many innovative ideas sitting in dusty filing cabinets, but instead we are getting Apollo/Saturn retreads. There is no great leap forward being offered, only a grudging admission that NASA spent the last 25 years wandering down a dead end.
As for the design specifics. . . If you look at the proposed designs, they aren't what anybody would have created starting from a clean slate. The NYT article implies it's all about saving money, but the real reason for using recycled Shuttle components is all about politics and expedience.
I'm no fan of pork-barrel spending, but I guess something can be said for expedience. Even if it's basically 1970s technology, this plan can get us back into the space exploration game.
Some people talk about radical technologies like space elevators, aerospace planes, or nuclear rockets. I'm all for researching that kind of stuff. Most of these technologies have been buried because they were perceived as a threat to the shuttle, or else shuttle operations gobbled up most of NASA's budget so there wasn't much left for that R&D anyhow.
But those technologies right now exist on paper. Developing them into working systems would take time and money, both of which are in short supply. Using shuttle components may seem disappointing, but it can get us back into the space exploration game in a matter of a few years time -- and then research on more forward-looking stuff can, hopefully, pick up again.
In short: I hope these new systems will be only stopgaps to tide us over until newer technology. But sometimes a stopgap is really good to have.
Remember that -- The replacement to the Space Shuttle that was supposed to be ready to fly by now?
Well, like everything these days it "cost" too much money and congress slashed it, but not so soon as to not have blwon billions $ on who knows what. They did the same thing to the Spuer Collider. Remember that?
So now they're going back to Apollo style and saying that's the way to go b/c of leasons learned from the shuttle -- Blah! It's all about the pork fools! Russia spends 20x times less than we do (about 700 mil) on their space program and they go to space more often than the President says the word.
Sigh. Just another sign of the coming fall. Well, at least we'll have something reliable to go to space in for a while, I guess.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Is there really any need for shuttle launches any more? They could keep a shuttle in orbit close to/docked at the ISS for missions that require the maneuverability in orbit a shuttle can give them - plus use it in the case of emergencies.
Just fire cargo up to the ISS using commercial rockets, and astronauts via Soyux or a to-be-developed NASA alternative. The ISS-based shuttle can then be used for repairs, maneuvering, etc. without the dangers involved in launch and re-entry.
I suppose the question is how long would a shuttle last in orbit, when they're designed for short week or two missions?
I thought everyone knew that the end of the world was 2012.
http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html
- sig? who is this sig of which you speak?
You may find it kind of sad, but it's vindication for those of us who've argued for the last 20+ years that the Shuttle program was a disaster in progress. Finally, after the spilling of much blood and treasure, NASA have been forced to admit (tacitly, at least) that we were right all along.
Reading the article about JAXA's space plans, I am mighty impressed. That proposed spacecraft to the moon bears a vague resemblance to the early prototype spacecraft imagined by the writers of "Star Trek".
Washington should open up competitive bidding (for space projects) to JAXA. If JAXA has the better ideas and the better technology, then Washington send some money over to JAXA. For too long, NASA has been a space monopoly. A little competition from JAXA will improve the quantity and quality of NASA's production.
So help me Buddha!
How come /. doesn't have the seemingly obvious "useless NASA middle-manager" troll?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
NASA ppl disagree with you.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's nice to see that NASA has moved from "clean slates" to the much more modern and recent technological innovation of "clean paper."
This Sig Kills Fascists
In case you never have heard about this program, this is the Big Gemini or Gemini II Project that was proposed to NASA right at the end of the original Gemini missions. You can also see the "real thing" that was built as part of a full-scale mock-up.
There was another "failed" hold over from the pre-Shuttle days called Apollo II as well, that was essentially a beefed up Apollo capsule that could hold up to seven passengers and crew. Basically the current crew load of the Shuttle. Trying to build on the Apollo technology, it would also incorporate some of the ideas that also developed from Gemini. Keep in mind that despite the fact that the Apollo capsules went to the moon later, the Gemini program was in some ways a more advanced program than the Apollo system... in part because it was built with newer technologies.
