Stacking of New Space Vehicle Begins At KSC

Matt_dk writes "For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a new space vehicle will begin stacking on a mobile launch platform (MLP) at Kennedy Space Center. The Ares I-X aft skirt, which was mated to a solid fuel segment in the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility at KSC, rolled over to the 528-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building today, where it will be lifted and placed on the MLP in High Bay 3. On that platform, workers will secure the aft booster and continue adding segments of the first stage rocket, the upper stage simulators, the crew module mockup and the launch abort system simulator, taking the vehicle to a height of 327 feet."

Comments

Spaceship modules

[sopssa]

Dudes, the game ends at 2020. There's around 10 years to go, and the trip to alpha centauri takes way more turns. All the modules should had been installed by now and the space vehicle should be on its way already! I mean, I did take my extra time to build the better modules and prioritized production in all cities to do it, but I would had never left it this late in game to actually launch it.

Aah, Civ2 times.. All the lost weekends, while still learning so much from it.

Re:Spaceship modules

[Shakrai]

All the modules should had been installed by now and the space vehicle should be on its way already!

Not if you plan on winning by global conquest. People actually launched the ship in that game? I always paid on bloodlust -- or if I wanted a challenge I'd allow spaceships and race to conquer my enemies before theirs reached Alpha Centauri.

Why pour resources into exploration when you can pour them into global conquest instead? ;)

Re:Spaceship modules

[sopssa]

I actually found the technological way a lot better. It made it a little boring during early/mid -game, but I always had technological advantage to enemies because I pushed for it. Because of that the optimal winning tactic was launching the spacecraft to alpha centauri. Usually after it went there and I won, I would continue playing and totally crush the opponents who still were so much behind me in tech. I always found it hard to develop your army during game and still keep up with technology and city building.

Re:Spaceship modules

[Shakrai]

I could never do it because I always got sucked into a war. Even when I had an entire island/continent to myself, an NPC would invariably land a settler and found a city within the radius of one of my cities and start stealing my developed land. A few dozen turns later and that particular NPC would be lain waste.

I didn't fall real far behind in technology while fighting wars because the computer players would usually switch to fundamentalism to keep up with your war machine. If they didn't and started to pull away in the tech race there's always the possibility of espionage to keep up. You did fall behind in the city building race though.

Re:Spaceship modules

[Red Flayer]

Ah, how far the mighty have fallen.

Where once that post sailed above the masses in the +3 thermocline, now it languishes at the bottom of score:0 canyon.
It is no longer its privilege to soar and swoop among the updrafts and downdrafts over the score:2 threshold, now it must crawl, penitently, through the scrubgrass.

Oh worthy moderators, how had he offended thee?
Was it his wanton brashness in posts of yore?
Was it his disagreement with your politics?

Oh, my keyboard for the knowledge of why, why, why
his off-topic post gleans deserved moderation, while its off-topic parents receive continued adulation.

Consistency, please.

Actually a plausible scenario

[StCredZero]

They do have that "Chicken Gun." I can imagine a test where they see what happens if you fire a chicken at 600 MPH into the 1st stage exhaust plume. Not that they'd ever have a good reason to do it, just that they could -- to have KSC Friend Chicken.

Maybe this is a one for the Mythbusters? How do we incorporate C4?

That's a low ceiling..

[theelectron]

327 feet? I was hoping it could fly higher than that...

This is the way to spend taxpayer money!

[tjstork]

I know a lot of other people might be down on NASA. They say its too much of this, or too much of that, should be privatized, etc.. but...last time I checked:

NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon, land a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, build and operate a space plane and a space station.

Everyone says NASA is expensive, but, I think the value is just tremendous.

I cannot reiterate my support for NASA, enough.

Re:This is the way to spend taxpayer money!

[FleaPlus]

I know a lot of other people might be down on NASA. They say its too much of this, or too much of that, should be privatized, etc.. but...last time I checked:

NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon, land a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, build and operate a space plane and a space station.

NASA's done a lot of great things, but the Ares I-X isn't one of them. It's just a suborbital rocket model being put together mostly for political reasons, and has almost nothing in common with the Ares I rocket it's supposed to be a test for. It's been designed to specifically avoid all the big problems and question-marks which are threatening to doom the Ares I, making it almost useless as a test. I feel really bad for all the skilled NASA engineers whose time has been wasted on this make-work project instead of something more fruitful.

Like another commenter, I'm quite a bit more impressed by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which is already at Cape Canaveral, even if it isn't using the MLP. That's going to be quite a bit more important to the future of spaceflight than the Ares I-X.

