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NASA Shows Off Mock-Up of Mars-Capable Spacecraft
N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer."
They're still working on the parachute.
Wow, all these years of working on the new moon/Mars project, and they hit upon the ingenious idea of making an Apollo splashdown pod slightly bigger. My tax dollars at work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Current Unixes (Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, etc.) are also a derivative of 1960s technology. And if we were talking about that, the Unix and most of tne Linux guys, at least, would all be saying "yeah, but it's stable because it's so mature."
what's the difference then, with a 1960s Apollo-derived capsule, then?
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"...and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer."
Ah, am I the only one reading this and questioning just exactly what the hell we have been paying NASA Engineers millions of dollars for over the last 45 years?
I mean, I'm all for K.I.S.S. methodology and all, but damn, 40+ years worth of advances should not be completely looked over for "tried and true". Even that is questionable, given Apollos not-so-perfect track record.
Hell, how many "safety" features are still in use today from the 60's in automobiles?
Guess I better start buying stock in vacuum tube manufacturers...
Sets some interesting challenges never mind the amount of time to get there but simple landing and taking off again will be horrendous. Bear in mind that to achieve even Low earth Orbit you kneed some pretty impressive ordinance. Getting back from the moon will be a piece of piss in comparison at only 16.6% earth gravity but Mars's gravity is 38% earth gravity which means any escape mechanism is going to kneed orders of magnitude more impulse in order to achieve marsion orbit compared to to same feat on the moon. I'm not sure it could be achieved with a single stage rocket although I admit it's a possibility. But what about Launch a pad???? Will it be Liquid or Solid propellant???? Many many questions of which I'm sure even NASA hasn't even started to look for answers yet.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Yeah, I'm having a little trouble believing that's going to be an adequate space-craft for going to Mars. For a several day trip to the moon, ok - but being bottled up in that thing for 2-3 years? And where are you going to store several years worth of supplies in there?
I think somebody is smoking something.
It would be the case if they had continued working on that model, but they didn't. So basically you would be saying that Windows is stable because Unix is old, which doesn't add up.
I am the lawn!
when we get to watch em die light minutes from earth in space.
Even with that risk, I'd sign up as the first to go.
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
But humans are violent in nature
I smell bullshit. All omnivores and carnivores could be said to be "violent in nature." However, since we try not to anthropomorphize in science, we just say they act naturally. If you remove our sentience, we revert back to our animalistic selves. Would we then be violent for showing our competitive natures?
Ultimately when you think about this you will reach a point where you will see that peace and violence are man made. This is akin to good and evil, they don't truly exist in the natural world except in the hearts of men.
We could be a lo further if we had taken just a fraction of the war budget and let Nasa keep going to the Moon. There is no reason we couldn't have a permanent base by now.
2030 to Mars? Where does this come from. We could have 1 way manned missions to mars right now. Ill bet there would be volunteers.
No, I think Nasa has just become a cash register for the usual defense contractors with no vision.
I am truly sorry we couldn't have had just a little less war, and a little more science.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
There is really not enough data to attest Apollo spacecraft were much safer than the shuttles. There were less than two dozen Apollo manned launches with one nearly (because the crew got really, really lucky) catastrophic accident and more than a hundred shuttle launches done by a small fleet that went to space a couple times each with two very serious mishaps.
The best one can do is to extrapolate on data from about a hundred Soyuz missions. Soyuz seems to be slightly safer than shuttle and has in common with the Orion both the 60's tech and the mostly expendable architecture (IIRC, some systems are transferred from a used Soyuz to a new one after being recertified).
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"I feel sorry for the crew who has to spend all that time in that shit box."
They won't. And you can really consider that capsule is more or less the escape pod from the real spaceship. Other way to think about it is the "shipping container for the crew and return samples".
I suppose most of the time the crew will have more spacious quarters, specially when en route to Mars. The capsule will also never get to the Martian surface - they will probably have a descent vehicle either with them since Earth or safely parked in Martian orbit as well as an ascent vehicle landed near their working site on Mars that's there since before they leave Earth.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yeah, you retards. It's not rocket science.
Oh, wait, it is. I'd mis-identified the retards involved here.
For the record, there are ways of getting to Mars in substantially less time. However, they're not going to happen, because people don't like hearing the N-word.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
No....I think you'll find it *WAS* rocket science.
People forget that the Apollo project killed off the much more reasonable X-plane development, one of which by 1962 was already flying at an altitude of sixty miles. Progression to space travel was seen as the logical next step. But when JFK decided "HOLY FUCK WE GOTTA GO TO THE MOON!", and the developers told him it might be possible to do deep space stuff by the seventies, he opted to kill the project and go for Wernher von Braun's batshit insane rockets instead.
Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.
Except you can keep rotating for free, while constant acceleration using chemical (or even fission) power requires completely insane amounts of fuel.
All of these seem to argue in favor of Orion being safer than Shuttle. There are two obvious downsides:
On balance, I tent to like the KISS approach, so favor the capsule. But you're correct; actual safety comes down to how well all the systems are actually designed and implemented. A simpler approach, poorly implemented, is no safer than a complicated approach implemented well.
One added benefit to the rotational method is that you can gradually alter the rotation so that by the time the astronauts reach Mars, they are acclimatized to its gravity. Same thing on the trip home.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why? Honestly, who in their right mind wants to live anywhere but on Earth? We are perfectly suited for life on this planet and no other. We have beautiful mountains, ocean, fresh water, we don't need "life-support" systems just to take a walk outside, and we sure as hell don't need a rocket to get here.
I could see the attraction and novety of a three day mars or moon vacation, but beyond that, I'm staying here.
When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off.
How is that, exactly? Population is governed by compound interest. Our population today is 6.6 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Data via CIA.) Do the math. Today there were 213,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 213,000 more. The day after - another 213,000. In six months that will be 214,000 per day - six months later, 215,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 213,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day or 35,000 Orions. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers of flesh - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years. If you want to push the inevitable collapse of civilization off for 240 years (roughly the duration of the American Experiment to date) - well, you need 15 additional Earth clones.
Our population problem will be solved on Earth - one way or another.