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Design of Next-Gen NASA Rocket Showing Flaws
caffiend666 writes "According to an AP news article, NASA engineers are concerned about the design for the new rocket meant to replace the shuttle. Work on the project has revealed that the first few minutes of flight could see 'violent shaking', a serious flaw that might destroy the craft soon after launch. 'NASA officials hope to have a plan for fixing the design as early as March, and they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. The shaking problem, which is common to solid rocket boosters, involves pulses of added acceleration caused by gas vortices in the rocket similar to the wake that develops behind a fast-moving boat.'
...before it's built. Seems like a non-story.
so they found a problem with a preliminary design. big deal. that's why they call it research and development.
how long did it take to design the saturn Ib/saturn V and make sure that they'd mate well with the apollo capsule? how long did it take to come up with skylab, an orbiting lab that could be mounted on a saturn V?
i expect it'll take about five to six years to bring the orion program to a complete first generation system.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
It's a harmonic vibration issue apparently, and these are generally solved quite easily. Adding or removing stiffness, a spiral wrap of an energy dissipating elastomer, isolation mounts, ading or removing mass (or simply moving mass around)... doesn't look like it's a severe issue at this early of the design stage. Someone's just being alarmist.
How is it that astronauts managed to land on the moon in 1969 but the next mission to get people to the moon will take until 2020? With today's engineering tech...
Basically they spent more in the 60's relative to today's budget to speed up the process. We're taking a slower, cheaper route this time.
Table-ized A.I.
She can't hold much longer, captain!
Management....wants....a....launch....so....shut....the....fuck....up, Scotty!
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, NASA's ROI is pretty good at about $7 returned for every $1 spent. They also develop a lot of technology that doesn't have a financial ROI, but rather a simple non-tangible benefit to society as a whole. For example, they developed the CCD imager for use in the Hubble Telescope. That technology is now widely used in inexpensive digital cameras but is more importantly also used in medical imagers for detecting breast cancer. It has eliminated something like a half a million unneeded biopsies which not only save that cost, but also the pain from the procedure itself.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
This was brought up last NASA story. Somebody pointed out that just ONE of the technologies produced for the Hubble telescope lead to more money saved on machines scanning for breast cancer than it cost for the Hubble in its entirety, and that's just the price tag, not the lives that have been saved because of that alone.
Yeah, how pathetic to run into problems already. It's not rocket science, guys.
No, NASA gave it up years ago - as it simply doesn't work. The turbines are too heavy, useful for too small a portion of the flight profile, etc... etc...
Two more ideas that don't work, despite years of fanboy cheerleading for them. Among other large drawbacks - you still need to get a substantial portion (99%+) of the required velocity from rockets, but the weight of the structure needed to withstand these methods of 'assisting' means a rocket launched this way is actually larger and heavier than one that launched in a conventional fashion.
I wish NASA would put more effort into developing gaseous core nuclear rocket engines. There was a nuclear engine project in the late 60s using a solid core reactor, but gaseous core reactors have not been thoroughly explored. Whereas solid reactors melt above about 3500C, a "light bulb" type of reactor consisting of a hollow quartz bulb with a cloud of gaseous nuclear fuel confined in the center could operate at 25000 C, radiating in the ultraviolet range instead of heat per se. In an engine based on this type of reactor, hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb would be superheated and expelled as rocket exhaust. No chemical combustion, no radioactive emissions, just heat transfer.
Check out this interesting article, part 10 of a series, about a hypothetical design for a non-polluting, 100% reusable nuclear rocket based on the Saturn V form factor. Using existing engineering apart from the gaseous core reactor, it could lift 1000 tons of payload into orbit (6 times the capacity of the proposed single-use Ares 5 cargo rocket, and 30 times that of the shuttle), and then return 1000 tons of cargo to a powered vertical landing. No expendable fuel tanks, no solid booster recovery, just a big old Flash Gordon style rocketship. This is heavy lifting power that could take up a space hotel or moon base in one shot. It could power enormous ships to Mars in 3 months, not merely to explore but to colonize, carrying hundreds of people at a time, hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies, and highly effective radiation shielding.
I know it's the "N" word, but this rocket wouldn't be a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. If such a ship crashed or exploded and released its entire nuclear fuel load into the atmosphere, the nuclides released would be 1% of what came out of a single 1950s bomb test (and there were many of those).