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"Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket
coondoggie writes "With a hiss and roar, NASA's Ares I-X rocket blasted into the atmosphere this morning at about 11:33 am EST, taking with it a variety of test equipment and sensors but also high hopes for the future of the US space agency. The short test flight — about 2 minutes — will provide NASA an early opportunity to look at hardware, models, facilities and ground operations associated with the mostly new Ares I launch vehicle. The mission went off without a hitch — 'frickin' fantastic' was how one NASA executive classified it on NASA TV — as the upper stage simulator and first stage separated at approximately 130,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The unpowered simulator splashed down in the ocean."
It may really be the case that the launch was 'frickin fantastic', but just having finished reading Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology. This stuff is really complicated, and the general public doesn't understand that test flights going awry is not necessarily a bad thing-- so officials often put a nice veneer on the results.
I hope it really was fantastic. A lot of people put a lot of time into this thing. But this thing is so politicized, I'm not holding my breath.
As the guy in the background of the control room that did the sad wee celebratory dance.
So do they recover all of the parts and go over them closely to look for stress fractures/bad parts/etc?
When they are developing a new rocket, I would certainly hope they do more than a few of these test flights. One successful test flight doesn't thrill me. Multiple test flights utilizing different manufacturing runs of critical parts does.
If all went well, when's the next launch and what are its goals?
Well then, please allow me to be the first to say:
"Heck yeah!"
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
"I guess you can keep your job."
"You betcha!"
"The unpowered simulator splashed down in the ocean.""
And threw "water spray" all over Iran.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
America is a country in which millions of people are homeless and millions of homes sit empty, unoccupied. Where is the government getting the money to waste on the stupid foolishness that is space exploration at a time like this? Space is a frontier for our great-grandchildren to consider, as for us, perhaps we should get to work cleaning the Pacific Garbage Patch or feeding Africa. There is more than enough prosperity, more than enough resources in the world for everyone to have food and shelter and clean water and even 1080p televisions. Instead, we bail out wall st. and give NASA endless resources that produce nothing of value for the average human being. The scientific triumphalism NASA represents is just modern day bread-and-circuses aimed at the Intelligentsia.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
I am just glad I was not riding in that simulator. Did anyone else notice the separation, and the flight path of the (in the future to be occupied) simulator? The booster and the simulator appeared to tumble after separation. It could have been the camera angle I suppose, but that front section should have continued on, correct?
I think he misspelled frackin
NASA's new moon rocket makes first test flight.
Moon... Ares I... Yeah, let us know how that works out for you.
*sigh*
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Even though the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle and had its problems, it seems odd that we are going right back to the type of vehicle that started it all. DNRTFA, but is there a new and improved capsule to mount to this thing? Or are we just going to give up and use Soyuz capsules?
Gee.. That's nice....
I wish NASA would do one of several things:
1. Concentrate on robotic missions and other non-manned science.
2. Put together a serious push for a Mars mission.
Things that I feel are an utter waste of time and money:
1. Going back to the moon purely to go back.
2. LEO (Low earth orbit) projects and questionable ISS science fair projects.
Put together a real push for Mars and get people excited about science and technology again. Or make a real effort in exo-planet research and searching for life around other star systems. (I did not say "intelligent life, or infer anything about aliens and flyingf saucers there!) The tools are available for both.
Also, manned missions to Mars are not "cost effective" but you can't beat the sizzle effect that you get from the "boots on the ground" of a live mission. Best bang for the buck there comes from the unmanned and robotic research.
Sad to say, NASA, for the most part has become another government bureaucracy. I would like to be proven wrong and see them return to what the did from 1960-1970, but the congressional money path probably won't happen again.
From 1963 to 1970 was a great time to be a kid watching all this stuff happen. Too bad there were a lot of other ugly things going on at the time, (Vietnam, Watergate, etc.) but history allows us to remember the great and suppress the ugly.
