Slashdot Mirror
NASA Engineers Work On Alternative Moon Rocket
Gibson writes "A team of 57 engineers at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight center feel that the Ares rocket is not the best solution for launching the new CEV. They are currently working on their own time developing an alternative launch system known as Jupiter. The 131 page proposal, along with other information, is available on the project website. Proponents of the project say that it is 'simpler, safer, and sooner' than the Ares project, predicting the ability for a return to the moon in 2017, two years before the current goal. Ares management has so far dismissed the proposal as a 'napkin drawing.'"
That a "napkin drawing" by engineers never amount to anything.
How can anyone whose project is in the design stage, scoff at another that is in the conceptual stage? Neither of them EXIST yet!
Where is Ares? Oh, it's in AUTOCAD! Well, that makes ALL the difference!
Meanwhile, their brilliant project isn't expected to get anyone to the moon before, what, twenty years?
Sheesh.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The 131 page proposal
That's a hell of a lot of napkins...
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
From the project website:
$35 Billion in savings? How much is that in napkins?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
After reading the summary the only thing that went through my head was memories of Matt Le Blanc, and the urge to cry: "Danger, Will Robinson!"
I could probably do with a rest...
I scoffed a bit at their description of the excess payload capacity of the crew-launch configuration as "free." I mean, you still pay for that capacity in fuel and delivery. You're not getting something for nothing. The Ares CLV has far less capacity but it should be far less expensive as well. And I'm not entirely persuaded that the costs of operating two launch systems will be that much greater than one combined system. We currently launch a wide variety of rockets for different purposes without it being cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, the Ares CLV really seems to be cutting to the bone, to the point where they've cut land-based recovery. If your goal is efficiency, reducing your CLV capacity to the point that you can only ever do expensive seaborne recovery seems like a false savings.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You got to love it: By day, they are mild mannered engineers. By night, they are undercover rocket scientists who are building a rocket to go to the moon! It sounds like a pulp sci-fi story.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's the old engineers vs management debate on who gets to make the decision. Seeing as both cost and speed are on the engineer's side I don't see why management would be against.
oh wait I know
Because it will make them look like they have been wasting time and money and they would rather waste even more money while looking like they are not.
If NASA is unwilling to consider Jupiter as an alternative to Ares, then would there be private corporations willing to invest in what appears to be a good heavy-lift flight system? You might even find Russia or the ESA willing to purchase flights, either to service the ISS in the pre-Ares years, or to service an ISS v2, if and when. Pie in the Sky, perhaps, but I'm finding this to be an intriquing proposal, and it'd be a shame if it didn't end up flying.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
A handful of engineers and a stenographer cooped up in a hotel room over a weekend, designed and developed the B52. And its still going strong 50 years later.
After all, it not rocket surgery.
No, actually we don't. The tooling's been long-since destroyed, and there are no blueprints for many of the parts because they were farmed out to contractors, let alone information on things like what precise alloys to use for said parts, and other methods of manufacture.
There are a couple Saturn Vs left, yes, but they were left out to the elements for many years and may have been scavenged for parts.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Flying into space in any kind of rocket is dangerous
True, but in your quest to belittle the original poster, you fail to address his (completely legitimate) concerns:
1.) SRBs can't easily be throttled
2.) SRBs can't be shut down in flight
Even had the Challenger crew known about the O-ring breach that was burning holes in the external tank, there'd have been exactly dick they could have done about it short of trying to blow the orbiter off the stack and hoping it remained controllable. Liquid fueled rockets are *much* safer once you're in the air, and "space flight is already dangerous" is not a good reason to avoid mitigation of risk whenever possible.
Solid fuel launches with the shuttle seem fine from a safety standpoint. The one danger that did in a shuttle (falling Ice) came from the liquid oxygen tank, no the solid fuel. The other failure was of an O-ring connecting the booster to the liquid fuel tank. That failure was addressed.
