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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?"
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...
All their muscle mass will be gone, but they'll get there.
Unless they order the astronauts to have sex during the flight... Oh wait.
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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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.
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.
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" -
Personally I'm in favor of 50 G acceleration, a la Dragonball Z. That way we get Super Sayan astronauts out of the deal. Explore space and protect Earth all from one project.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
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?
It can be done much simpler: split the spacecraft in two and connect them with a long steel cable. That way the two halves can rotate around their center of mass and create artificial gravity without the trouble of getting a huge construction into space. Also it is easier to make a large diameter for which a low angular velocity will be sufficient to create 1 g, thus reducing disturbing Coriolis forces.
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This is not my sandwich.
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.