One of the reasons why Gemini is getting another look today is because the standard two-person version can fit on top of the Falcon V, and make a base design for an orbital vehicle. The Falcon V is going to be man-rated, and a bit cheaper than the Russians are able to put somebody up into orbit. Plus (for those that care), SpaceX is an American company, avoiding the political issues of going to Russia for at least American companies or tourists.
A beefed up Falcon V (Falcon X?) could in theory be able to launch seven astronauts at once. Certainly at a substantial fraction of the price for a single shuttle launch, and to the same orbit.
I think it's incorrect to say that NASA was the only organization responsible for the requirements for and eventual design of the shuttle--the US Air Force played a significant role in defining what the shuttle should be able to do, therefore driving many design decisions. The Air Force simply realized early on that the shuttle wasn't a feasible solution for them, especially given the fall of communist Russia. They left NASA hanging on to the (now horribly disfigured and) only remaining US manned space vehicle.
--- Standard disclaimer applies.
Their Web server is set up to let Google searches through. So if it sees a referrer URL coming from Google, it will let it through. Therefore: 1. Copy link location 2. Open up Google. 3. Paste the URL into Googles search page. Click Search. 4. Googles search results give you a link to the URL you just pasted in. 5. Click that link. Voila, the NY Times Web server sees a referrer URL coming from Google and lets you in. comment by Robin Munn 09.05.04 @ 2:59 pm
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Try this link.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
As said reusable means cheap only if you have lots of flight because the reusable ship being much more expensive to build the investment must be amortised on many flights to become economical.
The space shuttle was built with an estimate of very frequent flight which never happened, thus it is very expensive.
I don't expect space flight to become much more frequent in the near future (than they were when the shuttle worked correctly) because there isn't much incentive, so I think that the new design should be as cheap as possible in itself: multiple stages and soyouz-like ship.
Try this link.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I think either John Travolta or Tom Cruise did this flick already. Doesn't matter -- the Scamentologists copyrighted it as holy text anyway! They just called 'em clams instead of Niburu, and if that doesn't work they're going to label it pr0n and get Congress to try to ban the story outright.
John
1. Why don't they spray the insulating foam on the inside of the tank, rather than the outside? There are no aerodynamic forces to rip apart the foam inside the tank.
2. Be politically incorrect and use the old Freon-foamed insulation. Non-Freon-based foam "causes up to 11 times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam," according to engineer Robert Garmong. The 1997 mission, STS-87, was the first to use a new method of 'foaming' the tanks. The shift came as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was ordering many industries to phase out the use of Freon.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I lost it in a hard drive crash.
Needle Nardle Noo
We already knew that the CEV would use a traditional rocket to launch into orbit, boeing has been counting on this for the delta IV heavy family
the only area of grey was that t/Space wanted a plane-launched system for their CXV, which would transfer the crew only, and that lockheed was working with them.
Hopefully its a possibility because its MUCH cheaper, as the cost of man-rating the delta IV line is estimated to be billions. and, since the first stage is a plane, the t/space system is very reusable.
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
This was the shuttle's original mission, anyway, to shuttle cargo back and forth from orbit. It was assumed at first that there would be a permanent orbital structure as a destination for that cargo, i.e. a space station. Maybe it's time we got back to that idea.
If you had bothered to (a) RTFA (b) actually learn a bit about current rocket technology and (c) not try to be a smartass, you might not come over as a dumbass.
In case this ever gets moderated flamebait, the parent called me an idiot. I may possibly be an idiot, but the parent doesn't have any evidence on which to make that call.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Apply a sealer coat to the foam to hold it together/give it a protective coating.
As in paint the enternal tank!
Oh wait...oops...
I agree that this launch method would be quite usable for putting payloads into orbit.
However.
With this idea it's apparent that the space program is now going in circles. There have not been ANY advancements in propelling craft into space, through space, or anything inbetween.
Better NASA in saving this money put the saved money into getting the smartest brains together until they can figure out gravity. Then once they figure it out explore things such as anti-gravity and now to use it to get large payloads or entire ships into space.
