Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
My blog
Well seat belts came in around the late 60's... I think what they mean is the fundamental craft was sound (in the same way that cars are still fairly car-shaped) however they are now adding ABS, Air bags and a musical horn.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
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.
Good point, yes, obviously making a spacecraft to carry six people to Mars is as simple as just coming up with the idea "make it bigger". It's not like it's rocket science, is it. They should have just read your comment here on Slashdot, we'd be there by now.
What a waste of those tax dollars, if only we hadn't spent all that money funding NASA this past five years we could have had enough for, I don't know, almost an extra year of war in Iraq ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget ). And it's not like they did anything else with all that money, like Shuttle launches is it.
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!
I (for once) RTFA, and from what I gathered, they've developed this module and updated launcher to provide an effective round trip mechanism for Moon expeditions, where they will practice the operations that will be required when a full scale Mars mission is executed (sometime around between 2020-2030). I think the important point is that NASA is realizing that the shuttle is not an effective mission system for the next generation of Moon missions, which are a pre-req for any future Mars missions.
To me, this actually sounds like a sober assessment - and one that is long overdue.
Bryan "BJ" Hoffpauir
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).
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I'm more worried about my tax dollars - the ones wasted on your education.
In real world engineering, form follows function. Just like the Airbus 380 is basically an enlarged Boeing Dash 80, the Orion is an enlarged Apollo. For both functions there's only so many forms that work, and no particular reason not to choose something proven. This isn't fad and fashion driven product design (like the latest iCoolthing), but something people's lives will depend on.
No....I think you'll find it *WAS* rocket science.
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!