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Alternative Orion Missions Proposed
skywatcher2501 writes "Lockheed Martin, the company producing NASA's new Orion spacecraft,
published three videos (news article in German) showing alternative Orion missions. Great efforts are made to show Orion's flexibility as a space transportation system beyond the goals of the Constellation program." The three videos, respectively, illustrate ISS missions with cargo in low-Earth orbit; autonomous use of the service module; and maintenance missions from low-earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit.
I always thought it was kind of stupid that our premier post-Apollo launch system couldn't get beyond LEO. Maintenance of GEO sats would probably be more useful than putting more footprints on Luna in terms of short-term returns.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The real Orion unfortunately can't exist due to the cold war era treaty banning nuclear tests in space. Orion based on closed nuclear reactor designs on the other hand may do the trick. Even using a decent sized reactor to power either plasma or ion engines would likely get around the treaty restriction.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yeah, cause the US gives a shit about international treaties.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A company has issued a press release that speaks of its product in complimentary terms and suggests that we should buy more.
Shocking.
While NASA is plainly losing its edge, we shouldn't be so quick to turn to commercial means of space travel. Corporations are ultimately concerned only with turning a profit, not with the exploration of the Universe. We need NASA to be a science and research-centric agency. I don't want to live in a world where I must pay for the Hubble's incredible images, or one in which the Hubble doesn't exist at all due to a lack of profitability. If NASA were to end their manned missions program, I wouldn't shed a tear, but its robotics are invaluable.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I've never understood this. We should be out there en masse by now. You want to do something about world hunger? How about a way to shrink the populace? That's right folks! Train the homeless to live and work in SPACE!!!!! Then send them to places we might be interested in living, or can make money from exploiting! What a concept eh? Too bad it isn't original. The Americas, Australia, New Zealand, all started with prisoners, the homeless, and other social malcontents. I think we are due for yet another culling of this sort. You don't know how safe the mine is til you take a canary down it. We won't know what riches and wonders are out there, or how we will be able to use it for fun, knowledge, and profit until we get some more bodies up there!
-Oz
Uh huh. The news reporting on the HSF review committee has been horrid. The committee has the duty of reporting the options to Congress and the President. Some of those options are affordable, some of them are not, and doing all of some of them isn't affordable either. The mouth breather journalists don't understand the discussion so they latch onto the word "budget" and write a the-sky-is-falling article.
The cheapest option, that no-one is considering btw, is to just give SpaceX the $300m for crew transfer to LEO that they were promised and wait 2.5 years, then pay $20m/seat.. if you want to spend a little more, buy seats from the Russians at $53m/seat. If you want to spend a little more, keep flying the shuttle beyond the current manifest (and hope it doesn't explode). If you want to placate your international partners, keep flying the ISS until 2020, by then it'll be completely unusable, but hey. And after doing *all* that you'll have some money left over to launch an unnecessarily large capsule towards the Moon. But just forget about Mars for now because we don't have the skill or the technology (just don't tell Zubrin that).
How we know is more important than what we know.
As much of a fan of NASA as I am (and have been, since the mid-70s), I am seriously beginning to doubt the agency's ability to get back into the business of taking big trips.
Well, since NASA had a funding level of 5% of the federal budget back in the Apoillo days, and its been cut down to less than 0.5% today, that's not too surprising that they don't have the same level of effort.
Pournelle has written extensively on this, e.g.:
Stating opinions as facts does not make them facts. Let's assemble some actual facts:
1 There are a lot of commercial satellites
2 There is a market for commercial launches
3 There have been a few sucessful commercial launches
4 Commercial companies have not taken over the scene
5 The space shuttle is the only vehicle which has ever been capable of servicing Hubble.
I do not know where this bizarre delusion that all commercial companies must be necessarily better than all governments comes from. I can only assume it's by people who have never worked for a large company. Or at a small/medium sized one for that matter...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The cheapest option, that no-one is considering btw, is to just give SpaceX the $300m for crew transfer to LEO that they were promised and wait 2.5 years, then pay $20m/seat.
It's not the cheapest option, if they can't deliver. They haven't even launched the Falcon 9 yet. I don't believe this magic 2.5 year claim that keeps surfacing like a mushroom. No offense to SpaceX, but they need to demonstrate first that they can launch people into space reliably before they'll be servicing the ISS.
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't NASA pay the commercial sector to build rockets to its own specifications?
NASA: We need a big rocket to send things into space. But it has to have these 15 compromises so that all the various military branches are happy and these 22 senators get contracts in their distrits.
Private contractors: Ok. Here's 10 different ways of using a big freaking rocket to shoot things into space. None of which are anything revolutionary... mainly because you're still asking us for big freakin' rockets.
I think the idea of going to corporations for transport is thus: NASA says, "Ok, as soon as one of you private companies gives us a reliable and safe means of transport to orbit, we'll use your services and give you a prize check for $x,000,000,000." Then all the individual companies are free to come up with their own ideas of how to do that, whether its Virgin's big plane to rocketship plan or a space elevator or whatever. The patents that company will earn during that R&D will lock them in as potential monopoly for a number of years increasing their incentive to "win".
My history is probably way off here, but it took state incentivized individual entrepreneurship to get us to the new world. It took state incentivized individual entrepreneurship to get the transcontinental railroad laid.