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NASA Scraps Shuttle And Returns to Rockets
nathanh writes "NASA is building a launch system that they've informally dubbed Apollo On Steroids. It's a hybrid design of the Apollo capsules and the Shuttle's booster rockets and engines. Crew and cargo are lifted by two different rockets: the crew use a single-booster/single-engine rocket and the cargo is lifted by an awe-inspiring two-booster/five-engine rocket. NASA reckons this craft will take humanity back to the Moon and then to Mars. Has NASA realised that the old designs were better? Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?"
Real news from NASA!
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Sure, they'll get to Mars in it. All their muscle mass will be gone, but they'll get there.
You need a spinning ring to provide artificial gravity or they will literally collapse when they set foot on Mars.
Shouldn't the title read "NASA Scraps Shuttle And Returns to Capsules"?
Both the shuttle and the capsules are lifted by rockets...
I am going to treat this as vaporware just like every other "shuttle replacement" NASA has come up.
Does anybody remember the concept of the next generation space shuttle that nasa talked about during the mid to late 90's. I remember there was research and products being developed for this project. Does it still exist, or has it just vanished into the black hole of failed/forgotten nasa projects?
Reusing the shuttle main engines might seem like an R&D cost saver, but isn't it also a kickback to the contractors who currently support the shuttle too? They would stand to lose quite a bit otherwise.
NASA's funding is continuously being cut while they are being forced to stay in the space race by other countries, and consequently, the White House.
This isn't an attempt at something nouveau and ground-breaking engineering-wise, but a pieceing together of cheap rockets and whatever else is in the warehouses.
- A
Japan intends to build an orbiting solar station by 2040. The planned satellite is to be equipped with two giant solar panels, each being 1*3 km in dimension, and will weigh about 20,000 tonnes, thats impressive
Back to the topic, i wonder how much cold-war flaunting the shuttle represented at the cost of practicality...
The going-back-to-the-moon theme is probably what the public want, but i hardly see the design of the vehicles as a ploy to gain public support. On the surface this looks like oldschool tech - not like the slick, 21first century aerodynamical spacecrafts we have grown accustomed to on the screen. But its probably a safer and more economical design. And as long as we actually get back to the moon...
In order to make any project successful, it is necessary to be able to both plan ahead to take care of contingencies before they appear and also be able to be flexible enough to work around unforeseen problems. This latest effort, though definitely a good step away from the shuttle program, does not allay the fears of a lack of the second point above. They think they can plan ahead for each contingency, but the NASA bureacracy is too heavy and too heavily dependent on Congressional support.
Congressional support, in turn, is heavily dependent on the contractors who stand to make a mint off of a new space program. So instead of good science being the leading light, it is special interests who hold the purse strings to NASA's budget.
The problem is that space is not a priority, so NASA will not get what it needs to succeed. Rather, it will continue to get pushed around by its suppliers because Congress wouldn't have it any other way.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The right stuff!
Enuf said.
Wasn't there already a Rockie movie about that?
(Wow, I'm full of lame jokes lately)
So, if NASA wants to cut back on their budget expenses, then they should be cutting back on the waste. The Shuttle is a great design in that it's largely reuseable, thus reducing the waste materials, and the expense of replacing/rebuilding them.
Using two largely un-reuseable rockets to blast crew and payload into space is a massive waste of resources, and thus funding.
The only reason for this waste of money is the increased safety of launching humans into space, and let's face it; riding the Shuttle is amazingly safe, considering that it's riding on the back of a pair of gigantic sticks of dynamite, and a jar of highly flammable gasses.
Old doesn't necessarily mean unreliable in design terms - after all, the Russian's workhorse Soyuz orbiter is based on a 1960s design too, but you'd hope that by 2018 we'd be using something.. a little more high-tech.
Just to give a reminder of how much momentum has been lost in the space program: I was born in the same year the movie 2001 came out - when that film was made it was absolutely believable that the sort of technology portrayed in the film could be in use by 2001. The (admittedly flawed) Shuttle was an obvious step towards this future - but somewhere everything went wrong. This is not the future we were promised. Where are the flying cars?.
Still, it's all progress of a sort, I suppose.
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And, at the very least, we can stop wasting taxpayers'money on my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours space programs while the research is going on. Come on folks, we can't even organise ourselves on Earth to prevent avoidable damage from hurricanes and earthquakes, we can't agree on whether we are causing climate change by producing greenhouse gases, we are faced with an influenza pandemic that no-one really knows how to deal with, and we still have R&D money to spend on sending people to the moon and Mars?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
While this is still at an early stage of development, the planning and decision process involved is surely too long and complex to downplay this decision as a mere ploy to recapture the hearts of the public. Talk about overpromising! You don't make a U-turn on everything you did in the last 20 years just to raise some empathy!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
The shuttle was never build for lunar travel. It is important to understand that different spaceships are used for different tasks. The shuttle is used to bring cargo up to (low) altitude, while escaping the earth gravity completely and going to the moon (or mars) is a completely different story.
You might carry a Luna space ship into orbit with the shuttle, but then you will just be carrying a spaceship within a spaceship. That would be a waste of fuel.
The shuttle is only good if you wish to bring stuff back down with you. In that regard you might have used it on returning to the earth. The returning spaceship could dock with the space station and transfer men and cargo to the shuttle for safe landing. But that's only saves the weight of a single heat shield.
So dropping the shuttle for a Luna and mars mission is the obvious choice. A lot of comments will be made in regard to "return to the old capsules". But this is not really relevant. The "old" capsules were a good design. The engineers for the first Luna expedition did a lot of thinking and testing before going there, so it's a good design. To come up with something new, just for the case of "making something new" would be stupid.
But these new capsules are not old! They use a new propellant, to prepare them for the mars expedition. And as the old Luna Lander had computer power equivalent to a modern average car, I'll expect the new ones will be far more advanced.
This is the same case in regards to the boosters. These are actually based on the Shuttle engines and lifters. So the engines are the same, even thou the exterior is not. And these boosters are far more advanced than the old ones as well.
So scraping the Shuttle and returning to the old capsules?
Not true.
-:) Oh no - not again.
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As much as I'd like to think "ploy", they probably are onto something.
If you think about automobiles, for instance, the most efficient configuration seems to be a combination of small passenger cars and large semi-trucks. The shuttle was basically an SUV: high maintenance, high cost, low gas mileage and range, and not big enough for truly heavy lifting. It was popular because it fit into the American one-size-fits-all independent mentality.
But the shuttle was also part of a natural evolution. We started out driving a Pinto. We had newfound freedom, but little useful to do with it. To take the next step required a vehicle capable of doing some serious work. But we couldn't afford to go from a Pinto to a Mack Truck. That would've been too expensive, and risky. Instead, we got a Suburban, and used it as a daily-driver, as well as for some backyard projects. The insurance was less than having two autos. There was some maintenance, but we could do it ourselves, without an expensive mechanic.
