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NASA Shuttle Replacement's Problems Are Worsening
ausoleil noted that NASA's replacement for the shuttle, the Orion, is slipping behind schedule "'We're probably going to have to move our target date,' NASA exploration chief Doug Cooke told The Associated Press on Wednesday after Nasawatch.com posted the 117-page internal status report (PDF) on the moon program. The cost problems include an $80 million overrun on a motor system. The Orion spacecraft's design remains too heavy for the proposed Ares 1 rocket. Software development, heat shield testing and other complex work remain behind schedule or over budget. There are dozens of such serious challenges, many of which are 'worsening.'"
but i'll play one on slashdot and come up with all kinds of rubber band and duct tape solutions and act like my 11th grade physics class bests nasa engineers.
wait, my friends, you'll see tons of posts just like this except for that the posters take themselves seriously.
I keep half expecting them to finally get one built, and then they realize they don't have a launch pad capable of handling something that big.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Look, does this news really come as a surprise? NASA's been over-budget and behind schedule since the last Apollo flight. Without the unlimited checkbook that Mercury/Gemini/Apollo had, this should be expected.
Unlimited budgets have a way of clearing all obstacles in their path.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
How long will there be no active US manned spacecraft - and will this get longer?
I am reminded of the gap between Apollo and the Shuttle - and look at what happened to Skylab...
We seemed more adventurous and capable in the 1960s than we are in 2008. Is this what has become of the great spacefaring nation that so many before us had envisioned? Despite serious technological advancements, have we lost our momentum? Maybe it was a passion for the unknown that enabled us before. I fear it has been replaced by disinterested private contractors, underfunding, and ambivalence. More so if this shuttle replacement isn't successful.
40 years later we can barely make it out of Earth's atmosphere. Just use the equipment from the Apollo program...problem solved.
slipping behind schedule?!? Say it ain't so!
Cue contractor "cost" increases and subsequent price and budget increases in 5....4....3....2....
NASA has reported that the delay and the budget crunch has forced it to reconsider a prior option that will now be built on the shores of Cocoa Beach, FL. It will include two one hundred foot towers with a very elastic synthetic band extending between them. A state of the art human reclining space momentum chair will be attached in the middle to propel future explorers into space...or some where father out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Engineering of a very complex systems overrunning budget and schedule limits and this is news?
News would be if they were under budget and finished a year early.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Jupiter look better every minute.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I've given up on any hope for a manned successor to the shuttle, at least as far as NASA is concerned. I've gotten my geek hope burned too many times on the hype.
If this thing ever gets off the ground, I will be surprised. But even if it does at that, I imagine the design will be as flawed and compromised as the shuttle's.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
and we haven't paid for much of a space program for several decades now. All that engineering knowledge has slowly, and literally, died as engineers have retired. Sending a handful of people to earth orbit every year is not exploration - any focus on anything other than how to advance human beings as rapidly as possible to every body in the solar system is simply spending money without garnering public desire to pay for more of it. We need people going places, and waiting five decades to get around to making it happen has wasted away all the good will those who write the checks had for doing this business.
Well, that's sucks I guess. But since NASA has something like a $17 billion budget, isn't that a colossal non-issue? I realize this was just the motor system, but if I had a $40,000 budget to furnish a new home, I don't think I would be concerned if the coffee table was $20 more than I was expecting.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
"Software development, heat shield testing and other complex work remain behind schedule or over budget."
"Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."
You just got troll'd!
Are you implying that the word is not perfectly cromulent?
Bot Assisted Blogging
You should see the contortions Grumman had to go through, to get the Lunar Module under the mission weight budget, well into the Apollo Program.