This new old concept of capsule-atop-rocket + heavy lift cargo rocket can be made reasonably cheap (though this being NASA one never knows) and safe, but it is a technological dead end. It is identical to what the russian used to build and crew Mir (with the soyuz-atop-proton and the energia for heavy cargo).
What it tells me is that 1 NASA considers the shuttle a failure 2 The american space program will focus on space science and planting flags in the Moon and Mars.
I think most people agree that #1 is true, as far as the shuttle is concerned; but I think the concept of reusable vehicles is part of the way forward. As for #2, its is really focusing on splash over substance. The key to building a real space infrastructure is getting to low earth orbit in a cheap and reliable way. Once you have easy access to LEO, you can build think in orbit, and getting anywhere is (comparatively) much easier. A simple reusable, single stage to orbit vehicle is in my view the best wat of doing it. Unfortunately NASA (and its political masters) is not interested in this sort of project anymore. Instead of striving for simplicity and incremental advances, it designs and builds enormously complicated and expensive monstruosities that try to do everything at the same time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
...
I think a magnetic field enchanced SCRAMjet engine with the
hinted at oxidized component will come along very soon .
One is already somewhat in use with the replacement for the SR-71 .
AKA Aurora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_aircraft
The "unclassified" use of this may be blocked by DoD is my fear .
The X-43 already did some public SCRAMjet testing, but either
they cannot make it work, or decide to make it look like they
can't make it work .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-43
Personal opinion is it is military domain only .
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Lobby for a space elevator? With current materials a space elevator is simply not possible. As in it defies the laws of physics. We need monumental improvements in materials to even make a space elevator scientifically feasable. What we need is some guy sitting in a lab screwing around with chemistry and physics in ways I can't even begin to comprehend. And we have that. All over America people are doing just that because the rewards of such progress are huge, not just in the realm of space travel. In short, lobbying of space elevators at point is about as useful as lobbying for an antigravity ray. But don't let that stop you or anyone else from teaching these NASA "rocket scientists" what a real space program should look like.
These airmchair rocket scientists never cease to amaze me. To paraphrase that guy in "Gone in 50 Seconds":
You can't park. You can't maintain speed. You can't change lanes. Honey, you can't drive. I can't swim. I know I can't swim, so you know what I do? I stay my black ass out of the water.
The handful of worthwhile posts in this thread are practically drowned out by the torrent of backseat NASA administrators who all know they would have handled it better. And the worst part of all is that you know that if NASA had never built the space shuttle these same clowns would be on slashdot bitching about how spaceships haven't changed in 70 years and saying that we should really have spaceplanes by now.
bit trollent
Why not just mount the damn thing,upside down. With the top towards the boosters. (Slight redesign of the fin) Any material comming from the booster can not hit the ceamic tiles.
I said they were not made out of foam but RCC ceramic material. They are not made out of foam. Period. There is no, "no", to it. Not made out of foam. Not made in a process that even closely resembles a foam process. Carbon-carbon is brittle like a piece of ceramic is brittle. Not like foam. Furthermore, I have found no refrence to fingernail scoring in carbon-carbon in the CAIB report. Could you please point me to it.
Wow. But wasn't Planet X / Niburu supposed to pass by us in May-July of 2003 and cause all the fun parts of Revelations to happen,
The crack-pot you're referring to is Nancy Lieder. She just crawled out of the woodwork to make another bold Planet X claim:
New ZetaTalk By Nancy on the GLP Forum
"When the passage did not occur as expected in 2003 because Planet X had stalled in the inner solar system, we explained the increasing weather irregularities in the context of the global wobble that had ensued - weather wobbles where the Earth is suddenly forced under air masses, churning them."
If you can't get enough of Nancy, she will be on CoastToCoast AM with George Noory on Aug 9th. Sadly I think George is too nice a guy to confront her with her own nonsense, but I'm still hoping people call in and tear her a new one.
With no funding from earth governments, X-COM will have to depend on paypal donations.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Problem: combining the functions of fuel and reaction mass makes the reaction mass noxious.
Solution: use a rocket technology that seperates the two. Nuclear-heated rockets, for example. Then the reaction mass can be regular tap-water.