Now, though, we can afford both the Mercedes and the F-350 flatbed. We have a legitimate use for each. Eventually, we may need the equivalent of a subway car, and a Greyhound bus, and a bullet train. But even here on Earth we have lots of different ways to get around, each optimized for a specific task. We shouldn't be surprised that space is no different.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
We're returning to rockets, you say?
Well it's about damn time. I'm sure it'll beat the pants off all those rubber bands we've been using in the mean time...
Sleep is futile.
Having 1 thruster active with directional nossels is safer than two either side as per the shuttle design. As if one booster/rocket fails on the shuttle you would lose directional control.
If one thuster fails on a standard rocket then you end up without it going anywere.
Now a normal rocket also offerers better stremlining and as such less fuel needs over the larger front surface profile of the shuttle.
Also the possiblities of having the top command capsule capable of having a seperate jetison detach rocket and parachute landing system incase of failure enabling the crew to for all effect eject and and be recovered does seen alot more viable over any modification to the shuttle design.
So basicly it will be cheaper/simpler/safer and for some....sexier.
Now what I would like to see is a way to send all the old space junk into a pile or crashing onto the moon ready for one day when we do eventualy go back and stay there. Scrap metal/floating space junk is afterall probably the bestest concentrated form of resource up there at the moment that is already past the hurdle for getting to the moon with regards to breaking out of earth's gravity.
The centerpiece of this system is a new spacecraft designed to carry four astronauts to and from the moon
We want battle star destroyer size ships, capable of shuttling thousands of troops, citizens and refugees between orbits.
No horsing around now, why is NASA peddling "four astronauts" when they could be rock'n roll troopers like those of Star Wars and Battlestar Galatica?
This is very old news. It came out almost 2 months ago.
as i recall, the composite fuel tank had a variety of serious problems, so they planned to replace it with an aluminum one temporarily, and that threw all the the fight test cases back into areas that have already been significantly researched:
. html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0103/01x33/index2
Hence, funding was cut with a lot of construction already done (infrastructure for launch, vehicles nearing test, etc.)
So, yes, it has gone into the black hole.
Could you use some extremely high-power energy source to get high amounts of thrust with an ion engine? Say, a nuclear reactor?
+++ATH0
I can't wait for the private sector comes up with a reusable space craft that's more fuel and cost efficient than anything NASA can come up with. There seems to be too much red-tape and not enough budget for NASA to be able to do anything significant anymore.
That aside, I remember watching the first televised shuttle launch. I held my breath when it took off, and then watched in awe as it landed some week or two later. It was a sense of something great. It's a pretty good bet I most likely won't feel the same about these new rockets. It feels too much of 4 steps back to me....
And exactly who the fuck are you to talk - Von Braun's ghost?
You are right about one thing - I DON'T care what you think.
Blow Me.
Way back in the 2nd Doctor era of Doctor Who, one of the episodes set in the future depicted an earth where rockets were obsolete, and then they had to be brought back into service and improved.
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Russian engines have had greater lifting power for many years, and Russian-developed RD-180 (around 4000kN) engines are made by Pratt & Whitney for Atlas V launches. Compare this to the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine) at about 2000kN, and it makes me curious why they don't opt for a proven, heavy-lifting engine like the RD-180 (at least for the cargo lifter).
On the other hand, once the Russians solve a problem they reuse the design. The engines used for the boosters that launched Sputnic were fundamentally the same as those used for every subsequent vehicle for decades. Need more thrust, add more engines. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Using the same 1960 technologies to get back to the moon?
Why not fixing the shuttle design and finish ISS?
Is ISS going to waste?
Somehow, I knew we wouldnt finish ISS
Uppers, downers, now steroids be astronaughty stuff. :o
What are going to do on the moon once we get there? Impress little kids and convince people how great we are - a sort of a glucose shot to spike up national self esteem that will last about a month or so?
As far as public support, people already stopped caring around the 3rd Apollo moon landing. What do you think is going to make them "ooh" and "aah" again about the moon landings so they will run to their Congressman and petition them to vote for more NASA funding?
It's all very well getting to Mars, but how can they possibly get back again?
I think cheap is better than gee-whiz perfection when it comes to highly experimental projects like space exploration. First what we should work on is sending unmanned packages into space on the ultra-cheap. So cheap that we can send thousands of such packages up if we want to. Ideally these packages would be able to not only get out of our atmosphere but also to self navigate and land on the moon. Then we could build experimental machines designed to study the moon and prepare it for mankind by burrowing out air-tight caves big enough to contain a moon base and maybe even organizing all that material bored out into something that'd be useful for astronauts when they get there. What we want is to send cheap machines up that can put into place everything we'll need to live there. If each machine is cheap enough to make and deliver then we can replace those which fall short of our goals or that fail. Trying to make expensive fail proof machines that are even more expensive to deliver is a sure way to put off getting there until the end of the century. Using cheaper machines and delivery we should be able to get there in the next decade.
As much as people might hate to hear it I'd cut corners on manned space vehicles too although not near as many corners. Exploration has always been a dangerous business. Let the bold take their chances and reap their rewards. Open being an astronaut to anyone that passes a basic phsyical and psych test and whom might be able to do something useful. Honestly we're going to need to send up some cheap manual labor. If 1 in 3 ships doesn't make it it really doesn't matter if the people going are replacable and the ship itself didn't cost much. Hell, fall back to the old system of taking recruits among prisions and the poor. It may be dangerous but it gives them a chance at a new life. Always exploration has been a chance for those with nothing to lose to risk everything for that chance. Do it again.
In the longer view I think the space elevator is going to be the delivery mechanism for the masses but for now ultra-cheap rockets is a good idea. The cheaper the better so long as they can still get the job done at a rate faster than what we're doing now. (Wasn't there a story recently on rockets that need 1/10th the fuel for the same lift? which means carrying less fuel weight which means needing less than 1/10th the amount of fuel to achieve the same work.)
Caution will not win us new frontiers. Let man go where no man has gone before.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The flying cars are around, you just have to attach the right engine on yours. Somewhere in the small print in the manual it says:
To make this car your 2001 model flying car, attach one space shuttle booster to the bottom of the car and ignite the booster by starting your car. (Electrical wiring is sold seperately from the booster and the car)
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Yeah, in particular, whatever happened to hypersonic engines as the first stage?
The first stage could tranfer a large load to about a 20km height at Mach 8 then off you go from there. Or something along those lines, including a combined hypersonics and rocket vehicle.
But I don't agree with you about colonies. There is no particular reason why we more than any other lifeform especially deserves to survive as a species. However, the idea that a small number of us might preserve our genes by going to some other rock in case the Earth gets it seems to me like pure science fiction. The human race isn't just a collection of genes. It's civil societies and the artefacts they create, including ideas. Surely it's worth putting more effort into protecting those? A few people living in an artificial environment on Mars at huge expense is no substitute for New York, or Venice, or the English Lakes, or any of the other threatened places of the Earth. (FI, I'm thinking of the risk of destruction of NY by tsunami, not terrorism).