How about a space elevator project? Arthur C Clarke said we would build one roughly 50 years after we stopped laughing at teh concept. Well, the laughing seems to have died down.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
I was watching the launch with my kids on NASATV, and just when the stages separated, the leading stage started to tumble, and NASATV went black. When they came back in 20 seconds or so, they were following the larger stage on its descent.
I have to say, the supersonic vapor plume around the rocket during acceleration was awesome. I said to my kids, "look, they just broke the sound barrier," and the announcer came on with "passing Mach 1".
Very cool looking rocket, more narrow exhaust plume than I'm used to seeing, interesting angled ascent (it didn't go up straight vertically like a shuttle). We like to rag on NASA, but if this is really a an under-3-year project, who am I to cast stones?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
watch the launch
I originally understood the Ares rocket to be based around (somewhat outdated) solid propellant technology, meaning the the boosters can't be shut-down, controlled properly once lit, and suffer from severe resonance of the structure of the rocket from combustion instability of the solid propellant. As for solid propellant itself, this is a total nightmare - voids in the propellant, controlling grain size, differences in batch quality, effect of temperature, and binding of the propellant to inhibitors, insulation materials, and coatings. These sort of problems effectively make it impossible to 'man rate' this type of booster (at least without unacceptable risks - although I'm sure the politicos will protest at such engineering assessments!).
I was wondering if anyone knows if NASA has redesigned the Ares around more modern style staged combustion engines that use a liquid propellant, so that it will actually be safe for manned missions?
If not, I fear that this will be the end of the US space program, which has become a particularly sad and pathetic shadow of that of other more successful countries.
Go back and listen to the audio. (unless they made this part up for you tin-foil hat types) After burnout, they separated, and ignited a "tumble motor" to send both parts off on another direction so they wouldn't bump into each other. The rocket motor was the important part, and was recovered. The "mass simulator", the upper section was not recovered and was expendable.
Great. First we bomb the moon, looking for water. Then we bomb the Atlantic Ocean. Were we looking for Moons?
Did Bolden even bother to be on hand for this?
It's flight hardware now. Can't call it a 'boondoggle' or whatever media-speak they had been using. That much more poisonous a pill to swallow when they kill it.
Also, the 'thrust oscillation' theory is on it's last leg. The 5 segment ATK ground test showed no threatening oscillation. This launch won't either. Won't stop any of you from prattling on about it, however.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
"I really feel like we've regressed to the 1960s"
As this launch is partly testing the Solid Rocket Booster stage, you could argue its regressed 750 years into Chinese firework technology!.
Although both would be a little unfair and while its easy to joke at it being basically a high tech firework (at the moment as the other stages are not used yet), the goal of making launches cheaper is very important.
Although to be fair its no where nearly as impressive as even a Shuttle. Its currently not even as impressive as a Saturn V rocket.
I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Some items to note:
(I largely copied this from a comment I made yesterday, but it still seems pertinent)
Am still not a fan of the Ares design. I feel that the solid boosters are to blame for both of the Shuttle disasters (Challenger, directly, and Columbia and other ice impacts due to their extreme vibration) and as such feel that it's technology which should not be used for human flight. Ares I scales up use of the solid booster- Ares V, even more.
Don't get me wrong. I love the space program. I live in Florida and have a NASA tag on my car. I'm a year-pass holder for the visitor's complex. I just think that the Ares is a really bad design, influenced by contractors trying to hold on to their existing work, and it's going to hurt everything in the long run.
The upper stage was unpowered - it was just dead weight that was meant to simulate the mass, moment, strength, etc; of the real first stage. It wasn't meant to do anything but essentially fall off the booster at the end of the flight.
The positive: Judging from the downward looking onboard camera, the vibrations and oscillations I was expecting were minimal at best. Great job!
BUT: The first part of the flight looked like a fight between the booster and the attitude control system. It was some time before the booster settled down. I could see a couple guys talking about it in the launch room. An absolutely visible cant to the bird. Probably gave the RSO the jitters!
