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NASA's New Shuttle
j0ugh writes "NASA releases plans for a new spacecraft (Audio stream contains the meat) that would replace the space shuttle. The vehicle is part of a system that will be capable of putting astronauts on the moon by 2018, laying the groundwork for space travel to Mars. NASA says the new system is designed to be 10 times safer than the space shuttle"
The video and other information make several things quite clear:
Overall, this looks like good technology to me. Anyone who thinks NASA is taking a step back (except for the capsule configuration, I agree with you there) needs to pull his head out of his rear. This design will be inexpensive (NASA is merely redirecting the shuttle buget plus a little extra), reuse existing components/industry, will be more powerful than any rocket ever designed, and will finally give us back the ability to put USEFUL stuff into space. Good job, NASA!
P.S. On the capsule (again), I'm surprised they didn't even consider the Big Gemini design. The BG would have been a very large capsule (more crew than the Shuttle!) with a parawing for smooth touchdowns on Earth.
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113 shuttle flights, 2 catatrophic failures. A ten-fold improvement means we should only lose the entire crew 1 time in 560.
I expect the SSME on the second stage of the manned launcher will be replaced with a J-20S.
The reason: Restarting.
The SSME has never been restarted in flight, and there's a big cost associated with adding/certifying this capabillity. The J-2, on the other hand, was used by the Saturn V's third stage, and this restart is needed for trans lunar injection.
Read Richard Feynman tearing them a new one over exactly that sort of language. It's disheartening that they still apparently have marketdroids doing their press releases.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I assume you mean a space elevator stretching from the Moon to the Earth? If you lived on the Moon, you'd see the Earth spinning about once per day, so a given point on the Earth's surface does not stay in the same place from the Moon's perspective.
A Moon based space elevator would reach almost halfway to the Earth since the Moon only rotates once per month. However, it wouldn't help get stuff from the Earth to the Moon, since the boost out of the Earth's gravitational field is 90% or more of the energy required. However, the combination of an Earth elevator, ion propulsion, and a Moon elevator would make it much cheaper. Look for this in about 50 years.
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According to this site
Saturn C-5 max payload: 127 metric tons
New Booster may payload: 100+ metric tons
May be less payload, but last time I checked we weren't building Saturn 5 components.
For crew capacity, technology has changed. We can take out a lot of mass and replace it with new technology compared to the apollo era. Remember, we were still using vacum tubes then and no solar panels. Adding solar panels (which is in the plans) means fewer batteries are needed. Replacing vacume tubes with solid state decreases power and mass and space.
The good news is that NASA are finally picking up where they left off 30 years ago. The bad news is that NASA are picking up where they left off 30 years ago. . . and we have precious little to show for the decades, lives, and many billions of dollars sacrificed to the Shuttle.
We got some info out of it, just not as much as we could have since we got sidetracked with the original moon missions. I've heard that JFK set the space program back (or held it back) 50 years. However, that does not mean we haven't gotten anything out of the shuttle. Otherwise we wouldn't be using shuttle components in these new lifters.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
- NASA's new heavy lifter: 125t
- Saturn V: 110t
- Russian Energia: 100t
- Space Shuttle: 29t
- Commercial Falcon 9 S9: 25t
- ESA Ariana 5ECA: 21t
- JAXA H-IIA: 12t
All to LEO (low earth orbit).we were still using vacum tubes
A nit, but I don't think there were any vacuum tubes in the Apollo/Saturn stack -- transistors were already commonplace, and the Apollo Guidance computer pioneered the use of ICs, albeit not microprocessors. But if you've got a reference that describes tubes, I really would like to see it (I'm not being snarky, I really would!)
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While "we" were still using a lot of vacuum tubes in 1969, the Apollo program did not. Their computers were solid state; in fact, the onboard flight computers were the first ever built with integrated circuits, and the Apollo program absorbed a significant fraction of all the integrated circuits manufactured in those early years.
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Actually, speaking myself as a liberal Democrat, opposition to the SSC was pretty non-partisan. If anything, there was more support from the Republican party. In particular, Reagan was pretty supportive of the SSC while Clinton's lack of strong support was probably its undoing. But on the whole, there is a problem that funding of a large scale big science project over the span of decades has a real hard time surviving the congressional budget process.
It's sad that this is the kind of post that passes for infomative.
First of all, for those who actually read rather than just look at pictures, there's a lot more information at the NASA site than what the OP writes here, and, unlike that post, it is correct.
Now...
>> There appears to be an Apollo age escape tower on the crew capsule. This doubles as a docking port.
No. That's part of the abort apparatus. it is jettisoned during the trip to orbit. It has nothing to do with docking.
>> The mission plan given is basically the same one used on Apollo.
Wrong. There are significant differences with Apollo, including flight profile, length of stay, size of crew, and the ability to land anywhere on the Moon (Apollo was confined to equatorial regions).
>> We use big booster to light up millions of tonnes of mass... Kind of pathetic,
It is not pathetic. That's how rockets work. Almost all the mass in a rocket is propellant.
>> I'm surprised they didn't even consider the Big Gemini design...
Probably because it is essentially the same design: a blunt conical object with a heatshield. We've seen more than 40 years worth of avionics and electronic advances since Gemini. There's no reason to resurrect the dead. Remember, too, the CEV is supposed to bulk up for the Mars trip. Gemini couldn't survive more than a few weeks. (It barely made it through the two-week endurance mission.)
>> Anyone who thinks NASA is taking a step back (except for the capsule...
The capsule is not a backward step. That's equivalent to lamenting the lack of innovation in aircraft design because they all have wings. If you design a spacecraft to be launched by rocket from and to return to a planetary surface, that's the vehicle shape you'll have: conical for aerodynamic purposes during launch, with a blunt heat shield on the other end. So long as we launch such vehicles via rockets, that's what they're going to look like. (Remember, we don't have the technology to protect leading wing entries at escape veleocity speed, which a returning lunar mission will see. A returning Mars mission will reenter at higher speed.)
>> With this HLV booster, we could put a brand new space station whereever the hell we want it...
Why?
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