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?"

Comments

Thanks for the tardiness

[ctetc007]

This is very old news. It came out almost 2 months ago.

NASA is Finished

[segedunum]

Going back to rockets, in this day and age, after forty years is just ridiculous. I think it was universally accepted that the Saturn V and the Apollo modules were about as much as you could possibly lift into space via that method. It's also grossly expensive. The private companies and guys trying to get into space cheaply and efficiently are going to kick NASA all over on this. They shouldn't have even bothered with Apollo and continued the X-15 tests to get a more mobile vehicle into space.

But of course, this could all be a cunning ploy to convince us that programs like Aurora do not exist, could not possibly exist and are not flying into space right now!

PFfffff

[chord.wav]

Or is this all a ploy to recapture the hearts of the public?

Yeah sure, like they are going to spend a few billion of US tax payers and risk lives for a bunch of hearts...

Re:Russian Philosophy

[birge]

Safer? Debatable. Even with our recent crashes, I'm pretty sure we've still killed fewer astronauts then them. Cheaper is really the main point. They haven't advanced much, and the same criticisms applied to the US program not gaining ground can be applied to them in spades, with the sole exception of cost. 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.

You could probably argue they had more engineering talent. I'm just arguing they really didn't have a philosophy so much as constraints and less ambitious goals. Chiding the US for doing something that was, in retrospect, biting off too much is unfair. Nobody should be too smug about the failure of somebody who bit off too much. We are where we are because of such people (and their occasional failures).