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Project Orion to Bring U.S. Back to the Moon
ganjadude writes "Thirty-seven years ago yesterday, Project Apollo put the first humans on the surface of the Moon. The next time the U.S. launches its astronauts to Earth's natural satellite, they will do so as part of Project Orion." From the article: "Under Project Orion, NASA would launch crews of four astronauts aboard Orion capsules, first to Earth orbit and the International Space Station and then later to the Moon. Two teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and the other a joint effort by Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Co., are currently competing to build the CEV. NASA is expected to select the winner in September."
ah, the moon, the stepping stone to Mars. for me, this is a subject of much ambivalence. it's nice to see some actual money being spent on science, but at the same time, I struggle to really identify what benefit there is going to the moon, or to Mars. Other than public relations benefit, of course. But really, what will we find? That a few simple organisms once existed on mars, and that Mars once had water? But don't we know this now?
The Europeans focus much more heavily on aero-sciences, and we seem to be a lot more captivated by reaching the moon (etc). The Europeans are busy doing piles and piles of research (which will ultimately find many useful things), and similar research in this country is largely the burden of private organizations. All the tangible benefits we've reaped from space travel (tang, velcro, etc) could have been discovered much more cheaply (or if you prefer, in greater abundance for the same price) if we were simply focusing on inventing and not reaching some milestone out in space.
I guess what i'm saying is that I'm not sure how to feel about this; It's science, and exploration, and both are good (imo), but if we want to prioritize, wouldn't billions of dollars be better spent focusing on fixing our own messed up planet? Assuming there is some inherent benefit to going to the moon/mars/wherever, is it really necessary to send *HUMANS*? Could we not fund 10x as many unmanned missions and learn probably close to 10x as much?
I promise this post isn't a troll, I am a filmmaker, and interested in science, but obviously I have some question as to the science-value of putting men on a rock in space.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
... and cutting Shuttle flights and ISS funding and space telescope funding ...
I predict we will get some nice, new expensive exhibits for Space Camp and not much else.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I was also really annoyed at the name. They take the name for a project to get man to a planet on another solar system, and use it for this much much smaller project. :(
On the other hand, I agree that the Shuttle was the wrong path. It is/was an expermiental vehicle, neutered by politics. Who knows what it might have been had they stayed true to the original vision. Alas, politics is the fountain of compromise, and compromise is the enemy of engineering.
The design work is already done ( which saves years and bucks ), the testing is done ( which saves years, bucks, and probably lives ). Is Orion going to be that much better to be worth all the extra costs?
If you bother to look past the short term expenses I think you will start to realize how beneficial it would be to establish modes of efficient travel and a permanent presence on terra luna. There are physical characteristics there that make it ideal for a number of different industries, most obviously, an inconsequential atmosphere, and relatively low gravity.
For example, how big and how perfect of a pure silicon crystal could you grow there? And how much energy would it require? The low gravity means that you could make one much bigger (6 times as big? or is there an exponential factor there?). The near-nothing atmosphere means that probably all the energy you would need would be available via solar panels. Energy collection could be a business in itself (you want to stop using hydrocarbons, right?). And what about transport of these goods? What would it cost? How about almost nothing to any location on planet earth? I imagine even small towns would have a designated delivery port where lunar cargo could be dropped with the accuracy of a smart-bomb... cheaper and faster than a cargo ship from China.
Sure, it's incredibly expensive to establish a presence there, but in the long term, it's more expensive not to.
Interstellar? No, interplanetary.
And the original developers behind Orion did indeed envision using it to lift very large craft. This was back in the late 1950s, atmospheric testing of nukes was common amongst them that had 'em. Talk about direct to Mars...
Ever seen film footage of the test models? Small things, using grenade-size explosive charges, but pretty impressive considering. The number of (small) nukes needed to lift the real thing beyond the atmosphere wouldn't have amounted to as much as some of the strategic weapons they were testing anyway. Indeed, as much as anything else, Projects Argus and Starfish (high atmospheric/ionospheric detonations, in the late 1950s/early 1960s) put the damper on Orion because it showed the adverse effects of ionospheric detonation. The EMP from Starfish blew out phone lines and street lights in Hawaii, and even fused car ignitions.
-- Alastair
Yes its the Bush Administration's grand plan to make you look at what's in the right hand while they screw the planet with the left hand.
... as only NASA can."
All funding is being stripped from projects that look at the earth - all dissent at NASA is being muuzzled so we can explore the moon and Mars.
This administration's grand plan to benefit those (oil companies and others) who would reap dollars by denying that we in the US are part of the global warming problem and the main generator of CO2 from emissions must be stopped.
Science geeks say "Wow - yeah the moon and Mars - cool!" are having theie attention diverted as to what really is going on here.
You have to ask yourself - who stands to make the most money and get the most political long term gain here?
Its all a smoke screen to divert dissent.
Check out the latest article from the New York Times - 7/22/06 - "NASA's Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet" by Andrew Revkin - in the Science section:
"From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush's goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.
But the change comes as an unwelcome surprise to many NASA scientists, who say the "understand and protect" phrase was not merely window dressing but actively influenced the shaping and execution of research priorities. Without it, these scientists say, there will be far less incentive to pursue projects to improve understanding of terrestrial problems like climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
"We refer to the mission statement in all our research proposals that go out for peer review, whenever we have strategy meetings," said Philip B. Russell, a 25-year NASA veteran who is an atmospheric chemist at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "As civil servants, we're paid to carry out NASA's mission. When there was that very easy-to-understand statement that our job is to protect the planet, that made it much easier to justify this kind of work."
Several NASA researchers said they were upset that the change was made at NASA headquarters without consulting the agency's 19,000 employees or informing them ahead of time.
