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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?"
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.
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.
You need a spinning ring to provide artificial gravity or they will literally collapse when they set foot on Mars.
;)
Not necessarily. If you accelerate at 1 g for half of the trip, then do a flip and decelerate at the same rate for the second half of the trip you get the same effect, with the added bonus of getting there faster. The only problem is the energy required to do that, but I'm sure they'll figure that out some day...
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.
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This isn't an attempt at something nouveau and ground-breaking engineering-wise
until there's some fantastic new propulsion technology, ground-breaking engineering isn't going to happen anyway. there's only so much you can do within the bounds of chemical rockets. nuclear propulsion is politically off-limits, and ion engines haven't scaled to multi-ton spacecraft yet.
It's hardly a waste of fuel. If you did what the grandparent post suggested you'd get to Mars in less than 48 hours. It'd be great if we could do that, but we can't. The question is, though, how much acceleration do you need to maintain body mass?
How we know is more important than what we know.
When you are going to Mars, or the Moon, you don't need slick aerodynamic spacecraft. The wings on the shuttle do nothing other than make it fly like a glider when it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. On a trip to Mars or the Moon, they are simply dead weight that would have to be pushed along.
Nothing has changed in external capsule design over the past 35 years either, but don't count on them being oldschool tech - They will incorporate a whole heap of new technologies, and internally they will be totally different.
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?
The things you mention, and other unavoidable stuff like a massive meteor strike, are precisely the reason(s) we should be doing these things. Our goal shouldn't be to "simply" get to the Moon, or Mars. Our goal should be to establish a viable self-sufficient colony there that would ensure, should some catastrophy strike here on Earth that wipes out all life on the planet, the survival of the human species. Right now, all of humanity's eggs are in one basket, and as you've pointed out, that basket is looking more fragile by the day.
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No kidding.
Combined spend on the shuttles and the space station:- around $250bn
US _annual_ defence budget: $417bn in 2003, and increasing.
35 years in the future? When you don't know what technology will be like in even 10 years, how can you possibly plan 35 years ahead?
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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.
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But would you argue that the Ford Focus is based upon the model T? ;-)
The Soyuz orbiter is being constantly updated, pretty much each one that goes up is an improvement on the previous one. I think to call what flies now 1960s technology is a bit harsh. Yes you did say it's based upon it, but in that case, I just drove to work in a low-tech vehicle based upon a 1908 design.
Damn I hoped I'd get more for my money than that
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It's all very well getting to Mars, but how can they possibly get back again?
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.
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.
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With the shuttle, if the rocket explodes then everybody dies. With a design which places the crew capsule at the top, and an escape tower attached to it, then when the rocket explodes, everybody gets a really exciting ride and has to abort the mission, but they land safely. There is an enormous difference between low "mission success" reliability and low "the crew survives" reliability. The shuttle had the latter, this design should only have the former.
That lack of vision is what holds us back these days. You look at stuff like some of the cathedrals/castles in Europe that they made with tech that was nowhere near ours, (or temples in the far east, some of the stuff the egyptians built etc) and thye had vision to build stuff that took well in excess of 35 years. If we never aim for anything thats gonna take more than 5-10 years your never going to achieve anything truly great, and if you never start because the tech might improve tomorrow, you'll never do anything at all.
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.
Money isn't some magical thing that makes things appear out of thin air. If you don't spend R&D money on space or related areas you'll have alot of scientists and engineers doing the equivalent of flipping burgers.
Or you could retrain them, but adding man-power doesn't nessesarily solve the problems very much faster.
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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.
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We can't even get living on Earth right and we're going to Mars?
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?
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 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.
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