As for the other poster's comment that Nasa is 0.7% of federal budget, what proportion of R&D is it? In other words, what percentage of the best brains does it occupy on manned spaceflight? I'm suggesting scientific and engineering skills be focussed on the real problems.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Going back to rockets, in this day and age, after forty years is just ridiculous. I think it was universally accepted that the Saturn V and the Apollo modules were about as much as you could possibly lift into space via that method. It's also grossly expensive. The private companies and guys trying to get into space cheaply and efficiently are going to kick NASA all over on this. They shouldn't have even bothered with Apollo and continued the X-15 tests to get a more mobile vehicle into space.
But of course, this could all be a cunning ploy to convince us that programs like Aurora do not exist, could not possibly exist and are not flying into space right now!
The old designs, and this one, are meant for completely different purposes.
You don't use a dump truck to take a cross-country trip.
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without the screams of "doop!" :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
On the solid rocket booster: A more reasonable figure for [reliability of] the mature rockets might be 1 in 50. With special care in the selection of parts and in inspection, a figure of below 1 in 100 might be achieved but 1 in 1,000 is probably not attainable with today's technology.
On the main engine: Engineers at Rocketdyne, the manufacturer, estimate the total probability [of shuttle main engine failure] as 1/10,000. Engineers at marshal estimate it as 1/300, while NASA management, to whom these engineers report, claims it is 1/100,000. An independent engineer consulting for NASA thought 1 or 2 per 100 a reasonable estimate
So, how exactly does this make a safe, reliable launch system?
nuclear propulsion is politically off-limits..
It is off limits for more reasons than just evil liberals and environmentalist and their protests. While I agree that for the forseeable future there is no way to get around nuclear technology in large sized space craft for deep space exploration I also share some of the concerns voiced by people arguing against using nuclear power with wild abandon in the design of spacecraft. The problem is how do you build a large sized space craft capable of really worth while deep space journeys? Do you build the components down on earth and lift them into orbit? In that case what if one of the heavy lifters carrying say, a metric ton of nuclear fuel explodes after launch? Even if the effort succeeds how comfortable will you feel having a nuclear powered space ship or even several space ships each the size of a large nuclear submarine and their nuclear powered support facilities in earth orbit? Considering the hysteria caused by 'Cosmos 954' what would the prospect of an interplanetary space ship crashing to earth do to public support for space exploration? And this is actually not such an implausable suggestion either, all it would take to cause a major disaster is a single piece of space debri or a micro metiorite. I for one would feel alot better about large nuclear powered space craft if they were built as far off planet as possible, preferably on a moonbase using locally mined materials.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Besides, why do you even care if the human species survives, you and I and everyone else alive today would be dead by then.
Somehow "space talk" and astronomy always makes me depressed, it is just a reminder of how silly, short and pointless our lives are...
Just two obligatory things:
1) In Sovjet-Russia, Soyuz launches you!
and
2) I for one welcome our warp-capable overlords!
Huh?
NASA's budget has been mostly flat, with a slight upward trend, for over 15 years.
Trends in Federal R&D, FY 1990-2006 (DOD, NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA) (pdf).
Putting 20,000 tons into orbit would cost trillions, an amount even the
japanese don't have to spare, especially the way their economy is going.
And never mind the financial costs , what happens at the end of its
life and it has to be decommissioned? How to you get something the weight
of a small battleship to come back down to earth safely? 20,000 tons is
not going to burn up on re-entry and can you imagine the sort of damage
that sort of weight hitting the ground or ocean at hypersonic speed would
cause?
I like this mission, the sketch of the technology to be used sounds good. Soild.
It sounds like they have put some good thought into this, it is alot better than the current scrappy shuttle.
I'm excited about a permanment moon base, but I hope i cannot see it from here. I do not want the moons view to be polluted.
I always remember from first contact Riker comments to Zefrem Cochrane that the moon in the 24th century looks very different - it has 50 million inhabitants, and from Earth, you can see the lights of "Tycho City, New Berlin - even Lake Armstrong..."
I really hope this wont happen.
Pablo
I think that we will get to mars via the long tail semantic web 2.0.
I guess this is a bit off topic, but when the world is connected by a wide web it will enable maximization of eyeball dollars.
You are completely right: The Russians didn't spend tens of billions of dollars and didn't have any astronauts killed in accidents. But what you ignore: In stead they spent tens of billions of rubels and had some cosmonauts killed in accidents.
14 lives and billions and billions of dollars later...
Even for low-orbit stuff I get the impression that shuttle has been less of an improvement over rockets than was originally hoped, but I would love to know the numbers for cost and launch success rate.
We can barely afford to keep a low-earth-orbit space station from burning up in the atmosphere, never mind actually doing anything useful. (The crew spends all its time on maintenance.) Now we're supposed to keep a lunar station going using super-sized Apollo designs that were abandoned decades ago because they were too wasteful. What are the crew supposed to do on the moon, anyway? Dig? What are they supposed to do on Mars? It's hard to imagine more useless lumps of dead rock.
Asteroid missions (manned or not) would be interesting. Space elevators would be very interesting. Even another Cassini (for Jupiter) would be interesting. Instead, they're gutting JPL. Anybody who says this is something other than a disaster for NASA and for space exploration is drinking Kool-aid.
Do you mean hundreds of billions of rubles? Because tens of billions of rubles would be merely billions of dollars. One ruble is worth about 5 cents, IIRC.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
(quoted)
Going back to rockets, in this day and age, after forty years is just ridiculous. I think it was universally accepted that the Saturn V and the Apollo modules were about as much as you could possibly lift into space via that method. It's also grossly expensive.
well, nothing has lifted as much stuff to space as saturn V did at 60's and 70's. saturn V has about 5-6 times the lifting capacity of a shuttle, but weights only a bit more and costs about the same to launch than the shuttle.
so talk about capacity, price and efficiency.
USA also had a design of a "saturn VI"(real name was saturn v block II or something like that) , but non were built when the interest to space fligts decreased at 70's. This rocket would have had about twice the paylaod of saturn v, or about 10 times the payload of the shuttle. wonder how much faster the ISS could have been constructed with these rockets..
actually the original plan regarding the shutte was that the shuttle was to be a cheap small personnel carrier and the "saturn VI" was to be used for cargo.. but they did not have budget for both so the "saturn vi" was cancelled and shuttle was enlargened to cargo-carrying vehicle (which eventually became more expensive than both the original shuttle plan and "saturn vi" would propably have cost together)
The biggest breakthough we can hope for is for the brainboxes at NASA/ESA to make a launch vehicle that doesn't carry it's own fule. The advantages of such a system are huge, lower mass (several thousand ton of fule less) means less fule all oth which makes for a cheaper and safer launch with heavier payloads.
