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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?"
Real news from NASA!
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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.
Shouldn't the title read "NASA Scraps Shuttle And Returns to Capsules"?
Both the shuttle and the capsules are lifted by rockets...
I am going to treat this as vaporware just like every other "shuttle replacement" NASA has come up.
Does anybody remember the concept of the next generation space shuttle that nasa talked about during the mid to late 90's. I remember there was research and products being developed for this project. Does it still exist, or has it just vanished into the black hole of failed/forgotten nasa projects?
Reusing the shuttle main engines might seem like an R&D cost saver, but isn't it also a kickback to the contractors who currently support the shuttle too? They would stand to lose quite a bit otherwise.
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...
In order to make any project successful, it is necessary to be able to both plan ahead to take care of contingencies before they appear and also be able to be flexible enough to work around unforeseen problems. This latest effort, though definitely a good step away from the shuttle program, does not allay the fears of a lack of the second point above. They think they can plan ahead for each contingency, but the NASA bureacracy is too heavy and too heavily dependent on Congressional support.
Congressional support, in turn, is heavily dependent on the contractors who stand to make a mint off of a new space program. So instead of good science being the leading light, it is special interests who hold the purse strings to NASA's budget.
The problem is that space is not a priority, so NASA will not get what it needs to succeed. Rather, it will continue to get pushed around by its suppliers because Congress wouldn't have it any other way.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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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And, at the very least, we can stop wasting taxpayers'money on my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours space programs while the research is going on. 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?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The shuttle was never build for lunar travel. It is important to understand that different spaceships are used for different tasks. The shuttle is used to bring cargo up to (low) altitude, while escaping the earth gravity completely and going to the moon (or mars) is a completely different story.
You might carry a Luna space ship into orbit with the shuttle, but then you will just be carrying a spaceship within a spaceship. That would be a waste of fuel.
The shuttle is only good if you wish to bring stuff back down with you. In that regard you might have used it on returning to the earth. The returning spaceship could dock with the space station and transfer men and cargo to the shuttle for safe landing. But that's only saves the weight of a single heat shield.
So dropping the shuttle for a Luna and mars mission is the obvious choice. A lot of comments will be made in regard to "return to the old capsules". But this is not really relevant. The "old" capsules were a good design. The engineers for the first Luna expedition did a lot of thinking and testing before going there, so it's a good design. To come up with something new, just for the case of "making something new" would be stupid.
But these new capsules are not old! They use a new propellant, to prepare them for the mars expedition. And as the old Luna Lander had computer power equivalent to a modern average car, I'll expect the new ones will be far more advanced.
This is the same case in regards to the boosters. These are actually based on the Shuttle engines and lifters. So the engines are the same, even thou the exterior is not. And these boosters are far more advanced than the old ones as well.
So scraping the Shuttle and returning to the old capsules?
Not true.
-:) Oh no - not again.
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As much as I'd like to think "ploy", they probably are onto something.
If you think about automobiles, for instance, the most efficient configuration seems to be a combination of small passenger cars and large semi-trucks. The shuttle was basically an SUV: high maintenance, high cost, low gas mileage and range, and not big enough for truly heavy lifting. It was popular because it fit into the American one-size-fits-all independent mentality.
But the shuttle was also part of a natural evolution. We started out driving a Pinto. We had newfound freedom, but little useful to do with it. To take the next step required a vehicle capable of doing some serious work. But we couldn't afford to go from a Pinto to a Mack Truck. That would've been too expensive, and risky. Instead, we got a Suburban, and used it as a daily-driver, as well as for some backyard projects. The insurance was less than having two autos. There was some maintenance, but we could do it ourselves, without an expensive mechanic.
Now, though, we can afford both the Mercedes and the F-350 flatbed. We have a legitimate use for each. Eventually, we may need the equivalent of a subway car, and a Greyhound bus, and a bullet train. But even here on Earth we have lots of different ways to get around, each optimized for a specific task. We shouldn't be surprised that space is no different.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
We're returning to rockets, you say?
Well it's about damn time. I'm sure it'll beat the pants off all those rubber bands we've been using in the mean time...
Sleep is futile.
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.
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.
The centerpiece of this system is a new spacecraft designed to carry four astronauts to and from the moon
We want battle star destroyer size ships, capable of shuttling thousands of troops, citizens and refugees between orbits.
No horsing around now, why is NASA peddling "four astronauts" when they could be rock'n roll troopers like those of Star Wars and Battlestar Galatica?
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....
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.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
It's all very well getting to Mars, but how can they possibly get back again?