I figure the only thing that's changed between now and then is the Internet makes it much easier for the lay public to form entirely the wrong impression about highly complex and technical works-in-progress.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
We *can't* go back to the Apollo gear. What little survives is in museums and the tools that made it are long gone. So are the tools that made the tools, and the knowhow that went with it. You might as well ask for a brand new L-1011 jetliner.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
In fairly new technology a fairly good rule I observe is to always doubel managements estimated time. Therefore the first manned Orion to ISS will be 2018 (assuming ISS is still functional then).
There are existing commercial launch vehicles such as the Delta IV or Atlas V rockets that can be man rated or the potential upcoming commercial launch vehicles such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 that could replace Ares I. Although man rating isn't trivial it's insane for NASA to create a new rocket to compete with existing commercial launch vehicles. NASA should encourage making manned access to low Earth orbit a low cost commercial commodity rather than using government resources to discourage such access.
In fact, NASA should contract with two independent suppliers capable of lifting the CEV to low Earth orbit and buy launch vehicles from each supplier in near equal quantities. This would add some expense, but it would make sure that should a launch accident occur our manned space program isn't grounded for years as complex accident investigations occur and fixes are implemented on the failed launch vehicle.
The Ares I is an albatross that only exists because of pride and politics. It is harmful to the exact type of space development that this nation needs. In the early 60's NASA didn't lose any face by choosing to re-purpose ICBMs for the Mercury and Gemini programs. Instead, out of necessity, NASA it's rocket building teams on the Saturn series of rockets. It was the practical decision then and it is the practical decision to re-purpose existing vehicles now for LEO access.
If NASA wants to build a launcher (and whether they should be building any is a very debatable) then they should be concentrating exclusively on the Ares V/VI which actually goes somewhere and does something that commercial space companies may not be able to do economically today.
The Ares 1 rocket's design remains too weak for the proposed Orion Spacecraft.
There, fixed that for ya.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
By the time Orion is actually getting ready to launch, Richard Branson (or somebody like him) will have rendered the entire program irrelevant by creating something cheaper/faster/better.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The capsule is too heavy? Just use bigger nukes! What? Oh, you mean that Orion. My bad.
Hans
I have less of an issue with NASA being over budget than something like the census bureau. Trust our government to take one simple, Constitutionally mandated action (counting heads) and blow as much tax money on it as they can.
Then there is the whole pesky war thing ...
No sig for you!!
How could we expect this to be any different then our wasted tax dollars on the over budget, waste of money, defense programs. Those that have worked on defense programs know what I'm talking about! I would agree that space exploration should finally revert to being privately funded. I for one would fund it, mostly because I already do for my dishNetwork, the question would be how much is the real cost?
Anyone know if they're mandating Ada?
Damn, I thought they were talking about Project Orion.
I would like to question the reason to build a human carrying shuttle at all right now. While it's certainly very cool to be able to shoot people into space and have the walk around on the Moon is it really the most cost effective way to do the research? Huge amounts of money are spent researching ways to keep our poorly space adapted feeble bodies alive in space which could otherwise be spent making some really great breakthroughs in the robotics and perhaps AI fields.
I'm not questioning whether we should do space research (which I would like to see more of even though I think it's an expensive luxury) but I am saying that we should be maximum bang for our buck both in space and down here in the real world.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Why don't they open-source the development of the damn thing?
We've seen how many times now that communities of interest can do a FAR better job than rigid hierarchies. The government needs to set clue=1 and start working more openly on stuff like this...or it will _always_ be late and over budget...and built half assed.
Copies of the manuals and the designs for the Saturn V still exist. And we've got one of the best examples out there. We still have original Saturn V rockets out at the space centers. Dust that damn thing off, REVERSE ENGINEER it. If NASA can't do it, HIRE MICROSOFT ENGINEERS! They've been doing it for YEARS.
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
Why not?
I'm sure there are a lot of smart people at NASA who can do quite a lot on their modest government regulated salaries.
But I'm equally sure they are vastly outnumbered by mediocre and downright incompetent talent that waste tax payer dollars doing little, nothing or actually counter-producing by dragging the aforementioned smart people into their screwed up projects on last-minute, emergency fix-this sessions.