Sudgestions my are:
magnetic pulse/rail gun to repel/shoot the craft (probably work better on the moon)
fire the fule at the craft at a plate unter the craft (exploding on contact)
Space elevator go solar! That Jap station with the 3^2km pannels might come in useful.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Or you'll end up as a bike courier who dies every two weeks.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Seriously, every one of the comments above did not mention it. The Space Shuttle is the ONLY way to lift the new sections and the only way for America to send/get back astronauts (Though we can hitch a ride with the russians like we already have)
There is a gap between where the Space Shuttle will be retired (if it isnt taken out of service or has another catastrophic failure before that) and when the new CEV and Heavy Lifting vehicles hopefully come online.
There are 15-20 trips required of the Space Shuttle just to finish the ISS, can it make all these trips before 2010 when it has to be recertified and will probably be decommisioned altogether?
What will be done in the 4 year gap to 2014 when the new vehicles are due?
There is truth in humor.
Or use a calculator, apparently...
Earlier this week I saw something on TV (unfortunatly I have no source, sorry, maybe another Aussie know's what I was watching) where an engineer from NASA was talking about their plans. Basicaly he said that at first they tried to make something most unlike the Apollo as possible but the more they tried the more they realised that the Apollo missions were really well designed. So in regards to the speculation at the end of the /. piece, yes, it's because they realised the old designs were better
I'm sure you know all this already, but just to put things in a historical perspective for those who don't:
The original shuttle design was, basically, a car. It cheap, reusable, and could carry buggerall cargo. And only in some orbits.
Then NASA wanted the Army's space budget. The Army was launching some bloody huge spy satellites (the solar panels alone are pretty darn big) in a polar orbit. And they already had the rockets to launch those. If they were gonna give NASA their budget, NASA had to be guarantee they'd put those huge spy satellites up there. What the Army wanted, basically, was a truck.
So the shuttle got inflated to being big enough a truck to haul up anything that the Army could possibly want hauled up.
So here we are with a one-size-fits-all solution that makes as much sense as saying that a 10-wheeler truck is the one-size-fits-all automobile. You can drive it for anything from cargo transports to groceries to driving your kids to school, right? It has to be the perfect family vehicle, right?
In practice, that one size still didn't fit all.
For starters, now for anything smaller (e.g., a 1-2 ton satellite), packing it in a bloody huge and heavy shuttle makes as much sense as packing a half a pound Walkman in a 100 pound steel safe when shipping it by UPS. Yeah, so the safe is reusable, but you still pay entirely too much for shipping.
As a more insidious thing, it just created the problem of crew safety in a lot of situations where a crew just wasn't needed to start with. (Which, as we know, just jacked prices up even more, and made it even less attractive to use the shuttle for a lot of things. Other than as a national Our-Penis-Is-Bigger-Than-Yours status symbol.)
E.g., the army was already lifting and positioning those satellites in orbit without a crew. A computer is perfectly capable of positioning a satellite in orbit on its own. You don't need a crew of cosmonauts for that.
Using cosmonauts for that just means you have the extra worry of bringing them down in one piece, and bad PR when you don't. An unmanned rocket with a satellite exploding is something we all don't get too emotional about. E.g., you can joke about the Arianne incident and how it shows the risks of reusability, and noone will take it as insensitivity. Or about the Mars lander metric/imperial screw-up. But toast 5 cosmonauts and people get this weird thing called empathy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And for the gravity solution (in getting to Mars), you string the cargo and crew module together, and set them spinning--string in the middle, cargo on one end at one gee, crew on the other end at one gee. That is also Zubrin. If you don't know who BOB ZUBRIN is, you know where to Gooooooooooo.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Only a month late.
...only in reverse.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Things that go "TWANG! ...wwwaaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaauuugh..." in the night.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Back in the 50s and 60s, rockets were a relatively new and unproven technology, but since nobody had any better ideas on how to put a man on the moon back then, NASA accepted the risk. It was cutting edge technology, but NASA were pioneers, so of course that's what they were doing.
Now they want to go back, but I wouldn't call rockets cutting edge technology anymore: the space elevator is. Yes, the space elevator requires a crucial component that we're not able to manufacture yet, but we're very close and if this project were given the same budget and time frame for completion as the current moon project, we'd have something we could build on after the project is over: not just another entry in the history books.
- Apparently not a smidgen of Apollo hardware will be used.
- We're talking separate boosters for crew and cargo, again not an Apollo paridigm.
- Using liquid methane ain't the Apollo way either.
It's more a marketing thing, piggybacking on the name of a successfull project. Just like calling everything "Ethernet", even though it's now completely different in every way from the original.Personally, I am a great fan of the Apollo Era... Large rockets and such. However, I am a fan of large spaceships too. I would definately be a fan of constructing a few large spaceships in orbit... say 100 meters long with numerous rooms and labs in them... something for a very long haul. but thats just me wanting to see Starships... Lets build a Galaxy Class... sorry off topic.
Anyway I would love to see something thats more "safe" and something that can provide us with a venue to get to the moon, Mars... Orbit Venus perhaps.... and go on to the asteroid belt.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
The article is dated 9.22, today is 10.24.
More than a month late?
Nothing to see here, move along.....
Mmm... yeah. Now, I'm sure that NASA is hoping that's what they'll get, but all it will take will be one mission failure, a new war somewhere for the US to fight, or just a change in the political wind, and they'll be back to square one. Again.
Maybe NASA wants to use the 'but we can't give up now - look at all the money we've already spent!' argument. Personally I'd love there to be a moonbase, and Mars missions, and all the other cool stuff, but boring reality (and the shrill, tedious cries of the 'how DARE we spend money on space when somewhere a child is starving?' brigade) tends to smack down the dreams far too quickly.
You must think in Russian.
But it's been bugging me. When the Space Elevator is used in the future as a lift system to get out of the atmosphere, at what point would one riding on it be weightless since it goes straight up and you're never in free-fall?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Space planes don't really make much sense and afaiui, the US and Sovient Union were hell bent on making space planes
/sense/ for robots to explore space... the psychological factors, of human exploration are in many ways, just as important in terms of dare I say it, colonising beyond the constraints of the earth's biosphere.
only to prove to one another that each side could.
It's good to see more practicle if less spectacular designs being proffered by NASA.
Plus I must say, despite the fact that it's makes more
We need to see more senseful decisions like this and ideally as much international collaberation as possible, as humans begin again, to push the frointers of space.
Carpe diem !
Thank god. I have been screaming anout the stupidity of the shuttle. To hell with sexy, I want cheep.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
I don't think we should use "steroids" to signify bigger/stronger things.
There are other ways to be clever without promoting drug use.
I'm serious.
...are vapour already.
I vote that we build two real bang-bangs and put a real station into a real orbit with one, and a real mine and a real slingshot onto the Moon with the other. Far less polluting and far safer than the hundreds of missions they would replace, and they'd shave, oh -- I don't know -- maybe 50 years off the space program?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?