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.
The old designs, and this one, are meant for completely different purposes.
You don't use a dump truck to take a cross-country trip.
Then again, it wouldn't be slashdot without the screams of "doop!" :)
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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?
nuclear propulsion is politically off-limits..
It is off limits for more reasons than just evil liberals and environmentalist and their protests. While I agree that for the forseeable future there is no way to get around nuclear technology in large sized space craft for deep space exploration I also share some of the concerns voiced by people arguing against using nuclear power with wild abandon in the design of spacecraft. The problem is how do you build a large sized space craft capable of really worth while deep space journeys? Do you build the components down on earth and lift them into orbit? In that case what if one of the heavy lifters carrying say, a metric ton of nuclear fuel explodes after launch? Even if the effort succeeds how comfortable will you feel having a nuclear powered space ship or even several space ships each the size of a large nuclear submarine and their nuclear powered support facilities in earth orbit? Considering the hysteria caused by 'Cosmos 954' what would the prospect of an interplanetary space ship crashing to earth do to public support for space exploration? And this is actually not such an implausable suggestion either, all it would take to cause a major disaster is a single piece of space debri or a micro metiorite. I for one would feel alot better about large nuclear powered space craft if they were built as far off planet as possible, preferably on a moonbase using locally mined materials.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, every one of the comments above did not mention it. The Space Shuttle is the ONLY way to lift the new sections and the only way for America to send/get back astronauts (Though we can hitch a ride with the russians like we already have)
There is a gap between where the Space Shuttle will be retired (if it isnt taken out of service or has another catastrophic failure before that) and when the new CEV and Heavy Lifting vehicles hopefully come online.
There are 15-20 trips required of the Space Shuttle just to finish the ISS, can it make all these trips before 2010 when it has to be recertified and will probably be decommisioned altogether?
What will be done in the 4 year gap to 2014 when the new vehicles are due?
There is truth in humor.
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.
Things that go "TWANG! ...wwwaaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaauuugh..." in the night.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
- 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
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.
It's not really news at all - I mean the European Space Agency has understood the value of Russian engineering done decades ago and simply decided that it was the better choice over spending vast sums of money on try-and-fail schemes. Even more interesting is: "In 2007 a Soyuz launcher will take off from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana (South America). This will be an historic event as it will be the first time that a Soyuz launcher lifts off from a spaceport other than Baikonur or Plesetsk. It will also be a milestone in the strategic cooperation between Europe and Russia in the launcher's sector."
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?
I've worked at NASA JSC since 1979. There was a history archive building (or actually, several). I worked in one of them on a very slow second shift, watching data reduction programs design the leading edge of the shuttle wing, among other things. I browsed the library for reading material while I waited for tapes to spin and printers to print. (And card readers to read, too!)
All the plans were there. When they shut down the office, they dumped boxes and boxes of duplicate records, books, etc, that had been collected as the various parts of Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, etc shutdown. I got a chronology of Skylab. Another coworker got books on Apollo and Gemini, along with drafts of the first space shuttle - the one called Dynasoar, and its descendents, from back in the 1950's.
"Systematic destruction" is complete baloney.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I heard about this months ago when the latest shuttle landed. Good job staying on the latest-breaking stories. The data on the article is even a month old.
Slashdot: Rumors and out-dated news for nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter anymore.
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
Not the Army, but the Air Force, and really the NRO, whom the Air Force is working for in the spysat biz.
Second, they never did it. The Vandenberg site was a boondoggle and work on the Shuttle facility was scrapped after Challenger. I was living in L.A. in the early 80s and REALLY looking forward to shuttle flights out of Vandenberg. SLIC-6 at Vandenberg is now an ELV facility, and the Air Force has EELV, which handles their requirements.
Agree, however, that the shuttle was trying to please too many people in order to get funded. That, and they jumped from drawing board to operational fleet of 5 orbiters without a true demonstrator or X-rocket. The Shuttle Main Engine is an impressive technical achievement, but is costly to reuse. The original vision of routine spaceflight at $100/kg was never remotely achieved.
Helium balloons want to be free.