Re:This is the way to spend taxpayer money!

[peragrin]

while I agree. i also don't want them to completely mothball the shuttles either. There is a handful of missions that only a shuttle can accomplish that would be worth every penny in keeping one on hand.

My personal favorite goal. When the Hubbel is finally dying And beyond repair, Send up a 2-3 man crew retrieve it and return it to earth safely. That is what the shuttle were meant to do with old satellites. retrieve them for proper disposal on earth. It is one mission not yet attempted. Besides how cool would it be to have the Hubbel space telescope setting in the Smithsonian? heck the majority of the shuttle launch could be financed by donors. It would be risky, but for that honor, i bet you get lots of volunteers.

Re:This is the way to spend taxpayer money!

[CrimsonAvenger]

Soyuz has flown many more times than the Shuttle, IIRC, so two losses is statistically much better for the Soyuz.

Umm, no. Soyuz 102 manned flights. Shuttle has done 126. So its two losses are statistically worse for Soyuz (1.96% Soyuz, 1.58% Shuttle).

I know there are people who have been indoctrinated into believing that the Shuttle is the worst vehicle to ever fly into space, and the Soyuz is the best. But, fact is, the numbers support the reverse position.

Shuttle has had 126 missions. 124 of them reached orbit and returned.

Soyuz has had 102 missions. 98 of them reached orbit and returned.

Of the 124 Shuttle missions that reached orbit and returned, 122 completed their intended missions, two had to abort due to non-lethal technical difficulties.

Of the 98 Soyuz missions that reached orbit and returned, 91 completed their intended missions, seven had to abort due to non-lethal technical difficulties. Note that one of the 91 "successful" missions included accidentally ramming Mir.

Re:This is the way to spend taxpayer money!

[Martin Blank]

There was at least one mission that returned satellites to Earth. STS-51A returned two satellites that had malfunctioned; these were later repaired and successfully relaunched. I thought there were one or two others that did the same (and perhaps they were military missions), but I can't immediately find them.

Re:Maybe next year

[krswan]

Not live but recent images here: http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm?cat=4

Note the "mobile launch pad" disclaimer

[Anonymous Coward]

"For the first time in more than a quarter-century [...] on a mobile launch platform (MLP)"

Good thing they had that little disclaimer. SpaceX's Falcon 9 showed up there earlier this year. From the pictures, the Falcon's launch platform doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

http://spacex.com/updates.php

Re:Note the "mobile launch pad" disclaimer

[T Murphy]

The important part of that statement is the MLP is what goes into the high bays for assembly of the craft and moving the vehicle to the launch site. In other words it is officially the successor NASA rocket by following in the footsteps of the Saturn rockets and space shuttle.

Re:wrong macro engineering again

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Aerodynamics, last I checked, is not a completely solved problem (granted, it's in better shape than the more general fluid dynamics, but still not solved), nor are a large number of other design decisions involved with producing spacecraft. I somehow doubt that aesthetics are trumping science in the look; rather, they're probably guiding the selection among a number of similarly efficient designs.

As for imperial vs. metric, I think the big hurdle isn't patriotism, it's inertia. People were born and raised on imperial, and it's hard to reprogram them later in life. And teachers start with imperial because you encounter it more often. It's Catch-22; you can't switch until people are comfortable with it, and you can't get comfortable with it until you switch. The U.S. is slowly starting to switch the teaching to metric, so I suspect we'll try the transition again in the next decade or two, once the majority of the population can deal with it. Otherwise, you get smartasses/idiots driving 100 MPH on every highway.

Re:wrong macro engineering again

[TheRocketMan]

And while I am on it, no vehicles should be built at all until the scientific metric system of measurement is introduced and imperial medieval system is banned. It should be forbidden, I do not know, by the Geneva convention. Due to pseudo-patriotism the complicated systems are built with archaic feet, elbows, inches, etc. All would be fine, but alive people are to fly it.

It's not patriotism as much as infrastructure for fabrication and test. I'm thinking of propulsion here, but this is true of other areas as well. Raw materials required/needed are only available in the USA in English units (5/8in tubing for prop lines, etc), for that to become metric would require all the suppliers to support metric as well: it's not just NASA. Also, machining and test equipment in many facilities (again, not just NASA) are non-metric: again this infrastructure could be converted but would be expensive and nobody has ponied up the bread to do the conversion and re-cert required.

All certainly do-able but there is a cost: not arguing against metric as I work only in metric, switching to all metric would make my life easier.