No, it's the result of engineers recognizing and admitting that there are better, safer, cheaper ways to get into orbit. That admission in itself is progress.
The shuttle was designed to beat the Russians.
Australia has lots of big flat areas you're welcome to drag a Daedelus to in case it blows up.
Just don't forewarn any of the anti-nuke campaigners who are forcing us to subsist on coal fired power stations instead, which literally chuck tonnes of raw uranium out the stack every year.
The spots I'm thinking of are not even any use to the Aboriginals, who can survive in some amazingly desolate places (the few genuines who remain, that is; their city cousins would be dead in two days, tops).
Even if you blew up a Daedalus or few en route, the zero-pollution returns from the big powersats the working ones launch would more than compensate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's a common misconception that once you get out of our atmosphere you're close to getting out of the Earth's gravity. If you built a massive skyscraper up to the space station's average altitude, and stood on the top floor, you would feel (a rough guess) about two thirds of your normal body weight.
The reason people in orbit feel weightless is the same reason someone who's skydiving feels weightless; they're constantly falling and aren't resisting accellerating towards the Earth. The only difference is that when you're in orbit you're falling around the planet, not into it.
What this means as regards your comment is that it's no trivial thing to fling scrap metal from used up rockets to the moon, that's the very reason why they're released. Notice how when they are released they fall back to Earth, and don't carry on in their trajectory as you would expect if the rocket had escaped Earth's gravity.
Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?
Yeah sure, like they are going to spend a few billion of US tax payers and risk lives for a bunch of hearts...
Presumably they mean bloated and likely to suffer a premature death.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
The panels will produce lots of electricity. You can drop a wire and a weight, and use that as an electric motor armature, treating the Earth's magnetic field as a stator. Viola, reactionless propulsion (werl, eggsurely and to be completely honest, it reacts against the whole Earth). If the thing eventually gets so decripit that it looks like it's actually going to die, send it off to L5 or prang it into the Moon. BFHD!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The Moon is basically grey anyway, and so are the landers, suits and rover. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I've got a buddy who works at in the space division at Boeing - when I asked him how come we don't just use Apollo tech to get back into space, he gave me a fairly interesting history lesson. All the data for the space programs of the 50's, 60's, and 70's was systematically destroyed while the programs were current. They didn't want any plans to leak, so every two months all the paperwork was destroyed. This ensured that nobody could get all the information in one place besides extremely high ranking officials. That is why they are reverse engineering that last Apollo rocket in Alabama.
They'd be even cheaper if it wasn't for patent gougers and the RIAA.
I wonder how little they can build an Energia equivalent for? Twenty $13 million Energia-equivelent launches can put a heck of a lot more hardware up than the Shuttle's piddly 30 tonnes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This looks like a fake to me: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/cev/CEVedit2.mov
Since when did NASA design the shuttle to land on other planets?
Geosynchronous orbit.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Are you sure? The Buran was very similar to the shuttle in design, and the Klipper is as well.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-boo1.h tm
We can't even get living on Earth right and we're going to Mars?
very simple. nasa just needs a shrinking device. ... hey, now 4 astronauts just weight ... woud it be great to have :P .. we really want a real spaceship!
let's say four astronauts weight around 250 kg.
so if they invent some new particle at cern and
shot these at the astronauts, maybe they can shrink them
by a factor ten
25 kg!
anyway, if they can't find that shrinking particle,
maybe they can start doing some genetics on future
astronauts
a fully fledged astronaut, but only 80 cm tall and 30 kg
heavy?
you know
Zonk,
You need to keep a better handle on the news. That story is months old.
Why are you still here?
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
It's not really news at all - I mean the European Space Agency has understood the value of Russian engineering done decades ago and simply decided that it was the better choice over spending vast sums of money on try-and-fail schemes. Even more interesting is: "In 2007 a Soyuz launcher will take off from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana (South America). This will be an historic event as it will be the first time that a Soyuz launcher lifts off from a spaceport other than Baikonur or Plesetsk. It will also be a milestone in the strategic cooperation between Europe and Russia in the launcher's sector."
I believe an article similar to this can be found in the September 2005 issue of Popular Science. Eventually, it will hit the Popular Science archives at http://www.popsci.com/popsci/archive/index.html
NASA might do this kind of rocket. I don't see it happening because of the existing Atlas rockets that are capable of heavy lifting already. Why re-engineer what Lockheed Martin has already succeeded in doing? Of course, we are talking about government here. If they really wanted to do it they should take their design to Lockheed Martin and say, "This is what we want to do and your existing rocket is the closest thing to it. Make it so within this gracious budget, because that's all your getting!" That would be too simple, wouldn't it?
In the 1980s, a Soyuz booster did explode (just like the Challenger), but since they didn't commit the fundamental design flaw of omitting an escape system, the cosmonauts walked away from the incident.
Their launch cost = 1/20th of shuttle launch cost.
Which country's taxpayers are getting a better deal for their money?
Perhaps the Soviet Union was forced to do it economically because of, well, economic factors. They could not afford to waste the kind of money that the U.S. does. (Of course, you could argue that the U.S. should not be wasting the money, even if they could afford it!)
In the U.S., the massive spending on the Shuttle benefits the taxpayer group, that we could call, "The Shuttle Contractors."
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
With a rocket configuration you don't have to worry about foam coming off your fuel tank and damaging parts of your vechile that are important for reentry.
instead of a tether, use the girder system that holds the solar panels and (possibly) the communication antennas. Should be strong enough then.
why is this modded -1? He is right on mark. The RD-180 was designed because some of the russian engines were not designed correctly. More importantly, it has come to be used in our space systems because it was designed right.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think this is by far the best way to handle the problem :
e r2005.html
http://www.elevator2010.org/site/competitionClimb
I've worked at NASA JSC since 1979. There was a history archive building (or actually, several). I worked in one of them on a very slow second shift, watching data reduction programs design the leading edge of the shuttle wing, among other things. I browsed the library for reading material while I waited for tapes to spin and printers to print. (And card readers to read, too!)
All the plans were there. When they shut down the office, they dumped boxes and boxes of duplicate records, books, etc, that had been collected as the various parts of Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, etc shutdown. I got a chronology of Skylab. Another coworker got books on Apollo and Gemini, along with drafts of the first space shuttle - the one called Dynasoar, and its descendents, from back in the 1950's.
"Systematic destruction" is complete baloney.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Do you know why the Shuttle costs so much and keeps blowing up? Because it's too complex. It consists of four major "parts" that have to be mated in the VAB then carried out to the pad on an rediculous transport. The four "parts" are individually some of the most complex and part-intensive rockets even build. The SRB's, in turn, are fabricated in parts and shipped for assembly.
Failure is strongly related to the number of parts. More parts means more things that can break, and a highly failure rate as a result.