It's the nature of government employment methodology: "keep the fat."
Thank god we have some rich billionaires developing the commercial space program.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Did you look at how much payload each rocket can take to orbit before you made this post? Look at the payload capacity to GTO (not LEO)
Let me list the estimated maximum payloads since you did not:
Delta IV: 20,000 pounds or so
Atlas V: 18,000 pounds or so
SpaceX Falcon 9: 27,000 pounds or so
Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
See the difference? Ares I is also rated for man-flight, which just makes everything much more complicated.
The article is from a florida newspaper. Of course florida newspapers are going to print doom stories because they don't want to lose Shuttle business. Losing business happens.
Not to reply to my own post, but even if my exact numbers here are wrong, the idea is the same. None of the other rockets that exist now can handle the payload needed and be safe for humans to sit on it. That's your basic 4th grade answer to your question.
It seems almost unforgivable that this is happening now with our engineering tools having advanced so much in the last 40+ years, especially now that computers are there to do a lot of the work. Why is it that we can't do now what we were doing in the 60s? Is there too much red tape? Are the engineers less competent? I don't get it.
Isn't it ironic that all these debates about space launchers and exploration, are always restricted to one nation's nationalist efforts?
Why all this camp drama over which "American" launcher will be work/ be produced/ etc.... when certainly OTHER countries' space programs are alive and well, the Russian, the Chinese, it certainly looks like the ESA will be developing their manned 'CEV' atop their experience with Jules Verne cargoship... So "mankind" is definetely going to continue exploring space and other planets, and the Russians certainly don't seem averse to paying passengers, so there's always an option if 'Americans' really need to be in space (more than any other nationality, Bolivians?)
It's funny, all the space imagery and idealism is so 'pure', so open to possibilities of the universe, yet so many (in this thread, and so many I see on Slashdot and other sites) tie down their dreams of space to mere terrestrial geopolitics and nationalism...!?!? Would it be unimaginable when dreaming some future of mankind in space, if the United States did not even exist a century or two from now? Why is it so necessary for the American state to be the dominant occupier of outer space? (For it's own geopolitical reasons, of course, but why the investment of emotional energy in that outcome? Why not champion any and every side who is willing and able to explore space? The Europeans? The Russians? These are all human beings as well, right?)
The people at NASA have done some great things in the past so I'm not knocking them too hard but does anyone else get the feeling that they're being run by a bunch of career bureaucrats more interested in securing their pension rather than space exploration?
I think the whole idea of NASA needs to be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up.
This article was barely substantial enough to describe how to screw in a lightbulb let alone anything about technical issues. Keith Cowing made a typo which caused half the world to think 1-Y was being delayed when it really wasn't. The fact that NASA can't finish anything is well known.
No no no...it will be a truly state of the art chair made of carbon fiber composites...it's just that the duct tape will be used to hold it in place on the elastic band.
I am positive that I am not the only slashdotter that thinks they can fix anything with a zip tie.
Look through the discussion, and the term "man-rated" comes up, a lot. It's probably a good thing it does too, because it's generally a bad idea to lose life during launches, or any other time during the flight, for that matter.
But I question the path to man rating. For the US space program, as far as I can tell, only Mercury and Gemini turned previously designed boosters into man-rated. Everything else has been designed from the get-go as man-rated. It seems to me that though it can be done that way, it's a bit of a fallacy in the making. To some extent, parts is parts, and it should always be possible to tighten the specs on some number of parts to improve the reliability of an existing booster. For that matter, existing non-man-rated boosters likely have a much longer track record, more launches, etc. They really don't want to lose *any* of these things, because even if human life isn't on top of the stack, typically tens of millions of dollars are.