The falling ice problem is addressed by putting the cargo above the boosters. The O-ring has already been addressed. So the new proposal seems even safer than the shuttle. I fail to see how solid fuel rockets are inherently more dangerous than liquid fuel ones.
Solid fuel rockets can't stop, and they have to be carefully made so there isn't any open pockets of no fuel or they explode. But if you carefully make them (Nasa has) and engineer the launch system to take into account the thing won't turn off (Nasa has), it is a great system. Liquid Fuel can be throttled or turned off, but requires a very complex (read point of failure possibility) pump system to work properly. That has its drawbacks as well. In summary Liquid Fuel and Solid Fuel have different strengths and weaknesses, and when the vehicle is engineered to handle them, it shouldn't exclude either from being used the human passengers.
You should check the designs before you criticize them. Ares I uses an extended solid rocket booster (upgraded from the Shuttle) and a J-2X engine (upgraded from the Saturn V second and third stages). Ares V uses extended SRBs and RS-68 engines (from the Delta IV).
The Shuttle main engines (SSMEs) were considered instead of the J-2X and/or the RS-68, but the cost was too high. The SSME is a high performance engine, but it is an expensive engine. Also, one concern for using it for the Ares I is that the liquid engine is the second stage engine, which will be started in-flight and at high altitude. The SSME has never been tried like that (nor was it designed for that), while the J-2 was used that way in the Saturn.
As for Scaled Composites Tier 1b, it is a sub-orbital vehicle (good for nothing but tourists and hype). IIRC Tier 2 may be an orbital vehicle, but that is a long way off as well, since Scaled is working on Tier 1b (Ares is much further along in development).
After getting most prized "first post" position, I have one more...
I would trust a set of napkin drawings from dedicated engineers more than I'd trust a polished proposal from a committee of military contractors and NASA administrators.
Think of it this way, the latter said the O rings were safe, the former tried to warn everyone of the danger.
I *am* a rocket scientist, BTW. I read the Jupiter concept doc a few months ago, and I find it reasonably persuasive. The thing that makes the Jupiter concept "simpler" is that it reuses existing designs (specifically, main engine systems and fuel tanks) that have already been fully developed and put into use, rather than designing new ones that employ untested techniques.
What makes a design safer isn't necessarily lowest component count; in the space business, proven designs count for a LOT in risk mitigation. Consider the Russian Proton rocket: not modern, not the most efficient, but a very reliable system that gets its job done at low cost (assuming that the recent Soyuz QA problems don't mean that their whole production infrastructure has gone rotten from lack of funds). Incremental changes are almost always faster, better, and cheaper than radical design departures (at least until the radical tech is fully worked out, which takes time).
Indeed, a big part of the argument here is that Ares junks an existing manufacturing infrastructure THAT WORKS, just like NASA did after the Apollo program. Jupiter, on the other hand, maintains the current Shuttle-related tech base and builds on it. Having a functional tech infrastructure to build on, with suppliers who've been designing and delivering product based on the same design for many years, is an immense advantage in terms of cost, lead time, and reliability. Folks who've made the same system dozens of times make fewer mistakes than those building something brand-new with no comparable predecessor product.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
The concept of using the Moon as a launching pad to go further into space is almost completely broken from the start. What fuel source for launching rockets is present on the moon to take advantage of? None really, so it becomes an excercise of launching from earth, using more fuel to slow it down and land it on the moon, and then yet more fuel to have it take off again.
Explain why this is a good plan again?
No, actually we don't. The tooling's been long-since destroyed, and there are no blueprints for many of the parts because they were farmed out to contractors, let alone information on things like what precise alloys to use for said parts, and other methods of manufacture.
You are wrong. The blueprints for everything, down to the last nut and bolt, are on file at MSFC. Source.
There are a couple Saturn Vs left, yes, but they were left out to the elements for many years and may have been scavenged for parts.