So maybe people out there will understand why I find the idea of strapping five of these things to a new and part-assembled core is an ABSOLUTELY REDICULOUS IDEA.
Sure, SSTO is difficult, but it IS doable. But even if you don't want to spend that much, we know for sure we can do low-risk DSTO like Shuttle II et all. All hail the reduction of development budgets!
This is simply the wrong way to go. Dump Fred into the ocean, where it belongs, and built a _real_ launch system. Enough already!
Maury
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I heard about this months ago when the latest shuttle landed. Good job staying on the latest-breaking stories. The data on the article is even a month old.
Slashdot: Rumors and out-dated news for nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore.
I was all keyed up to see how the new system works, but the first thing that caught my eye was the use of Shuttle-era solid rocket boosters (SRB's) for the crew launch option. This is not a Good Thing.
Solid boosters have plenty of inherent disadvantages when compared to their liquid-fueled cousins. First and foremost, when you light an SRB, it's going to take off no matter what. They can't be stopped. If something goes wrong at any point, your only option is the range safety destruction charges. SRB's cannot be throttled, either. In short, they don't give you a lot of options. They are, however, simpler, requiring no cryogenic turbopumps or internal tanks, and they can be prepped well in advance of the launch.
Using SRB's for cargo is no problem. Using them for crewed vehicles gives me the heebie jeebies. The "old" Saturn V system used liquid-fueled engines for many reasons, and safety and flexibility were high on that list.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
My very first memory, from when I was 2 1/2, is of the moon landing...I have been a space buff since, tacking everything space related. From the beginning, I hated the design of the shuttle. Way too complex. Too much to go wrong. And reuse? Were they crazy?
I bet my best friend [Vic Spicer] in the early 80s $2 that a shuttle would blow up because of the solid rocket boosters or burn up because of lost tiles, when I called him on that January 1986 day to collect, he rightfully hung up on me. I didn't call him when when we lost Columbia...
I will be very glad to see the shuttle go.
I used to be a big believer in NASA but they really represent the worst way to do space technology. They are full of design-by-committee pork projects. It is in NASA's best interest to keep the projects as expensive and complicated as possible in order to maintain the status-quo. They want to maintain the illusion that only something like a "NASA" is capable of doing anything in space. I say bullshit to that. I think the private sector will ultimately trump all of these expensive government projects whether its from NASA, Russia, ESA or whatever. I wish I had a link to a satire article called "Flatlanders"? which really put the issue into perspective for me. Anyone have a link?
From the article: "but it won't be your grandfather's moon shot". Got that right. It looks like my father's moonshot, version 2.0 beta.
The Shuttle was born in the era when oil crises, skyrocketing (pun intended) energy prices, and terrorists demonstrating the folly of America's dependence on Mideastern energy showed America it needed a reusable launch system. This new system is born in the era when all that is the same, and much worse (after using up 30 years more fuel), but instead with a stupid oil cowboy running the show.
--
make install -not war
Not the Army, but the Air Force, and really the NRO, whom the Air Force is working for in the spysat biz.
Second, they never did it. The Vandenberg site was a boondoggle and work on the Shuttle facility was scrapped after Challenger. I was living in L.A. in the early 80s and REALLY looking forward to shuttle flights out of Vandenberg. SLIC-6 at Vandenberg is now an ELV facility, and the Air Force has EELV, which handles their requirements.
Agree, however, that the shuttle was trying to please too many people in order to get funded. That, and they jumped from drawing board to operational fleet of 5 orbiters without a true demonstrator or X-rocket. The Shuttle Main Engine is an impressive technical achievement, but is costly to reuse. The original vision of routine spaceflight at $100/kg was never remotely achieved.
Helium balloons want to be free.
I heard that they used the hubble to take pictures of the moon a few weeks ago including the apollo landing sites. But I can't find the hubble pictures of the apollo landing sites anywhere on NASA.gov. Can anyone help?
Citing tech limitations is a valid argument for us Americans...but not the Japanese...they're masters of perfection. If they want to do it, they'll figure out how to, and they'll do it fast and cheap.
What doesn't make sense is all the energy they are waisting blasting things back and forth from earth to the international space station... NASA Better model... Launch a rocket with cargo pod including men to go the international space station as well as all the fuel and resources they need to go to the moon, unfortunatly probably including a lunar lander( until they find a more efficient way of landing on the moon) that will be left behind. Rocket docks with international space station. Pickup a used lunar module(minus the lander). ISS operators load supplys from their rocket to a space shuttle docked and serviced with the ISS. Shuttle is re-fueled with supplys takes off for 2 week journey to the moon (probably would be pretty slow). Shuttle orbits Moon. Shuttle launches Lunar Module. People go to the moon do their thing come back dock with the space shuttle and the shuttle takes them back to the ISS. From there they can hop the next ride home. In this model you save a lot of resources. If it cost X ammount of money per pound to launch there is no reason not to re-use all the standard parts that would come home anways and service them in space. If they lighten the load they could save a lot of $ in launching stuff into our orbit. Heck the Russians might even fly our astronauts into space for us at 20Million a pop. Somehow I think that would be cheaper than it costs us to get GiArmstrong into space ourselves. It might take some retrofitting of the shuttles we have left but they would never have to come back to earth and we might get another 20 years out of them, but Endevour and Atlantis could be permently left in space to do skips from the orbit of the moon to the orbit to the ISS, heck with 2 of them we would have an emergancy recovery shuttle always ready to go save someone in space. We might even consider designing them for conventional lunar flight. Something we will most likely eventualy want to do as well.. ISS-for the moon, along with a lunar network of satalites. Wow just thing with the number of lunar meteor strikes we might want to put up a norad on the moon.
It seems that the idea of bringing satelites down from space have been pushed to the public sector. Not sure if they would develop a shuttle, but a device that can capture and repair satelites in orbit seems more plausable.
I'm sure eventually space elevators would work out and you can ditch rockets alltogether and then maybe the Shuttle would be feasable. Lift it up and it can fly down.
They also have seperated the people from the cargo so the people ship can be more reliable, and the cargo ship can be less reliable, e.g. the solid fuel boosters.
Strapping solid fuel boosters to people has never been a good idea.
Inside every complex program is a simple solution trying to get out.
... on /. on Sept 20, Sept 15 ...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
pffft, aww cmon, thats highschool stuff... 9.81m/s^2 i mean really
Yes, Buran was a copy of the shuttle. It flew a test flight or two, and was then scrapped. It never carried passengers.
No possible way!
The NASA way is the worst possible way, and whatever approach NASA takes *becomes* the worst possible approach, even if it's the approach we praise the Russian (or any other) space program for using.
I read it on Slashdot. (or sci.space.tech, or just about anywhere else.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It is part of the samed flawed NASA that kept the shuttle around too long. First off we have a station that is designed around what the shuttle could deliver. We also have a station butchered by committee. What we have now is not a system which was proposed back in the Reagan days.