Separation: Gads, the booster swung around as planned due to the rockets firing, but the top stage swung around just as quickly. Certainly would want data on that.
I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon [wikipedia.org]
Yeah sense of awe, as in WTF... the skylon is unrealistic for the following reasons:
1) Looking at the wikipedia article, first off, 50% faster than blackbird engines is a pure pipe dream. Material science has not improved enough for turbine blades to survive that, and the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc. Tech and cad design help some, but not enough.
2) Second wiki article problem, twice the size (twice the wing area?) but three times the weight, that things going to be a real handful at take off.
3) The sabre engine probably will not work, as the designer himself only gives it a TRL of 2 or 3. By his own admission, that's right up there with warp drive proposals and telekinesis. The ISP is too low, the T/W is too low. Following the old 6-6-6 rule, whats wrong with 6% bigger fuel tanks and an off the shelf engine?
(The 6-6-6 rule is mach 6 (good f-ing luck) at 60Kfeet up (difficult to impossible for an air breathing engine) gets you a whopping 6% of the way to orbit)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
NASA has always been "another government bureaucracy". The difference between the 60's and now: in the 60's, we had 1) a clear goal to aim for, and 2) sufficient funding to achieve the goal. In recent years we've had neither of these things... and that's not NASA's fault, it's the fault of Congress and the President.
And regarding the space elevator: the laughter has died down, and been replaced with... nothing. That's because there's nothing to talk about. We still don't have the technology to produce carbon nanofibers in anything like the lengths that would be required to build it. Nor do we know if other technical obstacles to building one can be overcome. Nor do we have even the slightest idea what it would cost (and won't until we solve the first two issues). And if you don't know the cost, you can't evaluate whether it's more cost effective than just using rockets. All of which means there's no basis to proceed with a project.
It was all staged, the shadows are not right and the flag is waving.
1). Scramjet using the liquid hydrogen propellant to cool the air at the intake
2). because air is cool at all speeds/altitudes, composite alloys and other lightweight materials can be used
3). ???
4). Profit!!!
I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon
Nice looking bird. Trading off very high specs at transition altitude shows a design philosophy has been well thought out. But that motor is a complexity nightmare http://www.astronautix.com/engines/sabre.htm . Great idea with too many details. Great Idea: Manipulating the motor cowling into the pressure wave at Mach 2 to transition from necessary cowling drag reduction to pressure feeding the intake. Complexification: Inserting a Brayton cycle power loop for heat exchange between air and fuel in order to reduce fuel flow. A lot of machinery with finicky operating parameters just to perform a simple function. There's got to be easier ways.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It's impossible, I tell you, impossible!
I believe the technical challenges you have raised concerning solid rocket motors can be addressed.
My understanding is that solid motors are a lot less complicated than liquid motors. You eliminate all the turbomachinery and related hardware and piping for fuel and oxidizer management, for one.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I saw the launch firsthand. The other day, I'd been asked to explain the basic physics of projectile flight to a student, and here I was today watching a parabolic trail of smoke being drawn in the sky!
Revive the Constitution.
is a way to shoot lawn darts from a gun.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
like this
or or this
Although both would be a little unfair and while its easy to joke at it being basically a high tech firework (at the moment as the other stages are not used yet), the goal of making launches cheaper is very important.
Although to be fair its no where nearly as impressive as even a Shuttle. Its currently not even as impressive as a Saturn V rocket.
The sad part is that the estimated cost per launch for the Ares I is going to be $1-$2 billion, making it more expensive per launch than either the Shuttle or Saturn V.
Yeah, in comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) seems easy to do. Probably doable tech wise and completely impossible politically.
I'm not quite sure where you are getting your info on hypersonic aircraft but you should take a closer look into it, the tech is REALLY sweet. That being said:
The SR-71 did not use turbines at high mach #s so material science really does not come into play here (also.. the Blackbird was designed in the late 60s and I would imagine that we've come along way since then). She was a ramjet hybrid. The turbines would allow her to lift off where after it would enter a dive. During the dive airflow bypassed directly to the afterburners where it essentially became a ramajet.