You are wrong. There are three, but none of them is "one" rocket. The one at the Johnson space center, made up of three flight-rated stages from different rockets, was left out for 20+ years but has been restored to pristine (though obviously not flight-worthy) condition. The one at MSFC is all static test stages and has been similarly restored. The one at KSC is two flight stages and one test stage, and has been kept in perfect (but again, obviously not flight-worthy) condition since the day it was rolled in. NONE of the rockets were ever "scavenged" for parts--they're all property of the Smithsonian and are maintained in trust as artifacts by NASA.
Recreating a Saturn V isn't impossible because we don't have the plans--it's impossible because the blueprints call for standard parts and items that don't exist any more (like a left-handed widget with widget gauge #12, which was used by, say, Boeing in 1960, but not any more).
The US can't afford a manned space program any more. The Iraq war has cost $3 trillion, we're headed into a recession, and it's going to take years to unwind the housing bubble. The next administration is going to have to focus on digging out of the hole left by the Bush administration.
And, face it, sending a few more people to the Moon on chemical rockets doesn't really get us anywhere. Been there, done that, know what the Lunar surface is like.
If fusion power ever works, space is worth revisiting, but with chemical rockets, we hit the limits a long time ago.
The initial architecture of Constellation was based on the congressional requirement that NASA actually use Shuttle derived rockets. The moment the original architecture was rolled out, though, (space shuttle main engines, four segment solid rocket boosters, 28 ft diameter tank), NASA ditched both the SSMEs and the 4 seg SRBs. They couldn't air start the SSME, so they had to develop a new engine. (The J-2X sounds like the Apollo J-2, but they have very few components in common, and the J-2X is 30% more powerful.) Then, they dumped the SSMEs for the Ares V core vehicle, and replaced them with RS-68s from the Delta IV. That was a smart move because the cost is way lower. But, since the performance is lower, they had to enlarge the tank (read develop a brand new one.) Now, it's 33 ft in diameter, and requires all new tooling and massive modifications to the manufacturing, preparation and launch facilities. That costs a lot, too. All this after developing another much smaller but equally expensive Crew Launch Vehicle. So, while the Ares now has nothing in common with the Shuttle, it costs many times more to develop, and twice as much to operate. DIRECT does have the side effect of maintaining more jobs than Ares does in the near term, but in the long run, Ares would require more employees, and that is a large part of where the cost increase comes from. The extra money saved would be used to speed up the moon missions by two years, close NASA's manned spaceflight gap by three or four years, and perform more science missions.
Wasn't the Apollo system shaped by a similar event? As I remember it, the original plan was to travel and land directly on the moon. However, a handfull of engineers felt that the launching rocket could be simpler and smaller if there was an orbital undock/docking stage. The problem was that orbital rendezvous docking was untried and required technology that didn't exist yet. The docking group eventually won out after heated discussion.
In the end, everyone was happy except Michael Collins, who had to wait in orbit while his buddies danced on the moon for the first time. (Although perhaps felt safer being that this was all new stuff.)
Table-ized A.I.
The cold reality is that we're probably not going to send a manned mission to the moon. The cost of robotic probes drops by the day, at the same time their capabilities increase. By the time we're ready to send up more astronauts, we'll be able to send up probes that can stay longer and perform more tasks than a human in a rubber suit who has to live in a little tin can. This whole moon-shot thing was basically a PR stunt by the Bush administration - McCaine or Obama will probably kill it, as it's wasteful and frivolous.
Humans will only return when it's time to construct something permanent there, like a telescope or automated mining equipment. (Even then, it would probably be cheaper to send unmanned probes to small asteroids, directing them to fall in the middle of the desert for harvesting.
The realities of space exploration have changed - going just to go isn't a useful aim anymore, unless you're paying on your own hyper-rich dime for a vacation to orbit.
How something was designed is not as important as why it was designed that way.
You're one of those people who COMMENT THEIR CODE, aren't you! :-)
you had me at #!
