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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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How do you classify something as 10x safer than something else? Do they expect 10x less people to die, 10x less frequent explosive disasters, or are the events themselves 10x less dangerous, meaning astronauts could survive?
Jerry
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It looks almost exactly like the Apollo system.
(if we're going back to 1969, can we also drop the war on drugs? thanks.)
When you put a date of '2018' on something, being at least two US administrations away, isn't that akin to basically saying "maybe, one day, but I wouldn't count on it"?
I wish we could be honest. Nobody really can be bothered to put a man on the Moon or Mars. It's faster, cheaper and easier to have a little wheeled avatar nipping around for us, searching out prime real estate and letting us know that the nightlife in these places isn't a patch on Vauxhall, daahling.
I mean, I'd like it to happen, but we all know it won't, right?
Martin
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.
and 30% cooler, with 200% more wiz-bang factor!
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I must say, it is interesting to notice that NASA has, in fact, finally opted to return to the old, well-tried capsule approach, as opposed to reusable reentry vehicles such as Shuttle. Especially when one takes into consideration the significant amount of resistance NASA experts have been offering to the idea for years and years, despite the poor cost-to-results ratio of Shuttles and, apparently, high(er) risks involved in Shuttle flights as compared to capsule flights.
Perhaps it is a bit of me that loves rubbing it in to american 'rocket scientists', but it might be interesting to notice that Russians never fully embraced their shuttles (Buran, http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/rsa/buran.html ) despite it posessing payload and operational capacities superior to those of US Shuttle...
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
Well, that's only like, 20 times more dangerous than a car. Pretty good considering you're basically riding a bomb to orbit.
NASA have needed a heavy lifter ever since they (foolishly) retired the Saturn V. Now they'll finally have one again, and that's good. However, it doesn't seem to me like a big step up from the Saturn V -- unless I'm missing something. How does the payload capacity to LEO compare? Off the top of my head, I thought the Saturn V was rated for 220 tons to LEO, the new rocket only 125 tons. But maybe I am mis-remembering something, or reading something wrong?
:p Anyhow. . . To me it looks adequate (not great) for lunar missions. The idea of sending it to Mars is ludicrous, it would be like sticking Columbus in a rowboat with five other guys and sending him out to find America.
I'm a little disappointed that nobody seems interested in reviving the old Sea Dragon concept from the 1960s. If you were really serious about going to Mars, that would make a good foundation for it.
The CEV and associated launcher look sensible. I'm not sure about the CEV's crew capacity. NASA say it can carry four astronauts to the Moon or potentially six to Mars. Do I sense a problem with their math skills? Maybe another of those pesky metric conversion errors.
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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Why take the elevator when you can just strap yourself to forty-seven fireworks?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
how many NASA engineers and others secretly cheered when Bush and Co. announced the end of the shuttle?
For too long we spent out time focused on the Shuttle instead of space itself. Everything other than a few probes was centered around the space shuttle. How much of the ISS was compromised because of the shuttle? Perhaps the original glamour of a flying space plane helped NASA but it sure turned into a Spruce Goose pretty damn quickly.
I really like this new direction. Getting the moon is the first step. While we might not reach Mars from there we never will have any chance if we just putz around in Earth orbit.
Perhaps the next habitation in space can be built on the moon. That can put the glamour back into the space age in a more practical method than a space plane.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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
Because of the difference in cost and risk, you can do vastly more exploration with robots than with people. I think sending people is the real conceit, and one that costs lives.
- 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!)
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
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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You know what we really need to get people excited about the CEV? An "American NASA" show. We get to watch every week as the scientists get pissy with each other as deadlines move closer and the pressure gets screwed on tight. Will they finish the chopper^H spacecraft in time, or will they kill each other first? Who stays, who gets fired?
;-P)
Only on Discovery Channel.
(Hey, I'd watch it.
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Give me $20B, and I'll plan and build a giant Hot Wheels launch track -- complete with pointless loop in the middle -- and we'll fling cars into orbit all day long!
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
But it's great for NASA bureaucrats. They can just idle along, issuing press releases, running their "centers", and promoting their "education" programs, without actually building anything flyable. And they get to blame Congress for not providing more money.
You can see this already. NASA just converted their home page to Flash.
The next people on the moon will be Chinese. They have such a strong manufacturing economy that it won't be a stretch to build a big booster. The "China price" on a booster should be low. Maybe the US will buy some.
I believe that being an astronaut is on a volunteer basis. If you put an ad in the paper that said:
Be one of the first humans on Mars. All expenses paid trip to Mars one way, See a new planet. Do some research. There will be no return trip.
I'm absolutely sure you would have 1000+ volunteers that would consider their life a fair trade just to go, just to SEE it with their own eyes.
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