What doesn't make sense is all the energy they are waisting blasting things back and forth from earth to the international space station... NASA Better model... Launch a rocket with cargo pod including men to go the international space station as well as all the fuel and resources they need to go to the moon, unfortunatly probably including a lunar lander( until they find a more efficient way of landing on the moon) that will be left behind. Rocket docks with international space station. Pickup a used lunar module(minus the lander). ISS operators load supplys from their rocket to a space shuttle docked and serviced with the ISS. Shuttle is re-fueled with supplys takes off for 2 week journey to the moon (probably would be pretty slow). Shuttle orbits Moon. Shuttle launches Lunar Module. People go to the moon do their thing come back dock with the space shuttle and the shuttle takes them back to the ISS. From there they can hop the next ride home. In this model you save a lot of resources. If it cost X ammount of money per pound to launch there is no reason not to re-use all the standard parts that would come home anways and service them in space. If they lighten the load they could save a lot of $ in launching stuff into our orbit. Heck the Russians might even fly our astronauts into space for us at 20Million a pop. Somehow I think that would be cheaper than it costs us to get GiArmstrong into space ourselves. It might take some retrofitting of the shuttles we have left but they would never have to come back to earth and we might get another 20 years out of them, but Endevour and Atlantis could be permently left in space to do skips from the orbit of the moon to the orbit to the ISS, heck with 2 of them we would have an emergancy recovery shuttle always ready to go save someone in space. We might even consider designing them for conventional lunar flight. Something we will most likely eventualy want to do as well.. ISS-for the moon, along with a lunar network of satalites. Wow just thing with the number of lunar meteor strikes we might want to put up a norad on the moon.
They also have seperated the people from the cargo so the people ship can be more reliable, and the cargo ship can be less reliable, e.g. the solid fuel boosters.
Strapping solid fuel boosters to people has never been a good idea.
Inside every complex program is a simple solution trying to get out.
It is part of the samed flawed NASA that kept the shuttle around too long. First off we have a station that is designed around what the shuttle could deliver. We also have a station butchered by committee. What we have now is not a system which was proposed back in the Reagan days.
I figure the best bet would be to push it into a much higher "parking" orbit and revisit it once we get the new launch technology together. This would be more politically acceptable than deorbiting it. By the time we get back to it we can probably find some uses for it as a whole or by components. Most likely we would just be able to ditch it then as being "too old".
If this new reengineering of NASA can keep on the "do it right" mindset instead of "lets do it because we can" we might actually see real human exploration of space. Putting robots up is fine but it doesn't really advance our use of space. It will take people to do that. Some will say going to the moon again is "because we can" but I say it is "because we must". We must get out of orbit to keep advancing space technology and understanding of how things work. This in turn will lead to advancements and such that can be used back on Earth. But sitting in Earth orbit gets us nowhere. We have been there for 50 odd years already. All the big accomplishments took place in the 60s and early 70s. Ever since its been a study in new ways to look flashy but not really do anything.
Let NASA be the builder of destinations. Then let the privates make use of those destinations. NASA needs to be the one who does the gruntwork to establish a presence in space. From there we get others to build on that. Having a government agency develope the base from which private enterprise expands is a valid use. Besides if he have to wait for a private enterprise to provide the basis of being in space we will end up with a very proprietary and private solution.
and this time, don't handicap missions in space because of your partners.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
put a valve in there???? :P
Great idea, it'll only come out late and need to be patched in a week
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
We can't even get living on Earth right and we're going to Mars?
We're sending all the "important" people first. Lawyers, politicians, door to door salesmen, etc. We'll be right behind them.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Even a remotely self-sustaining martian colony would take hundreds of years to establish. It's quite easy to overlook how interconnected our modern technology is. We rely in tens of thousands of types of materials, and this on a planet in which we can breathe the air, go outside without a pressure suit, have no need for insulation, no fine electrostatically charged dust coating and shorting everything, and have ample sources of both fuel and oxidizer just sitting around and waiting for us.
:P In general, you need an oxidizer; peroxides work well. Different catalysts and oxidizers will produce plastics with different properties; however, even trace amounts of O2 should work to some degree through performing of peroxides with impurities, although O2 in too large of quantities is an inhibitor.
For example, let's just briefly look at simply the plastic to build Martian greenhouses (one of hundreds of components, many of which have multiple parts made of different materials) that you'll need to expand your farming capacity): you'll need thick acryllic. Why acryllic? There are dozens of types of plastics (and many varieties of them); acryllic is very light-transparent (even moreso than glass) - it's sold as Plexiglass, Lucite, etc (not to be confused with polycarbonate - Lexan). This actually a relatively easy case compared to many other materials you'll need on Mars.
Plastics like acryllic are polymers - chains of monomers. Acryllic is polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). First, of course, you're going to need a petroleum source. Petroleum on Mars? Well, that takes a process invented by the Nazis in World War II - the Fischer-Tropsch process. While you can optimize it to produce chemicals in a desired weight range with specific catalysts, temperatures, and pressures, it tends to produce a fairly random mix of low weight hydrocarbons. So, you need to distill the hydrocarbons.