Proportionally, the Viet Nam War cost more far more: 9.4% of GDP vs. the Iraq War @ 1% of GDP. The entire military budget is 4.4% of GDP, and that's including spending on Corp of Engineer projects and other non-combat related spending. (BTW: The Department of Defense estimates a presence in Iraq through 2017 at $1.7 trillion. $3 trillion is a number came up with by some people with some VERY vested interests.) We WERE in a recession in 1957-1958 (when NASA was founded) and the housing bubble, while bad, is no where NEAR as bad a Black Monday or The Crash or perhaps even the .Com bubble. The only reason why people are bemoaning it (and rightly so!) is because people lost homes. That many of them were homes they never should have bought is another discussion.
And we've gone nowhere NEAR the limits. We could easily to manned missions to Mars, set up a real scientific lab on the Moon, even have missions to asteroids all on chemical rockets and boosters.
By some logic, it's never a good time to do anything. But human advancement depends on it. And NASA's budget is a mere 0.6% of the US GDP.
Call me a kook, but if I wanted to save money, let's ax something really worthless like The Department of Education. It gets [b]3.3 TIMES[/b] NASA's budget, but the kids are dumber today than they were when Carter formed the DoEd thirty odd years ago!
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
It wasn't even the shock wave that caused Challenger to disintegrate, it was the sudden deviation from its course while under Max-Q. Trying to separate quickly from the stack would have been just as bad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
Why exactly would the powers that be use NASA to launch orbital weapons when the Air Force already has a larger total launch capacity than NASA?
If "a left-handed widget with widget gauge #12" is the "impossible" that keeping a Saturn V from flying, then I'm guessing there's a mom and pop engineering company around here somewhere that would gladly make the part for NASA.
-516
The O-ring failure was IN the srb. The O-ring sealed the gaps between each section of the srb, and when it failed to do so, hot gasses escaped and burned through the external tank and boom. Of course if lobbying and politics hadn't forced the boosters to be made in utah which required them to be made in sections to make the trip to the east coast, we would have never had the o-ring problem in the first place.
I have no idea, and frankly the movie was awful so I am certain I'll never watch it again to find out.
Really far more interesting at this point is how I got moderated Insightful instead of Funny or maybe a stretch to say Interesting.
Sometimes I just don't get this place ...
Basically what happened was the DIRECT team said their design will work if they re-optimize the RS-68 engine for high altitude.
The Ares team said their design will work if they re-optimize the RS-68 and the J-2 engines.
NASA management chose the Ares over the DIRECT.
The DIRECT team reworked their design to require no engine optimizations. This resulted in DIRECT 2.0
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The SRB's have a good track record. Only one failure in 100+ launches. Cause of the failure identified and fixed so it should not be factored into reliability calculations. Unless some new system is significantly cheaper in the long run,then stick with the SRB's for a heavy lift vehicle. Remember they are recovered after launch and reused. The steel cylinders (about 1/2" thick walls) are taken apart and refilled with propellant and reassembled. All the infrastructure to do this is already in place.
Whether people need to go to the moon or Mars is another question. If not do we need heavy boosters in the first place?
One person with 50 years more experience than all of you still isn't nearly as smart as 57 of you that came to the same conclusion!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Eh, I disagree on the housing bubble. First, your stock market crashes are out of order. The Crash of 1929 was by far the worst US stock market crash ever. Black Monday wasn't significant in the long run aside from increasing regulation on computer trading. And the dotcom bubble was pretty signficant in size, but not that much effect compared to other US recessions after the Second World War. The housing bubble is signficant for two reasons. First, most people have substantial assets tied up in their home and the "wealth effect" from this tends to be larger than for stocks. Second, the housing market is a bit bigger than the public stock market and with long standing expectations of growth going back probably 60 years. If that changes, we'll see a correction that might take many years to settle out. Given that the decline in the housing market and the instability in mortgage companies is still ongoing, I think it's premature to say that the housing bubble will be less significant than a minor recession. We'll just have to see what happens.