As to the intake geometry you really should take a look at what NASA's doing with the the X-43. They somehow managed to get that bird above mach 9 :)
Used mplayer plugin w Firefox - works flawlessly
..........FULL STOP.
Yeah right...
Yeah right...
Could you elaborate?
2). because air is cool at all speeds/altitudes, composite alloys and other lightweight materials can be used
Well, the impractical part is the heat exchanger has to be lighter and more efficient than simply making a bigger fuel tank, thus you don't need to cool your air.
Even better a rocket engine uses pure, ice cold liquid O2. But the precooling the intake air wastes 80% of the cooling on nonburnable nitrogen.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
IIRC The sr-71 didn't use turbines for high speed flight; it used ram jets.
As for speed: Scramjet technology has currently reached mach 17. To put this in perspective, the blackbird hasn't broken mach 4.
Given that this test, while useful, didn't actually use any of the components of a man-rated Ares I, I'm not that excited.
Ares I will use a new 5 segment Solid Rocket Booster (SRB), this was the good old STS 4 segment SRB.
Ares I will use the J2-x powered upper stage, this was a weight equivalent mock-up.
Ares I will use the Orion capsule and it's engine to finish up the orbit, again, just a mock-up with right szie and weight.
Ares I flight control software not built yet, but that's ok, as the hardware it will guide wasn't here either.
You know when the car companies build a clay mock up of that new model? That's about where this Ares I-x test was. Baby steps are ok, but I was hoping for more return on investment.
So I'm annoyed that the test program hasn't progressed further, but in reality, this is rocket science, and at least they got the thing off the ground in a reasonable fashion. The problems here go a lot further than my unease that NCSA isn't that far along for the time and money they've already spent. Here's a list of issues that they still have to face in making this a viable launch system:
What's the lifting capacity of the ARES I? 25mt? That was the declared goal. 24 mt? That was a compromise when other issues crept in. 20 mt? Where the current design is, but Ares I needs 25 mt of lift for an Orion capsule with safety features and lunar capability for 4 crew, and doesn't have it.
Also, when is the Ares I scheduled to fly with the Orion capsule, even in a non-man-rated test? 2013, as NCSA originally planned? 2016 as the Augustine commission recently claimed?? Before the Space shuttle stops flying? Before the ISS is de-orbited? Be nice for NCSA to have a way to get our astronauts to the ISS without "borrowing a Soyuz."
More importantly, how much has NCSA spent on the development of the Ares I to date? 5 billion? 6 billion? They still have to finish the 5 segment SRB design and tests, the J-2x Upper stage engine and tests, the new upper stage and tests and the Orion capsule and tests before any manned flights can take place. That's got to be another $5 billion easy. All this to get the lift capacity of an Atlas V or a Delta IV heavy and a theoretical better safety rating.
Lastly, one reason the Ares I was chosen was that it was supposed to be safer for the crew than any alternative. But there's this- http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/07/death-knell-for-nasas-ares-roc.html. I feel sorry for the hard-working engineers at NCSA, and I hope that the new management can get them back on track with a better design.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Regarding your point 1), you must be an aeronautical engineer (and a clairvoyant one, too) to claim that "the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc."
You know that real experts (and not "experts" like you) once claimed that breaking the sound barrier is impossible in principle?
the estimated cost per launch for the Ares I is going to be $1-$2 billion,
{citation needed}
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Apparently you are not familiar with the advances in materials specifically superalloys and the new ceramic matrix composites (CMC) that Pratt and GE are now using in their high performance engines. The high end superalloys (mainly gamma/gamma' NiAl amoung others) have melting temperatures of 1600C. With active cooling and the TBC-TGO-BC-substrate layering used in modern superalloys these parts can be run to 90% of their respective melting temperatures. The most current progress into CMCs using SiC pushes the melting point of the materials even higher having a melting temperature of roughly 2700C for SiC. In addition to this producing an engine that out preforms the J58 is not outside the realm of feasibility the PW5000-F119 produces similar thrust at almost half the weight (6000lbs for J58 vs 3500lbs for the F119). The main reason that no engine has been built is that there is no need for such performance in current applications.
