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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...
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...
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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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
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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.
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.
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?