I figure the best bet would be to push it into a much higher "parking" orbit and revisit it once we get the new launch technology together. This would be more politically acceptable than deorbiting it. By the time we get back to it we can probably find some uses for it as a whole or by components. Most likely we would just be able to ditch it then as being "too old".
If this new reengineering of NASA can keep on the "do it right" mindset instead of "lets do it because we can" we might actually see real human exploration of space. Putting robots up is fine but it doesn't really advance our use of space. It will take people to do that. Some will say going to the moon again is "because we can" but I say it is "because we must". We must get out of orbit to keep advancing space technology and understanding of how things work. This in turn will lead to advancements and such that can be used back on Earth. But sitting in Earth orbit gets us nowhere. We have been there for 50 odd years already. All the big accomplishments took place in the 60s and early 70s. Ever since its been a study in new ways to look flashy but not really do anything.
Let NASA be the builder of destinations. Then let the privates make use of those destinations. NASA needs to be the one who does the gruntwork to establish a presence in space. From there we get others to build on that. Having a government agency develope the base from which private enterprise expands is a valid use. Besides if he have to wait for a private enterprise to provide the basis of being in space we will end up with a very proprietary and private solution.
and this time, don't handicap missions in space because of your partners.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They decided they wanted to continue to try to drive capital away from commercial launch services so they could continue to keep a strangle hold on access to space.
Time was when I would have supported NASA's science missions, supported by a commercial launch infrastructure. However, now its clear they just use their science missions as an excuse to block anyone from competing for their monopoly position.
Seastead this.
Of course it'll work. It's already been done successfully before.
Now is it going to be significantly better or an actual advance? Sure doesn't look like it.
Whereas while I'm not sure a space elevator would be buildable, if it actually works it'll be a significant advance.
The past 20 years in aerospace have been rather disappointing.
Contrast:
1969: Concorde, Jumbo Jet, Man on moon, etc.
2005: Low earth orbits with flaky manned spacecraft, plus talking about redoing stuff already done 30 years ago.
Seems almost like going backwards into the Dark ages from the Roman Empire.
Actually, assuming the chance of failure on an individual flight is 1/100 and failure on each flight is statistically independent, then the failures are poisson distributed. While the mean number of failures out of 176 flights would be 1.76, the probability of zero failures after 176 flights is 17%; thus, we can't say with any real confidence that Feynman was wrong, according to your numbers. In other words, it's not all that improbable (about 1 chance in 5) that Feynman was right and the failure just hasn't happened yet.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
These two things have really nothig to do with eachother.
..........FULL STOP.
other than using solid fuel, what is the advantage of adapting shuttle components to a capsule system over using saturn IV designs. why not update the F1 engine? it was the most powerful engine we have ever developed and extreamly reliable. the saturn IV rocket could still operate with a total engine failure. with present day computer technology, it seems to me a better system could be developed using the saturn IV as a starting point, not the shuttle.
the SSME's have undergone continual upgrades since that time to improve their efficiency and safety.
the SSME's are the most reliable rocket engines ever built by man.
-
I'm curious, if we move the launching of rockets from sea level to
someplace like Denver, how much fuel could we save, and how much
smaller (less $) would the rockets have to be?
Tom
put a valve in there???? :P
Great idea, it'll only come out late and need to be patched in a week
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Would you mind posting a pointer to the polls you refer to? I'm interested as to how they were conducted.
They work. Back around '91, the mom of a friend of mine had one from her doctor. Her arm was in a cast for a long time, and she used it to rebuild the muscle mass. The problem is, when you're in space, all of your muscles need to be exercised, so that method wouldn't work well.
BTW: I have a "Dr Ho's" (no, serious, that's what it's called) massager that works under the same principal and I like it. It's the only thing that can relax my tense shoulder muscles. It takes surprisingly little energy. I've had it for about 3 years, and I'm still on it's original 1 AAA battery.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Ming: Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?
Klytus: An obscure body in the S-K system, your Majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet, "Earth."
Ming: How peaceful it looks.
(He activates a console, and watches as earthquakes, floods, etc., start to occur. They both get a good laugh out of it.)
Klytus: Most effective, your Majesty. Will you destroy this, uh, "Earth?"
Ming: Later. I like to play with things a while. Before annihilation....
Buran was a proof that they can do it to stick to the Americans. But how many lives did Buran take? Russians didn't think it was cost effective and efficient. Launching the supposedly "re-usable" shuttle is more expensive than launching the old Soviet "disposable" rockets.
What for? There will be no-one to regret it since everybody would be dead. If 'survival' of mankind is the main reason for such a project I think the money would better be invested on Earth to try and make that a better place for everyone.
There is not enough room in the memory of the main line computers for all the programs of ascent, descent, and payload programs in flight, so the memory is loaded about four time from tapes, by the astronauts.
Because of the enormous effort required to replace the software for such an elaborate system, and for checking a new system out, no change has been made to the hardware since the system began about fifteen years ago. The actual hardware is obsolete; for example, the memories are of the old ferrite core type.
Ferrite core memory?????
I prefer the Martian method of using lightning (or however) for space travel like in The War Of The Worlds.
I supose like others had said - by trebuchets or rubber bands - is the same but powered by tension or gravity.
I like more power!
The real source of opposition is the security agencies who are worried that the nuclear components used in these reactors will become targets for terrorists (either to steal or destroy).
Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?
It is, and if the US would spend the money on the following we would all be a lot better off:
1) Renewable Energy R&D(petroleum costs are the single greatest drag on the world economy)
2) Nanotechnology (for a programmable autonomous robotics infrastructure)
3) Broadband (How much would it really cost to get everyone 30Mbps? If 250 million people could video-conference and telecommute, how much gas would that save?)
I'm perfectly content going to mars or the moon via my home theatre and PC thankyou.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Their launch cost = 1/20th of shuttle launch cost.
Of coarse the Soyuz only lifts 5 tones to orbit. The current shuttle launch system could lift 80 tones to orbit if it used expendable engines rather than the space shuttle engines.
cost to launch a Soyuz: $35 million ($7million/ton)
cost to launch a shuttle: $450 million ($ 5.6 million/ton)
But the shuttle doesn't use expendable engines, so it can only lift 24 tons in the real world. And since they've decided that routinely lifting heavy loads in the shuttle is too dangerous for the crew, much of what capacity they do have goes wasted.
Some other points --
The shuttle was sold as the primary launch vehicle for satellites, not just large ones. One mission could launch one large satellite, or several smaller satellites, or a smaller satellite with its own hefty booster. (Think interplanetary missions.)
All supposedly cheaper than using a disposable launcher.
This only works with incredibly unrealistic numbers. Weekly shuttle flights, quick and cheap turnaround that was completed within a few weeks. Costs so low that industry could rent shuttle time for industrial research, etc. Funny how it didn't work out that way. I think the Centaur (heavy duty boosters) were dropped long before Challenger, from safety concerns, and all satellite launches were dropped after Challenger.