No one knows what it would cost to launch a Saturn V in todays dollars. The last one launched over 30 years ago. There was some talk about bringing it back to life with modern materials to make it lighter and STS engines instead of the JP-1's but that idea was quickly killed even though NASA still has the blueprints.
Since when was it appropriate to say "Frickin'" in any official announcement? Oh, wait. Here it is... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2YX6FsoMIY
1) Looking at the wikipedia article, first off, 50% faster than blackbird engines is a pure pipe dream. Material science has not improved enough for turbine blades to survive that, and the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc. Tech and cad design help some, but not enough.
At high speed the blackbird engine is more or less ramjet, so turbine blades are of no concerns. A SR71 rebuilt with today's materials would certainly be quite a bit faster. Using hydrogen as fuel and 50% faster seems realistic to me.
According to the Mission Status Log on Spaceflightnow.com there appeared to be some telemetry acquisition issues as late as t + 6:30 (min:sec) mission elapsed time. I am not sure how the launch vehicle was designed or what it's asset acquisition profile was supposed to look like, however, for Atlas V and Delta IV launches I know that acquisition and vehicle state data can start dumping to ground resources at least as early as t + 100 sec (with lag of course). Does anyone know if this test launch was designed with a full communications package on board, or whether or not the Ares acquisition profile is designed to fly this long without a telemetry dump to the ground? It seems very dubious to me and, if it is an error, it is a major one. Having a launch vehicle fail to establish a proper data connection with ground assets for ~5:00 + minutes could mean anything from an incorrect roll attitude to a power system failure to software state failure.
If the telemetry acquisition timing wasn't planned for or accounted for, I would say that the Ares team has some major debugging to do, which, of course, means some extra time and money =)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
THAT, boys and girls, is how you do Space.
The sad part is that the estimated cost per launch for the Ares I is going to be $1-$2 billion, making it more expensive per launch than either the Shuttle or Saturn V.
{citation needed}
Sure. There's a nice discussion here.
Basically, NASA's own current estimate of the development cost for Ares I + Orion is $35-$45 billion (the cost estimate seems to climb every few months), with development finishing 2017-2019. Current plans after that are for three launches a year (2 ISS flights and 1 crewed lunar flight), and if you take into accounts the annual fixed and per-flight costs it comes out to an additional $800 million a year (including the cost of the standing army of maintenance personnel, which costs ~$2 billion a year). Amortizing the development cost over an expected 20 year lifespan for the Ares I and combining that with annual costs gives the $1-$2 billion a launch figure.
It is designed and built for show, not for real testing. The Ares 1X is just a Potemkin rocket to make a good impression on congress and the American public. Any test data is just incidental.
There are so many things that need to be tested, but this launch tests almost nothing. Unfortunately this is what I have come to expect of NASA: good PR, solid engineering, poor vision.
Please let the president and NASA administrators choose the Augustine flexible path using EELV rockets so that we can get something accomplished in addition to burning money.
engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff
I think it was more along the lines of this - never take incredibly stupid risks that a first year engineering student in any field knows are incredibly stupid especially when the only gains minor political ones and give no technical advantage at all.
Due to a disconnection between management and technical staff they had to go via Feynman to get the very well understood message out. Feynman was simply a messenger that was too well respected to ignore in that case.
You have worthwhile points above but your example is very poor and you are not distinguishing between calculated risks for real gain incredibly stupid ones for pork barrelling.
People may question what I say about even first year engineering students knowing better but I stand by it: behaviour of polymers above and below the glass transition temperature has been part of introductory materials science since some time before the space shuttle disaster.
