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NASA Installing Shocks On Ares
caffiend666 writes "In order to abate the massive vibration issues of their new Ares I spacecraft, NASA is installing shock absorbers. 'The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem.' So, when the spaceship is a rocking, don't come a knocking?"
Will they then have to haul nearly a ton into space? That sounds like a very costly improvement to the shuttle.
So they're loading down the first stage with at _least_ 1600 pounds of weight (plus motors, plus batteries, plus cannisters) to dampen vibration?
That's pretty crazy, I would think. It's not like all that weight is gonna come free.
Tell Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee how well the original Apollo design worked for them. Oh wait you can't - they're dead.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Ever get the feeling they're building a kludge all over again? Space Shuttle II -- Revenge of Thousands of Glued On Tiles and Strapping It to the Side an Ice-Covered Tank.
There was no way to passively dampen the vibrations? A simpler, cheaper solution? So instead they'll introduce another ton of lift weight and 17 additional motors and batteries to fail.
My prediction: in the first 50 launches this system will fail and the rocket will either shake the astronauts and payload apart (failure to dampen) or spectacularly shake the rocket apart (oscillate lopsidedly or out of synch with the vibrations).
With luck Slashdot will archive this long enough. Given that this is a NASA project, that might not be likely.
Get off my lawn.
You think the Saturn V didn't have many tons of anti-vibration structure, anti-pogo devices, and other such things? Get real!
Clueless computer types such as yourself might think that a rocket should be fuel tanks and an engine and nothing else, but that's not how it actually works in the real world. There's a reason that "rocket science" is used as an idiom to indicate something that's extremely hard, you know.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
The Apollo missions definitely weren't entirely safe... but people didn't really care about it as much as they do today. They were driven to succeed at almost any cost, and to do so before the Russians.
Now we have this culture of protection and safety that's we're too afraid to (accidentally) sacrifice a human even at the prospect of settling on the moon. Not saying it's wrong, but it complicates things more.
Move all sig!
I'd hesitate to say it 'worked great', given the very few flights the Saturn V (to give it it's proper name) flew. They didn't mostly solve the vibration problems until Apollo 14, for example (they never did completely solve them), and they were making significant modifications right up to the last flight. In particular, they fiddled extensively with the retrorockets on the first and second stages to reduce weight while ensuring proper separation and no recontact.
Mostly because it isn't a matter of updating 'some components'... For one example - the electronics in the Saturn V IU (Instrument Unit) are hopelessly out of date, you can't simply 'update them' because they interconnect with everything else on the booster. Even just updating the electronics on the IU means redoing the cooling system and wiring harness, not to mention that all the vibration, structural, cooling, etc. etc. analysis will have to be redone as well.
When it comes to the Apollo capsule itself, I've seen credible work that indicates that the weight of its power and electronic would shrink by over 90%! Which means the cooling system is now way oversized... The CG of the capsule also moves radically, which means rejiggering the RCS to account for the changed aerodynamic performance... Etc. Etc.
There's a reason why the Soviets update the Soyuz only infrequently.
It's only easy when you don't understand the issues involved. Very few Slashdotters seem to know much about the history and engineering of the Apollo program beyond the extremely simplified panegyrics they read as kids.