Second, the shuttle was sold as a way to bring satellites safely back to earth. The theory was that it was cheaper to haul something back to earth, fix it, then launch it again than fix it in space or simply replace it entirely.
One small problem - it's only safe to bring a satellite back down to earth if it's dead (no more manuveuring propellant), but it's not considered safe to approach dead satellites. Catch-22.
I think a few satellites have been retrieved, e.g., some long-exposure research satellites used to identify suitable materials for future satellites, but only a handful.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
a.) they were out of control, as they were no longer attatched to that which controlled them; the shuttle stack. And at least one of them corkscrewed like a typically unstable rocket. However, this means nothing, and is not an insult in any way, shape or form. Stability was not a design requirement for the SRBs, as they were not intended to fly 'alone'.
The fact that they did survive being detached and tossed about without breaking up *is* impressive. The amount of bending moment placed upon those SRB's must have been incredible.
b.) YES! I am very glad to hear that NASA is moving back to a system which allows for an escape mechanism. Of course if they add a solid to the stack that will make an escape virtually impossible, as you cannot safely eject while under thrust.
Except that this is a marginal cost that ignores that cost of getting where we are in the first place (i.e. developing the shuttle, building and maintaining an organization that operates it) and the opportunity cost of not having spent the money on something else (e.g. a bunch of conventional rockets). The NASA budget for shuttle operations is $5B/year. It launches how many shuttles in a good year? It launched one this year, so that's $60 million/ton.
Same idea three generations later. Will the
translunar drama of A13 also be included this time ?
If not Im not going to watch.
...that the Russians, with their Soyuz design, are moving to a winged vehicle at the same time the US is moving to a capsule (a la Soyuz) design, with everyone here (and elswhere) championing how much better the Russian approach has been?
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/kliper.html
Bear in mind the the Kliper is no Shuttle - it's much better thought-out. I think the greater flexibility of the reentry profile is invaluable, and am generally excited to see this bird fly.
Maybe they fixed the problems that killed them earlier, but they sure didn't get the first glass cocpit verson of their Soyuz right. It went ballistic on re-entry, (and that's a bad thing).
That was an eloquent explanation - I am often amazed at the ignorance of IT people I deal with at customers each day, and the general ignorance of the population in general in terms of scientific activity.
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
What would happen if the shuttle's guidance system failed? It would end up ballistic as well, but not before breaking up into thousands of white-hot pieces.
A: Not dangerous. Dilute beam falls on fenced-off antennae and is geared to only operate when the ground-station guarantees it's on target (and many other safeguards, most of them independently rigged to fail-safe). You can (and should) carry out agriculture under the antenna arrays.
B: Powersats don't produce radioactive waste, and once up don't require any dangerous or destructive mining, transport or refining for at least a couple of decades. In fact, launching a powersat more or less in one piece with an Orion (huge rocket which runs on a string of nuclear fusion bombs) would produce less radioactive waste than burning enough coal to produce the same amount of energy as the powersat.
C: Yes, I know you didn't ask this one, but I'll answer it anyway. (-: No, they won't fall on your head. They fly high, they can be propelled reactionlessly from their own resources, they're a damn near unmissible target for a missile, and the atmosphere would pretty much shred everything except maybe a central core anyway.
I personally am all for building fission reactors, since they're a lot greener than what we have now, but powersats have other, more exciting implications beyond additional green-ness.
And in answer to the Thor-worshipper: some handiwork your god does, it wore out completely in less than 40 hours! And does he warrant his work? No? I didn't think so. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The Flying Spaghetti Monster http://www.venganza.org/, Of Course!
-- Terry
Multi-booster heavy-lifter rocket designs not terribly different from the proposed heavy-lift system here were detailed in Popular Science in the 70's or 80's. I recall seeing the article myself.
Sadly, the Shuttle never fully lived up to its intended purpose; its alleged advantages became curses instead. It wouldn't be unfair to say that NASA's "detour" with the Shuttle, combined with public ignorance, is what set space colonization back almost three decades.
Using these much simpler rocket systems makes much better economic sense. Use these heavy-lifter rocket systems to finally get orbital or Moon-based manufacturing and construction facilities built, and then focus on dedicated interplanetary craft that aren't subject to the same nasty design requirements as STO craft. Planetary gravity wells are the biggest design problem facing spacecraft designers. Once we have a space elevator system, we may no longer need to fret so much over having "reusable" STO craft.
from the article "The new ship can be reused up to 10 times. After the craft parachutes to dry land (with a splashdown as a backup option), NASA can easily recover it, replace the heat shield and launch it again." Yay we're reusing the capsule! -wait we're wasting the rockets that brought it into space.. Why don't they just leave the capsule in earth orbit and send only a new crew, that can be send up in a much smaller rocket? This way, you just have to replace heat-shield of a much smaller vehicle, and save a lot of rocket. also there can't be any damage on the capsule because of landing. Must admit disadvantages that you can't repair as much in orbit, maybe something in the orbital mechanics (dont think so the last one). And ofcourse the orbiting capsule must be refuelled every time. (or just replace propulsion as a whole) And the new crew has to dock with the capsule. I'm sure NASA has its reasons for doing things the way it does (and creating jobs, for people and/or (US)companies will be part of it), but why dont they link to them? Americans (I am Dutch) may want to know where their tax-money is going..
However, the answer to your question is quite simple. I (and Panurge) am strongly in favor of any space program which supports basic scientific research, is intended to understand more about the solar system, and especially may have implications for defense against external threats such as asteroid collision. I believe that advances in robotics and remote communications mean that manned spaceflight is pointless until we come up with vastly better propulsion and shielding options. In the late 50s and 60s I was an enthusiastic follower of the US and the Russian space programs, and an amateur astronomer who built my own telescopes and radio receivers, but I think history has shown we got little out of the various trips to the Moon. Far less than we got out of communications satellites or the Mars Rovers. Or Hubble.
So I consider that manned spaceflight is purely a political activity, and I am deeply suspicious of all activities intended to aggrandize politicians.
En tout cas, comme j'ai dit, Panurge n'est maintenant qu'un avatar mort.
This is long gone off the front page, so nobody is ever going to see it, but...
The power isn't even remotely the hard part. That's not to say it's easy, but reaction mass is a much bigger issue.
9.8 m/s*s for 86400 seconds is 847 km/s. Assuming you've got some mythical ion drive with vast amounts of thrust and an exhaust velocity of 50 km/s, your delta V is going to be nearly 17 times your exhaust velocity.
And that's a six-nines (0.999999) mass fraction.
Just for the acceleration. The deceleration is the same trick over again, so you're up to 10^12 kg for every kg of rocket, just in reaction mass. Throw in another couple orders of magnitude for the trip into orbit, and, yeah, not going to happen.
and I just debunked your silly journal article, btw
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net