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.
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.
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."
Uh, no, actually that's exactly what happened. Griffin and Horowitz (the PHB's) came up with their Ares plan many years ago, did a 60 day "study" that came back with the recommendation to follow their plan, and ordered the MSFC engineers to build their designs, rather than the engineers' long standing plans to develop more conventional and cost-effective derivatives of the Shuttle (NLS/Magnum) or EELV.
Back in the '60s, the NASA PHB's were at least smart enough to see that John Houbolt had come up with a solution to fix their performance gap. Today, the PHB's are too busy doing political spin to promote their preferred solution and hide the 7mT performance shortfall, the 6 year spaceflight gap, and the $1.4 billion to $2 billion per launch total cost.
Thats one heckuva' job Mikey.
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).
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."