So I don't understand why we don't start with a non-man-rated booster with a large number of launches and study its track record, failure modes, etc. Then start work on a man-rated version of that same booster with the necessary spec and reliability tweaks. Seems to me that it would be faster and cheaper. It likely wouldn't have the launch capacity, but at the moment that's a separate issue. Even in the Aries program there's the Aries-I with relatively low launch capacity, and the Aries-V with much greater capacity. Better heavy launch programs would still need to go forward, but why have a new light-launch program?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Seems like there are only a few companies out there doing this work and that's the problem.
Microsoft anounced no more XP Orion's computers now have to run Vista The bigger computers consume more power More power requires more fuel Means more weight Means bigger rocket
Its an organisational one. They themselves are already complaining about their budget and they haven't even got a rocket off the ground yet. They've got teams off their own engineers who disagree so strongly with the direction NASA is taking they are designing an alternative rocket on their own time (DIRECT/Jupiter/Ares 2 or 4 or whatever). They've got staff airing their complaints to the press rather than their supervisor. I'd say the wheels have come off the plan to return to the Moon, buy NASA probably haven't even settled on what size wheels those would be yet.
I've mentioned this before. We can't do scale. Everyone is so invested in the orthodoxy of competition that cooperation automatically falls flat on its face. The idea of man as selfish and rational is a self fulfilling prophecy - if you believe that about other people it makes it almost impossible for you to trust and work with them.
So, in my humble opinion, neither the Americans nor anyone else is getting back on the interplanetary horse until we figure out the systemic, structural problems in our societies.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
They're screwed. MacGyver himself couldn't keep this project on schedule with all the duct tape, rubber bands and paperclips in the world.
The problem is, this project is massive. It was obvious from the beginning that their time estimates were basically based on everything working perfectly the first time and optimization studies showing that they'd already picked the most efficient design. There are always going to be problems, and the bigger the project the more you're going to have.
If they're serious about replacing the shuttle with only a couple years of downtime, they should already be gearing up to test the system as a whole. I'm not personally involved in the project, but it doesn't even look like they're ready to test big pieces yet. Maybe 2020 is a more reasonable date to actually begin flights.
Its when you are doing something fairly new, its unpredicatable.
Someone's taking the piss
It's not the tools, or the engineers, or the equipment. It is a matter of will. JFK gave NASA a sharp focus: to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. NASA does not seem to have a focus anymore. They're doing solar science, and weather science, and running interplanetary probes, and landers, and maintianing a space station, and, and, and. Each of these projects is probably good in and of itself. I'm not in a position to make any judgement calls on that. However, each and every project NASA runs, requires a bit of focus. If they really wanted to, if they had the will, they could get the Ares program up and running in five years, and have a man on Mars by 2020.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What if they compartmentalize Orion a bit more and launch *only* the manned crew portion on a smaller man-rated rocket perhaps from a QA-enhanced version of an existing design, and the rest of the payload could be launched by one or more *existing* commercial unmanned rockets? Then all the parts dock in Earth orbit, perhaps with a moon-booster or the like.
Table-ized A.I.
Isn't it ironic that all these debates about space launchers and exploration, are always restricted to one nation's nationalist efforts?....Why not champion any and every side who is willing and able to explore space?
Simple. Manned exploration is mostly about glory, NOT science. Robots are far cheaper for collecting science and samples. (And please don't start the argument about on-the-spot geologists. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny.)
Thus, if its only about glory, then nationalism must come into play. Otherwise, nobody will care enough to pay.
Table-ized A.I.
In terms of budget, NASA is trying to do an enormous amount of work on a budget that a roadside diner might be expected to operate with. Space-hardened, radiation-hardened, high-G-tolerant components are not cheap, and as Scaled Composites demonstrated not that long ago, rocket motors are temperamental and even small errors or flaws can cause nasty failures. (Going maybe 10 or so years back, an experimental VTOL lander collapsed and exploded during a test run due to a single hose not being connected. It'd be possible to have backup systems and/or failsafes that prevented such things being a problem, but you're talking extra money and extra weight.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's absurd bullshit, and you know it. The Apollo gear was designed and built from scratch in less than a decade. And that includes the tools that made the tools that made the tools! There's no fucking reason whatsoever that the same couldn't be done again, especially with the advantage of already having the damn blueprints!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Aerospace in the USA is a dying business. What's left is all contract management and trying to find some foreign supplier to actually build it. Its not so much the workers as a layer of middle management that can't be bothered with technology between now and retirement.