There have been 294 consecutive safe solid fuel rocket launches since the O-Ring problem with the Challenger. The proposed Jupiter launcher uses both solid and liquid fuel rockets, the Solid rockets boosting the initial stage and then separating. They address the solid fuel rockets don't stop issue by providing systems that detach the solid rockets from the launch vehicle in an emergency, and detaching the launch capsule from the rest of the launch vehicle and parachuting it down.
I'm not sure you read my post beyond just trying to spew vitriol. How is the fact a solid rocket can't stop inherently more dangerous if you engineer the launch vehicle to take that into account?
Rutan 1 (low earth orbit vehicle on a shoe string budget)
He has not put a vehicle into orbit. He launched a flimsy rocketplane into a little parabola with only about 1% of the energy required to reach orbit. Nor will his next design achieve orbit.
Get back to me when you get your basic facts straight.
The data recovered after the crash suggest the crew were killed by impact with the water. I don't believe it's known how badly (if at all) the crew were injured by the orbiter's breakup. Several of the suits' emergency air supplies had been activated, however, which tends to support the idea that at least some crew members were still functional after the cabin lost pressure due to hull breach. The guys at NASA who studied the crash didn't think the forces on the cabin would have hurt anyone strapped in, but the altitude was sufficient to knock people out from lack of oxygen.
This is dredged up from memory, so it may have been superseded by now. I was working for Morton-Thiokol when it happened, and it was not a fun time for myself or my cow-orkers.
How many School Teachers, Pilots, and Scientists has NASA lost in the last 20 years again?
Fourteen, after having achieved several man-years in orbit
How many has Rutan lost?
Three, after having achieved about 5 man-minutes in a parabola
Look, NASA has been stupid, bloated and has wasted hundreds of $billions of our money on the ISS and shuttle, which both should have been scrapped a decade ago. However, that doesn't mean that Rutan has done anything useful either. Compared to *real* space activities, he is just puttering around. By the time he builds anything that could safely get humans in and out of orbit (which would require 100X his current fuel capacity, heat shields, life support systems, etc.), his "shoestring budgets" would be totally busted.
Meanwhile, who does have the capabilities to put people into space right now? The Russians, on well-engineered, cheap-to-produce ballistic missile-style vehicles. And while NASA flounders around redesigning 30 year old shuttle derived technology, and watching their launch date slip out for years, if not decades, we will be dependent on the venerable Soyuz keep Americans in space.
That's one thing that has puzzled me. Why not use soyuz capsules to ferry people to and from orbit where they can meet up with a semipermanent vehicle which remains in orbit and is resupplied by cargo launch vehicles?
Supplying durable commodity goods to orbit, moving around while in orbit, ferrying humans to orbit, and returning them from orbit seem as though they would have vastly different needs as far as vehicles are concerned. Combining the crew to orbit and reentry vehicles makes sense because for every person sent to space, you hope to have one person return, but an orbiter vehicle parked in orbit in some sort of protective garage would seem to reduce the need to lift that heavy object every time and supplies are more expendable and often more durable than people.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
You going to find a "mom and pop engineering company" to duplicate IBM's work and make another Instrument Unit to fly it? Manufacture two tons of 1960s-vintage analog computers and gyroscopes? Rebuild equipment designed to determine the rocket's launch azimuth based on star sightings, not GPS like we'd use today? What about all the other analog and early digital equipment that's integral to the design? It's not just a giant fuel tank and some engines--it's a launch vehicle. It's got a flight manual, and it's designed to be used in conjunction with an Apollo command and service module pair flying it.
Re-design the rocket to use new technology? By the time you've de-Apollo'd Saturn, you've made a whole new launch vehicle. Which is exactly what Ares is.
The Saturn V is an awesome piece of technology, yes. An awesome piece of 1960s technology. Rebuilding it today would not work, period, no matter how cool it might be.
My point was that the US could fight a war in Viet Nam that proportionally cost 9x what the Iraq wars costs *and* go to the moon *and* fund "The Great Society". The original poster saying we need to ax manned spaceflight until fusion due to cost/benefit was what I was railing against, not saying that wars are good. Sheesh!
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."