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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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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.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.
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.
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.