Back when I was in the biz, my company was spinning off 'unprofitable' businesses to foreign owners like mad. Funny thing, with the same workers and plants, the new management actually turned them around. What changed was middle management. When faced with retirement or being shipped to 'retraining' in Elbonia, they all quit.
Have gnu, will travel.
The zip ties' big angry steroid-popping gorilla of a brother.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
NASA has been on a long, uninterrupted downward slide ever since Reagan, when it became more heavily politicized. They somehow managed to get people to the moon in 1969 with a basic, brute-force, heavy-lift vehicle and almost enough computing power to run a pocket calculator. Since then, the manned program hasn't made it much past Low Earth Orbit.
If the current crop of idiots can't get their act together, why not blow the dust off those old Saturn V plans, save some weight by substituting new materials where it would work, and get freakin' going? Longer stays could be accommodated be using the Mars Express approach of sending automated supply missions on ahead.
I don't know if it's time to fire everybody in upper management and start fresh, but it's getting really tempting. And let's try to remember that space exploration is dangerous work. Test pilots die. Astronauts die. That doesn't mean you shut down and abandon your whole program for years on end whenever something goes wrong. They tried it with the Space Shuttle, and all that down time didn't ultimately make things a lot safer.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Probably quite a few.
Delta IV: 20,000 pounds or so
Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
I'm not up on this, why do we need to stick 50,000 pounds into orbit all at once? Can't we just stick up payloads on two Delta IVs and stick them together? Seems to me we've been rendezvousing in space for a while.
was it urine-tested?
Has anyone else noticed that since we are no longer in direct competition with another super power over space superiority (although is close), NASA has lost it's drive and dedication for manned space flight. The shuttle program has limped along for far too long. Anyone who thinks that NASA will make it to the moon again or even Mars hasn't been paying attention to the federal government's track record lately. They have failed at everything. Period. Commercial space flight is the only option I see as having a chance to make it to the moon and even Mars.
It's not absurd, it's prohibitively expensive for obsolete gear. Consider that your Blackberry is EXPONENTIALLY more powerful than all of Mission Control in 1969. Why on Earth do you want to pay billions to bring back slide-rule tech?
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Faster/Better/Cheaper
As ALWAYS, pick two.
What if they compartmentalize Orion a bit more and launch *only* the manned crew portion...
The Orion is the manned crew portion. It is very similar to the Apollo command-module-and-service-module combination. But it is much larger - it can accommodate a crew of 6.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I thought it said "Onion".
There are alternatives
Those are some and I also wonder if they couldn't just license the designs of the Ariane 5 or the Soyuz 2 rocket? They are both proven vehicles.
Another alternative would be to work the Russians to bring the Energia rocket back into use.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Clippy: It looks like your trying to design a lunar lander. Would you like to:
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
"Second system effect"
only the government can go over-budget rebuilding something they already built 40 years ago
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
Here's another thought. The Russian have some huge heavy lift rockets that are tested and reliable. Use the Russian rockets to do the heavy lifting and concentrate on developing the manned equipment. Actually if you tell the Ares V contractors this is the plan then they may just find a way to get things done on time and on schedule for a change.
There was a great 6-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel recently called When We Left Earth. Looking back at the hurdles NASA faced in getting men to the Moon and back, it's astounding that it went so well.
