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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.
No - this is a derivative of the 1960s Apollo capsule. But look at the bright side - all the relevant patents have expired by now.
Would that be the large, unmarked banks of blinking square lights, the female voice that always says "Insufficient Data" followed by a dramatic orchestral chord, or the engine that the chief engineer can only repair 10 seconds before destruction?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
"Although similar, it builds on 1960s technology"? While the old one was build on 1860 technology? I don't get it.
"Hey! I just touched it and this piece fell off!"
"Hmm... It's... a Mock-up?... Yeah! It's a Mock-up!"
Don't get me wrong I hope we get off this rock and have a *real* space program but I suspect that I am not the only person reading this that thinks they were born before their time.
Good luck NASA, I hope it all goes well, this time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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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We'll be at Alpha centuri in a few years, if all goes well.
Nah, I prefer to win the game by global conquest. It's much more entertaining to pour all of your resources into armies, fleets and aircraft than spaceship components. Those fucking Celts will soon pay for sacking Athens back in 3400 BC, muhahahahahahahahaha.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"You came in that thing?, Youâ(TM)re braver than I thought"
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.
They were going to name it SpaceShip Colbert, but their plans were ruined.
rewriting history since 2109
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!
Perhaps in the large, cylindrical service module which will be launched by Ares 5 before the crew takes off? The crew capsule is just for earth takeoff and landing. They dock with the rest of the spacecraft in earth orbit before leaving for elsewhere.
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
The vehicle in question is an ascent/re-entry craft. It might be sufficient for the trip to the moon (though certainly landing and relaunching will require a second craft as it did for Apollo), but this vehicle is not up to the task of providing suitable living conditions for a trip to Mars.
For a Mars trip this is at best a way to get up to the interplanetary vessel and return to Earth from it. Given that, I can't imagine why you would bother to cart it all the way there just to cart it back.
Is it too much to ask for people who read a supposedly tech site actually read, and perhaps think, before pounding their keyboards with things like "how's that little thing going to get 6 astronauts to Mars?", "NASA is stoopid", and the like?
Its proposed use is to carry up to 6 astronauts to the space station, and from there, 4 to the Moon. For the Moon missions, Orion will travel along with the Altair lunar lander.
For Mars missions, "Orion could rendezvous in low Earth orbit with vehicles that will take explorers to other destinations in our solar system such as Mars." http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/306407main_orion_crew%20_expl_vehicle.pdf
These Mars-bound vehicles will be assembled in low Earth orbit. There is no reason to believe that 4 or 6 astronauts would be confined to the small Orion capsule for the duration of a Mars voyage.
On a side note, I was 5 years old when I watched the first manned landing on the Moon. It's amazing to me that a manned Mars mission may happen when I'm in my 70's. Certainly not how I imagined things when I was young.
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.
Not sure that I would want to be stuck in that with 5 other people for two years.
With enough viagra, lube, and toys, a crew of 3 guys + 3 gals might just survive. Exhausted, to be sure, but in pretty good spirits.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Except you can keep rotating for free, while constant acceleration using chemical (or even fission) power requires completely insane amounts of fuel.
* Moon-Mars is basically unfunded. NASA has to steal from other missions just to study Moon-Mars
* The moon is a lousy steppingstone to Mars. Think about it: to land on a planet with an atmosphere, you can slow down with a parachute. To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch! If you just skip the moon entirely, you don't have that horribly expensive deceleration phase followed by that expensive acceleration phase.
Face it, most of the actual science done in space has been done by robots and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Humans in space is not a bad idea, but Bush didn't fund Moon-Mars and it's unlikely to get funded any time in the forseeable future. Personally, I've always thought Moon-Mars was a cynical political ploy to win a slice of the nerd vote. But that's just me.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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!