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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?"
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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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" -
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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Ferrying U.S. astronauts into space aboard much safer rockets.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.