Though the "understand and protect" phrase was deleted in February, when the Bush administration submitted budget and planning documents to Congress, its absence has only recently registered with NASA employees.
Mr. Steitz, the NASA spokesman, said the agency might have to improve internal communications, but he defended the way the change was made, saying it reflected the management style of Michael D. Griffin, the administrator at the agency.
"Strategic planning comes from headquarters down," he said, and added, "I don't think there was any mal-intent or idea of exclusion."
The line about protecting the earth was added to the mission statement in 2002 under Sean O'Keefe, the first NASA administrator appointed by President Bush, and was drafted in an open process with scientists and employees across the agency.
In the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established the agency in 1958, the first objective of the agency was listed as "the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space."
And since 1972, when NASA launched the first Landsat satellite to track changes on the earth's surface, the agency has been increasingly inv
Can we get back to NASA looking UP and OUT and let NOAA handle looking IN and AROUND?
Personally, I want NASA to come up with good spacecraft and ways to foster getting those spacecraft up cheaper and faster. I'd prefer to let NOAA concentrate on things like global warming and CO2 impact.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Once upon a time, this nation was comitted to putting the best and the brightest forward, and creating the most we could with the technology available to us at the time.
Sadly, those days are behind us.
Now it seems, every project is a bad compromise, and it seems to have started with the Shuttle Program. Originally intended as a fully reuseable system that took off like a plane and landed like a plane, it then became a boondoggle of wildly incompatible systems that culminated in a bad hack where you strap the orbiter/glider to a fuel tank and two sticks of TNT and cross your fingers.
NASA still had high hopes for a full resuable system with the VentureStar, which sadly, never got beyond computer animations and little plastic models. The DCX, which had a 1/3 scale flying prototype, was scrapped after a few tests.
And now here they are again, with a bad compromise, using existing parts from the shuttle program and haphazardly slapping them together and crossing their fingers.
It would save a ton of money to design a good system from the start, even if it's more expensive up-front, than to build a system that's awful to start with and hope you can improve upon it with time.
It's funny that sci-fi from the 60's and 70's was so hopeful about where we'd be by this time, because we were making so much progress back then. If only they could have forseen how much time we'd wasted by going backwards, and designing lousy systems that can never really fulfull their mission requirements.
It's hard to believe that even before Yuri Gagarin was launched, America was reaching the edge of space in a rocketplane called the X-15, a simple, durable design that worked stunningly well, and, had we continued along that path, we'd all probably be living in space right now.
But no, we took two steps backwards with "spam in a can", sticking a capsule on top of a missile, and we've been making the same mistakes since then. And now, here we are in 2006, talking about using essentially the same technology from the 60's, when we should have already been reaching the outer planets in long-distance exploration vessels as seen in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" film.
America no longer puts its best and its brightest on top. America no longer prizes doing the best it can do. It's embarassing, that's what it is.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
How about we land in earnest and setup a permanent base, really hedging humanities bets against any astronomical catastrophe short of a supernova.
I can't believe how often otherwise intelligent people make this argument despite its palpable absurdity.
Can you describe a physically plausible catastrophe that would leave the Earth even less hospitable to human life than the moon? Remember, the moon has virtually no atmosphere, virtually no water, a sixth of a gee of gravity, and daily temperature swings of 200+ degrees Celsius.
Even if we somehow fucked up our planet that badly, consider how much better survival facilities could be built here on Earth when you're not shelpping everything across gravity wells at tens of thousands of dollars a kilo.
Martin
...being able to provide a backup of human life (which would cost hundreds of trillions and doesn't really seem necessary, especially to a cynic like me who thinks that if we manage to wipe ourselves out then we're not worth backing up).
How about the more obvious? Like: we gotta get the hell off of this one rock before random chance throws another "dinosaur killer" at it.
Why the assumption that we are going to destroy ourselves? There is overwhelming evidence that meteor strikes large enough to clear the ecosystem have happened multiple times in the past and that, statistically, we are probably due for another one "real soon now" (plus or minus several million years). Even if all you want to do is protect the rock we now have with superior technology it will require some form of space travel technology.
The universe is not a nice friendly place and there are dangers out there that far outclass any human endeavors!
Yours is a common argument. In an earlier era in the 1970s people were saying, why don't we spend that money here on earth where it's needed? Yet, every cent of that money is spent here on earth; it's not as though we launch tons of dollar bills into orbit and eject them into space. Thousands of engineers, scientists, physicians, space suit makers, rocket ship builders, computer programmers, astrophysicists, and others are employed by the space program.
:-)
By the same argument, wars are good for the economy. It is, however, a flawed argument, an example of the "broken window fallacy": "Throwing a baseball into the neighbour's window is good for the economy, because the glazier gets the money (by the insurance company), who then spends it at the baker's, or whereever."
It is a fallacy because the money that the insurance company pays has to come from somewhere. Overall, it is better for the economy if that money is invested productively.
The grandparent (poster)'s argument may well be that the same money could be spent more productively. Besides, part of the money really is burnt in space
It is a matter of discussion what percentage of the money spent at NASA could be called productive (in a similar way to "fundamental research").
Now, there may be all sorts of political reasons (and I don't mean this in a negative way, I mean it in the way "people want it") to go to the Moon and Mars (beside the fact that eventually we'll have to leave Earth, and we'll have to start some time before it's too late), but your economic reasoning is flawed.
Please let it be known that I love the idea of going back to the Moon etc., I'm just trying to be fair and not claim that there is more to it than there really is: A good idea, yes. Economically, probably not.
Is it Election Year already?
Compromise is actually very important to engineering.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?