The shuttle was designed in the early 1970s, and was first slated to fly in 1979. A 1970s car is retro. A 1970s fighter jet is sold to third-world nations. A 1970s space ship is... state of the art?
The shuttle design was a compromise to begin with. It's time to come up with something else.
What's old is new again. These launch vehicle plans are a lot older than 2.5 years! I worked on the National Launch System in the early 90's (the project began in the 80's) and some concepts used shuttle components for heavy launch cargo vehicles. Aaah. Killed by a short-sighted Congress., we coulda had this years ago.
Furthermore, I have found no refrence to fingernail scoring in carbon-carbon in the CAIB report.
Just read any of the current articles on NASA's plans for a spacewalk to clear dangling "gap filler" from beneath the Discovery. There is real concern that Robinson might accidentally crush a tile if he bumps into it with a tool or his suit, which would certainly be worse than the risk presented by the current damage.
Those things are fragile, but they're not foam- in fact, they're more vulnerable than most foam, which can generally bend instead of shattering.
Six legs, on the other hand, would be far more stable
"How to render the Segway obsolete:"
"BAM!
Third wheel."
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
When I read about the SpaceX plan, I am struck that it is what you would do if you don't care about technology at all and you just want to get to orbit so you can do stuff there. They really have the space truck mentality.
Awesomely high pressure high-Isp rockets using propellants that turn air into liquid and thus have wacky cryogenic insulating problems? Nope. (The Space Shuttle main engines were *required* to push the state of the art in engine design. They use the highest pressures ever attempted in a rocket engine, and liquid hydrogen, to get the best Isp ever delivered by a big engine.)
All-room-temp but scary-backstory oxidizers like Beal? Nope. (Beal used hydrogen peroxide. Is it or is it not safe? There is no consensus.)
SpaceX uses LOX and kerosene. For both stages. Their first stage (most of the hardware) parachutes back, but the second stage is expendable. LOX and kerosene were identified as probably the most practical rocket propellant combination in the *1800s*. Way old tech.
SpaceX isn't relying on reuse, though. They'll do launches, recover the first stage, and see what they have. Maybe they'll reuse the whole thing. Maybe they'll replace the engine nozzles. Maybe they'll cut the valves out of the engine and just use those in a new engine. It'll change over time as they get more experience, with no need for any customer to see any difference to operations.
And somehow, it looks like SpaceX has the political savvy to actually get lauched. I don't understand that one bit. Maybe the Columbia accident and the EELV cost overruns have changed the dynamic in congress. But so far the signs are good.
Then again, as Elon Musk (SpaceX CEO) points out, first launches have not been historically kind.
Why not just coat the entire shuttle external tank with something that doesn't permit water or ice to bond to it? Similar products have been on the commercial market for decades, and they work fairly well. I'm sure that 3M or somebody else could come up with something that would work in this situation, even with the temperature differences.
However, it's too elegant and simple a solution to not have been considered before, so I'm thinking that there must be a reason it it won't work.
Anyone know?
Cheers,
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
1) Dump the solid fuel booster. That gets rid of the o-ring joints, the foam insulation, and the ugly appearance. Replace with a 2 or 3 stage design with conventional liquid fuel but make the stages simple enough to mass produce to keep costs down and make them recoverable.
2) Dump the complicated exterior tile pattern for the shuttle heat shield where each tile has to be carefully glued into place and where a gap between tiles can lead to the loss of the shuttle. Replace it with some sort of crude but effective overlapping 'fish scale' design with the keystone tiles mechanically attached to the shuttle skin with ceramic pins of some sort.
3) post the acronym 'KISS' on the design team's cubicles and make them live it. What has killed the shuttle more than any other thing is the general complexity of its operation. If operating cars or airplanes had the same degree of complexity of the shuttle, we would still be riding horses and riding in hot-air balloons.
The shuttle was designed in the early 1970s. It is retro. But soyuz was designed in the early 1960s. It is classic. Come to think of it, the shuttle has lost 14 astronauts in 26 years, while soyuz has only lost 3 cosmonauts in 40 years. Newer technology means newer failure modes.
