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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...
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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."
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.