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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.
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 I fear it has been replaced by disinterested private contractors, underfunding, and ambivalence.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.
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
Just set up a national tip jar on something akin to PayPal.
Citizens actually want to fund space activities, not the stuff that's killing us: http://perotcharts.com/
Dis-intermediating DC is step #1 in carrying out the will of the people.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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.
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).
I think you're confusing Ares I and Ares V. Ares I isn't all that big. It's a single stack of capsule -> fuel tank -> stage 2 engine -> stage 1 solid rocket booster. If anything, it's quite a bit thinner than most rockets. However, it does make up for this by towering a massive 94m high. Which does mean a few upgrades to the scaffolding.
The Ares V, however, she's gonna be a beasty. With six (!) main engines, two outboard Solid Rocket Boosters, a plump width of 10m on the central stack, and a towering 116m tall, she's going to put every other rocket to shame. Personally, I can't wait. ;-)
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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.
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.
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...
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.
The Ares V will even put the Sat V to shame.
The Ares V is going to be the large booster we SHOULD have built after the Saturn V. It's late, but it's finally coming. :-)
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Back in the 60's we were competing against the "Ruskies" and NASA had a much bigger budget (when adjusted for inflation). They threw money at the engineering teams and told them to make it happen. These days, NASA is operating on a fraction of what it once had.
FYI, I found updated numbers for the six engine Ares V on NASA's site here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/aresV/index.html
The correct LEO figure is stated here:
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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.
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.
Nonsense. The vast majority of people really want to see some cool pictures on the news every couple of years or so. If you substitute to 10c per person (or whatever the current budget works out to) with half a dozen multi-millionaires and a long (actually, short) tail of "enthusiast" types chipping in $50 or $20, you won't have enough for a single Delta launch, let alone fund design testing build and operation of two and a half new launchers, a new crew vehicle and the TLI / lander / ascent hardware needed for another moon landing.
I personally am of the opinion the moon landings will be jettisoned as soon as practical, and that that's a good thing. I just hope it's early enough to leave enough left for the increasingly delayed outer planets flagship mission and some more Mars landers / rovers, oh and a telecoms relay orbiter that will be desperately needed in 7-10 years' time. (Did you know there's nothing on the Mars launch schedule after MSL in 2010? That money's gone to Dubya's cock-eyed publicity stunt of trying to get Kennedy's rep by announcing another manned moon landing. But I realise that's unpopular around here.
My tool box has two items. Duct tape and WD-40.
If it moves and it's not suppose to Duct Tape it.
If it doesn't move and it is suppose to WD-40 it.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
The difference is that the Saturn V stats reflect real performance, the Ares V figures are still hypothetical. Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
And of course, Saturn V is 45 year old technology. Just replacing the Instrument Unit (guidance system) with modern avionics would add about 2000 kg to the payload.
-- Alastair
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.
Those are not my quotes, they are NASA's. And I do realize that 71t "to the moon" means a TLI burn. The reason for the 188t figure is that NASA added a sixth engine to the previously 5 engine stack AND moved from the SSMEs to the RS-68 engines. These changes significantly increased the performance of the booster.
That is, in theory. We'll see how close the booster is to its theoretical figures once it's on the pad. ;-)
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Um, you just described the Ares program.
Ares V - unmanned rocket with huge lift capability.
Ares I - manned rocket designed to be extremely safe and get a manned capsule to LEO, period.
Plans for a moon shot involve using Ares V to launch the hardware, Ares I to launch the people, and a rendezvous in orbit before proceeding to the moon. Read all about it.
Annnnddd the thread comes full circle. You just confused Ares I and Ares V.
Ares I - Small, man rated rocket
Ares V - Heavy cargo rocket that is NOT man-rated
The profile for a moon launch requires two separate launches. The first is an Ares V launch to place the necessary equipment (e.g. Altair Lander) and boosters (Earth Departure Stage) into orbit. The Ares I rocket would then launch the Orion capsule carrying the crew. The capsule would dock with the cargo launched by the Ares V, then use the Earth Departure Stage to make a Trans-Lunar Injection burn.
As a result, the figures for the Ares V TLI burn are a bit misleading. The Ares V will be unlikely to send cargo directly to the moon. At least at first. Such capability might be used later on in support of a base or colony.
More information on the Constellation Project can be found at the usual sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Constellation
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html
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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.
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.
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.
Shuttle never got much more than about 80% of its originally advertised payload capacity.
You are wrong here in a way. I do not know the original advertised payload capacity, however, when they were during launch trajectory analysis they found out that when they used the upside down trajectory, it increased payload by almost 20%, so I can guarantee that the payload they carried up was more than what they originally thought it would be, if not the full extra 20%. I hope that made sense.
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.
Shuttle design payload was 65,000 pounds. Heaviest payload I can quickly find on the net was STS-93 carrying 49,789 pounds. (I think the nominal max is 55,000, that's what I based my 80% on). This is only 76% of original design goals. Launch profile has nothing to do with it. They have to fly upside-down so that the thrust vector of the SSMEs when pointed through the center of mass of the assembly is upward (and downrange).
Payloads to to the ISS are less (heaviest was about 36,000 pounds) because ISS is in a fairly high inclination orbit (which makes it easier to reach from Baikonur).
-- Alastair