What was that one called, VentureStar? I remember they gave up saying it was "too complicated." Wow, what an American spirit, can-do attitude. Real heroes. Makes me sick to think we pay their salaries with our taxes.
The original design was for a somewhat smaller reusable manned orbiter, and a separate heavy launch vehicle for big payloads, as well as a couple of other vehicles for inter-orbit transfers and a somewhat optimistic lunar lander.
If they'd followed the original design the shuttle wouldn't have to run over original rated capacity, because it wouldn't have had to reach as high an orbit and it wouldn't have had such an oversized cargo bay... plus, they'd have been able to send up really BIG space station modules in the HLLV.
I'm not so sure this new approach is all that great, I'm particular unhappy about having the crew going up on top of an SRB. The manned part of the system is where you really want to stick to liquid fuelled components.
Was nothing learned from Challenger? Solid rockets can't be throttled, and they can't be shut off, and they have no place on a manned spacecraft.
The liquid-fuelled RS-84 engine would've been comparable to the F1 engine used on the Saturn rockets. Too bad NASA just cancelled it.
Chapter 6, page 121, under the heading "Original Design Requirements". Much of Chapter 6 in the CAIB report discusses this issue.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
The point I am making is that it does not take a high-impulse, high-stress impact to damage the Thermal Protection System.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Furthermore, they did this not once, but several times. Instead of sticking to one project and seeing it through to fruition, NASA (and Congress shares a lot of this blame, funding-wise) decided to kill the programs half-baked.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
NASA rep: "If you want to take away our space pens to replace them with pencils, you'll have to pry them from our cold, dead, hands!"
In what way is this astroturf?
I lost it in a hard drive crash.
Coincidence? Hmm
The ISS is in the wrong inclination. It's too difficult to get any mass to if you're not launching from kazakhstan. That, and it's boondoggled to the shuttle.
Check out the Website from which the article comes from.
There will be 2 rockets. The first will be for crew and/or lightweight payloads (think satellites). It will use the current shuttles booster as the first stage. There will then be a 2'nd stage from the saturn V or a new design. Then the crew module will be either the new CEV or a simple souyz/apollo capsule. If they use the CEV, then it is a space plane approach. If capsule, well a simple chute will work. The solid rockets will be reuseable, as would the CEV. Most likely, the capsule/CEV approach would use the heat shields that were designed for the X-33.
The Cargo rocket will initially be the Shuttle-C, which is the same current set-up, but the shuttle is stripped, and remote controlled. It will allow us to get much larger cargo to space. In addition, they will over time move to an in-line cargo approach with the booster being upped to 5 segments (vs. current 4). That will allow the payload to be slightly less than the Saturn V. This shuttle-C/new inline are on one-way shoots. No coming back except in a burn-up approach. Who knows. If we are smart, we can send it to someplace upthere were we can re-use the metal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm heading to my basement right now, my tinfoil underwear & hat firmly affixed by duct tape. If my employer asks, tell him that Planet X is coming and money and work and living are now meaningless.
Damnit now you tell me, I was just going to come out of my basement and look for a job so i could have spending money. And BTW you want to use SILVER aluminium acts as an antenna to magnify the effects of the mind control. Steel is an okay metal, but not nearly as effective as silver, you need a much thicker heavier steel plate to get the same shielding properties as silver, because it reflects virtually all frequencies of light/em radiation. steel merly 'absorbs' like lead, you want the reflective qualities of silver, for something that has to be light weight like protective headgear. Plus silver can be turned translucent, which allows you to make a complete, full head sheilding device. For those of you on a budget, they conveniently sell 'silver' based optically translusent plastic in bulk they're called CD-R but the thickness of the silver is so thin you need to combine at least 2 CD-r to acheive much in the way of shielding. And then you'll need some 1000 watt lamps to see around you with, as the green dye will be problematic. Optionally you can 'delaminate' the silver foil with a blow dryer (haven't tested the effectiveness of this) or by 'boiling' the discs in water (also untested)... boiling wated seems to be like it would be the easier option, since you could easily get the water hot enough to melt the plastic away, leaving only the foil.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html