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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?"
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.
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...
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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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.
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....
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.
Exactly my point. I just dont think the general public will be much impressed with ordinary rockets, simply because they look like something out of old Wernher von Brauns mind - and not at alle like those in the movies. The russian Soyuz programme has - in its own way - been a much more succesfull launch-system than the shuttle. But they have the grim look of baikonur and no hightech appeal.
Nasa is depending on the politicians for funding. Politicians are depending on public support. But will the public be impressed by rockets, that - nevermind all the new technology inside - looks like something out of the sixties? Thats what i want to know. Nasa is not just a company that blasts things into space. They are a company that feeds the american public with dreams.
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?
What really matters is the price of a new mission, not how much material gets recycled from the last one. The problem ends up being that the cost of refurbishing the orbiter to make another flight isn't too much different than the cost of a whole new "dumb" rocket. Why spend $500,000,000 to relaunch a Shuttle if you can just get a whole new rocket?
Remember that building something to be reusable not only adds initial design cost, but it makes the finished product more expensive and heavier, and the added weight makes each launch more expensive.
One of these new rockets is little more than a huge fuel tank with engines on the bottom and a capsule strapped to the top. The crew capsule will be reusable. Since the fuel and tank get expended anyway, the engines are the only part of the system that would be thrown away which the Shuttle reuses. In practice it should end up not being that wasteful.
To make the inevitable car analogy, look at fuel economy numbers for a small passenger car (like a Honda Civic), a full-size pickup truck, and a semi-truck. The pickup gets 3 times better mileage than the semi, but can only carry 1/10 the cargo. Meanwhile the Civic gets 3 times better mileage than the pickup and can carry the same number of people. It should be obvious that the best way to send a few people cross-country is with the Civic and the best way to send cargo cross-country is with the semi.
The pickup (like the Shuttle) is only useful for short hauls of small cargo or a few people. It would be the best option if you could only have a SINGLE vehicle, but if you could have TWO vehicles then it would be better to have the Civic and the semi for this cross-country trip.
dom
You mean like the N1. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0 196.shtml
"Though seemingly more complex, the Soviets believed this approach could be developed more quickly than Apollo and would allow them to beat the Americans by making the first lunar landing as early as September 1968. However, this plan turned out to be woefully optimistic. While some blame rests on the LK and LOK vehicles whose designs fell behind schedule, the ultimate failure of the Soviet manned lunar program rests squarely on the N1. At least nine examples of this enormous rocket were completed and four were launched on unmanned test flights. Unfortunately, all four failed in spectacular fashion."
When you take a long road trip, how do you get back? You don't carry hundreds of gallons of fuel in your car, you fill up when you need to. Same idea with the Mars mission; you send a bunch automated chemical equipment to Mars, and it makes fuel out of CO2 and Hydrogen. When the astronauts get to Mars, they have their own filling station in order to get them back home.
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.
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.
I guess the Russians must have figured out what they were doing wrong then, when they built the RD-180 (http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/engines/rd1 80_sum.shtml) and licensed it to Pratt & Whitney to be used for Atlas V, US military launches.
- 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....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 maybe mad enough to take their experience in designing accurate and reliable missiles to the highest bidder. Wasn't that what we were worried about after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
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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.
The ISS doesn't really serve any useful purpose at this point. It exists as a place for the Space Shuttle to go to, and the Space Shuttle exists as a vehicle that gets us to the ISS. Check out this article for more indo.
The N1 was incredibly unstable and very complex BECAUSE of all of the engines. Sometimes the NASA approach works better. Also, if I remember right, the USSR used only one vehicle rather then a separate CSM and LEM like the US did. This made the man vehicle very heavy because it had to have everything including the engine capable of deorbiting the moon and for the course back to Earth. The engines and the much bigger vehicle was ultimately what did the N1 in. The first stage of the N1 had 30 engines! Invariably, a good chunk of the engines would not fire. NASA took the N+1 approach with at least the first stage....the first stage could achieve Earth orbit with only 4 engines, but it had 5 and fired 5, yet they were throttled down. If one failed, raise the throttle on the remaining 4 and you still made it to orbit.
Gorkman
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
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.
If there were dino-destroying size meteors; nuclear holocost; thousands of simultaneous earthquakes; and every active volcano blowing it's top - all on the same day - I would still prefer to be on earth than the moon. A bomb shelter (or abandoned mine) 2km down into bedrock would be a prefereable environment to the moon.
They were uncontrolled, but not OUT of control. They continued on fairly stable paths diverging slightly outward from the shuttle's path. Even considering that they'd had a massive tank of liquid rocket fuel explode right next to them, they not only survived, but didn't even lose stability from what damage they took.
The escape mechanism mentioned in the article is worth remembering too. Remember, when Challenger blew up, three objects survived - both SRBs and the forward section of the shuttle itself, which is believed to have had at least part of the crew alive inside. Had the shuttle been equipped with an escape rocket (Which the Gemini, Appollo, and Soyuz capsules all were/are, and like the system shown in the article will), at least part of the Challenger crew may have survived.
But, the fundamental "airplane" design made that impossible or extremely expensive, and it was never done, even after Challenger.
The alignment could likely be done with control moment gyroscopes that are powered by solar energy. However you raise a good point that it will take a lot of energy to slow the craft down from cruising speed to re-entry speed.
Scott
IANARS... but rockets must accelerate laterally as well as vertically to achieve orbit. Florida is therefore the location of choice (for the US) for launching orbital rockets, because of the boost in angular velocity they get from being close to the equator. Colorado and Florida both orbit the Earth's axis in 24 hours: obviously Florida is moving a lot faster. Denver's elevation would help, but not as much as Cape Canaveral's latitude.
If we launched rockets from, say, Quito, Ecuador, at an elevation of 9300 feet and basically on the equator, it seems to me we'd get the best of both worlds, but it'd probably be political suicide for NASA to try that. Less pork involved, you know...
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
While they don't send up as many people they haven't lost one on the Soyuz since the 70s (and one of those failures resulted in the capsule landing fine although a pressure valve problem led to the people dying before landing). How many did we lose with the shuttles at regular intervals again?
Now the Soyuz program is filled with a way too many near-failures and non-lethal failures including sever injuries however no one died. In the shuttle, a near failure is the same as a failure it seems. The newest generation of the Soyuz doesn't seem to have many problems at all.
As for raw numbers overall, the soviets officially lost 4 people while the US lost 17 to 18. Add a few more for the ones the soviets may have hidden and the soviets still lost less people, although they didn't send as many up.
So yes, their simpler design is much safer it seems especially if designed and used with a decent budget.
The Russians aren't sending stuff outside orbit like the US mars probes, and they really have no future as a space program except as cargo movers to low orbit.
Which is the only area which may have potential in the near future, and the only one with commercial applications. It's also the one which everything else will rely on.