There was a tremendous series of technical and organizational challenges to pulling off that project. Rockets kept blowing up until just before they started strapping astronauts on them. In-space docking failed to connect until the astronauts simply plowed the ships together hard enough to force a lock. The navigation software was bloated and slow, so they scaled back the role of the in-flight computer and relied more on Earth-based navigation. The lunar rover was an afterthought but a brilliant team of engineers dreamt up a design that was lightweight, reliable, and folded like origami to fit in the lunar lander.
So technical surprises are nothing new. One difference now is that all of our technology is so complex and our experts are so specialized that it's really, really hard to get the right person for the right problem at the right time.
The lack of budgetary support is new. Getting to the Moon in the 1960's was an issue of national pride, economic advantage, and military power. Getting to the Moon in the 2000's is an issue of fantasy and questionable scientific value. The technical problems could be overcome by throwing money at them, but we're not in a mood to do it that way.
...you'd be hard-pressed to find a person weighing 20,000 lbs. Except near a McDonalds, then all bets are off.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Can't we just stick up payloads on two Delta IVs and stick them together? Seems to me we've been rendezvousing in space for a while.
Orion is really heavy. It is much heavier than the Apollo capsule. You ask why not split the payloads between two delta IVs? The splitting of payloads is actually the reason why there is an Ares I and an Ares V. Ares I takes up the crew and anything else that is possible, and Ares V brings up everything else, which is a lot.
Why on earth is this report ... a PowerPoint "deck"?
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Steampunkgasm.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Capsule too heavy? Now if it was designed for crew less than 150cm tall and under 40kg the capsule could be a lot smaller and lighter:)
Then again - I just watch too much anime. The above was the premise for "Rocket Girls" to have an excuse for high school girls in space in a reasonably realistic story. Some real science and adapted anecdotes are mixed in. The characters even do a skip trajactory and repeat Aldrin's impressive feat of doing complex flight calculations without a computer. And yes, the "skin tight spacesuits" are under development and were not just an anime thing.
government technical endeavor: bad management. Managers overpromising results, underestimating schedules, understaffing projects, not willing to loosen the purse strings to give their engineers a raise that actually beats the inflation rate for once...
Let me list the estimated maximum payloads since you did not:
Delta IV Heavy: 57,000 pounds or so
Atlas V Heavy: 44,000 pounds or so
SpaceX Falcon 9: 27,000 pounds or so
Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
Fixed. Here's the sources for Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V Heavy.
The Space Shuttle is currently the only vehicle that can handle that payload and launch someone safely into space. The Ares I does not exist yet, nor will it exist till test flights of the Ares I-Y in 2013 or so. That's the first flight of the 5 segment solid rocket motor and a working upper stage.
One can see why your id is nearly a million. You post a six-paragraph comment about price vs worth without ever mentioning free software?
You need to learn to read. I said GTO orbit not LEO. In fact the wikipedia links you deliver show both of the payloads for each orbit, and they match what I posted.
Falcon 1 ready to fly --- launch window open July 29- Aug 6. update here: http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Third_Times_the_Charm.html
My apologies. I thought you were talking about LEO since you used LEO numbers for the Ares I. I will issue corrected numbers.
Ares I numbers are way off. I can't find GTO numbers anywhere online for the Ares I, but payload size should drop a similar amount to the other competitors. That Florida newspaper is wrong here.
Falcon 9 is 60,000 pounds or so. Ares I is around 55,000 pounds or so. Also, these are LEO numbers because I cannot find GTO numbers for the Ares I. It's definitely not 50,000 pounds to GTO. That would require some high ISP technology that currently isn't planned for the Ares I. Plus the other rockets could use that magic technology as well. At least two already lift more to LEO, so with the same tech they will lift more to GTO.
The shuttle program is either going to be extended OR the COTS will replace it. You can bet on it, that Musk will see to it that dragon will haul ppl up there before the end of 2011 (and I think before 2010). In fact, I am guessing that spacex will be the main supplier for bigelow and American ISS needs from 2011 to 2015 (or later).