Lets back up a minute - hydrogen, carbon monoxide? Hydrogen is easy - electrolysis of water, although note the high electricity requirements (if you have a high temperature nuclear reactor, you can thermally split it as well). There's plenty of CO2 on Mars, but not as much CO. Thankfully, you can strip an O from CO2 with hydrogen. To get that CO2, you need to highly compress the martian air (with a multistage compressor), then chill it to separate out the CO2, then reheat the CO2 (be sure to have a thermally efficient process!)
Ok, so now we've got our high pressure and temperature catalyzed Fischer-Tropsch process, and pretty much an entire oil refinery behind it. Now what? Now we need to form MMA, the PMMA monomer. I can't find how it *actually* is made in practice, but it could be made through esterification of methacryllic acid (2-propenoic acid) with methanol. Now we have two chemicals that we need to produce! Methanol is easier - reacting CO with H2 on a copper/zinc oxide/alumina catalyst at high pressure and moderate temperature produces it (of course, as with each process that I describe, you need to deal with heat exchange, waste products, tailings, etc). What about the methacryllic acid (CH2=CHCOOH)? You can make it from ethylene+H2O+CO at high pressure and moderate temperature with a nickel bromide catalyst, or you can make it from propylene with a little oxygen and steam over a molybdenum catalyst at fairly high temperatures. You can also make it from acetone, although that's indirect, so we won't cover that here. The higher the temperature, the more important it is that you do heat recapture.
Wow, we're done now, right? Nope, we haven't covered how to polymerize the MMA!
Ok, now we have the PMMA. Ready? Nope. It needs to then be formed into panes of resonable thickness and large size before it sets, and then be allowed to set. Then you have to take the molded acrylic, working in pressure suits (highly constraining), and position them with your imported cranes. Then you have to join the fragments together with superglue (do we need to get into cyanoacrylate
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
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."
I don't disagree that life on Mars would be very tough. Where I do disagree is in the assessment of whether it is so tough as to make it impractical. Some people would have said there just isn't a spare scrubber on Apollo XIII while others would have said I can make something that will work from what I have on hand because I have to. The difference in attitude made the difference in the outcome of the mission.
To head off a possible charge of ignorance leading to irrational exuberance: I am an engineer (albeit electrical) so I have some idea of what challenges can lie, unseen to a layman, in undertaking an effort. On the other hand, I also know good engineers solve extraordinarily difficult problems every day. That's our job and that's why we get into engineering - for the challenge.
Too often in the past, expert analysis has deemed a project infeasible (traveling faster than a horse (the air pressure was supposed to be too much for our lung power), heavier than air powered flight, the Panama canal, etc.), only to have the experts be proven wrong. The only real way to determine whether or not such a project can succeed is to try it. Often it is impossible at the beginning but inventions made during the effort make it possible. Without starting the "impossible" project, those inventions would never have been achieved.
My example from the recent past was intended to show how, when traditional techniques don't work, you have to get inventive. Obviously, the degree of challenge is different but the principle is the same: necessity is the mother of invention.
Sure, I'm a "the glass is half full" sort of guy but I think without that view we would still be living in cold and dark caves because "obviously" fire and lightning (electricity) can't be turned into anything useful.
I have always been inspired by a story I read many years ago where a group of engineers and scientists were shown a film smuggled out of Germany during WWII at the cost of the agent's life. The film showed how the Germans had developed a flying soldier using a jetpack.
While the quality of the film prevented the details of the jetpack from being clear, it was clear the solidiers were flying with them. After many months of exhausting work, the engineers and scientists on our side had produced a practical jetpack similar to what they had seen in the film.
Only then was it revealed that the film was a forgery, created at a Hollywood studio. Its purpose was to change the mindset of the scientists and engineers so that they would believe a jetpack was possible. Without that initial belief they were doomed to failure.
Finally, analyses of why things can't be done often remind me of those articles on why there's no time in life to get anything done. Out of 24 hours in a day you spend 8 hours asleep; you spend 2 hours shopping, cooking, eating, and washing up; you spend 1.5 hours driving; etc. At the end of the article you find that you have to spare time at all yet somehow we obviously do. Detailed analysis does not always produce a valid conclusion.
I think we're just going to have to accept that, given the time and resources available, we're just going to disagree on this today. I do admit sometimes the glass is half empty (for now, anyway) but I don't like to start out with that assumption. :-)