You mean the 6-6-25 rule. Rocketry goes by delta v not energy and Mach 6 is almost 25% of 9,000 m/s (which at least for rockets is adequate delta v to get into space). You still need to lug up to that point a vehicle that can make the difference. A rocket would require roughly 85% propellant mass fraction.
The Russians have a huge chip on their shoulder because they lost the Cold War. They're always making grandiose-sounding announcements, but they very rarely follow through.
They recently made a huge announcement about sending cosmonauts to Mars, but they're flat out funding their existing programs, like Angara. They've only recently had a flight test of the Angara common booster core; and only on a "South Korean" rocket.
I'll believe it when I see it -- and by that, I mean bent metal, not press releases with delusions of grandeur.
I said the same with fewer words below, and managed to get flamed. If you've avoided any flames, well played.
The Ares is a bad design. It just is.
I heard the "frickin fantastic" bit on news radio this afternoon. Honestly the guy sounded unprofessional and not what I'd expect at NASA. It made me wonder why we even fund this stuff.
Our government has spent us broke, and at this point non-military space missions are non-essential vanity projects that we can not afford.
If the SR71 was built TODAY, it would perhaps be faster but it would also be smaller and also uncrewed. A missile with a camera inside it. Add automated midair refueling for fun if the range or loiter isn't there, a digital uplink for real-time pics, and a WORKING self-destruct device for when the odds catch up with it.
Lose one, no sweat. No crew held behind the lines. Just build another. Fly it from Tonopah like the others. Done.
Sig for hire.
"In return we get invaluable scientific knowledge and practical experience in living under such conditions."
The problem is that's a fallacy. We wont learn anything new about human habitiation in space. Because even if we go back to the Moon, we won't be spending any considerable amounts of time there. Just like Apollo, it'll be there and back. There's nothing more we can learn unless we send them to the moon for considerably longer periods of time. And that's why this whole thing is going to be canceled.
The whole rationale behind Constellation was to use the Moon as a means to get to Mars. But even NASA admits we don't have the technology to do that. It's simply too far away, and we can't get men there fast enough.
So what's the point of sending men back to the moon? Nostalgia? If we were going to build a real moon base, and keep astronauts there for extended periods of time, hell, I'd be right onboard with that. That would be progress.
But we're not going to do that. No one seriously believes we'll build a moonbase in the near future, nor that we'll send a man to Mars in our lifetimes. Unless we send some dying cancer patient on a one-way trip, it simply isn't going to happen. We still could do pioneering manned space exploration by sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. But no one seems to think that's a glorious enough mission. Which is sad, because it'd be one hell of a first.
As things probably stand, we're better off canning the whole nostalgia trip, and using the money to do real space exploration... sending more robotic probes across the solar system to send back data.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
So, does that mean it happened at 12:33 PM for the rest of us east-coast folks who are still on Daylight Saving Time?
One More Thing. The SRB at the base came from existing shuttle inventory but was modified. That is what is known as sunk cost. So this launch at least made use of this.
Now the $445 million price tag may be from development that has been done already for the entire program. It is true that a Delta IV would be about $10 million or so, but these aren't man rated. To get to that level with anything is costly. Lots of things have to be designed and built that you wouldn't need otherwise like the LES for instance. Space suits aren't cheap. Way more redundancy to lower the failure rate and so on. So maybe someone has to decide if we really want to keep doing manned missions or not. I know the Russians can man rate their stuff cheaper but they kill off more people at first to figure out how. So I guess if you want to make it cheaper, human life has to be sacrificed for that convenience.
Really, the shuttle didn't get approved by Nixon because it was cheaper but because NASA told him in secret that we could bring back Russian spy satellites with it. That was a real selling point back then, but compromises were made, but that was and still is one good reason to have something like that, to bring big stuff back here.
You never know what you might find out there until you look.
No one knows what it would cost to launch a Saturn V in todays dollars. The last one launched over 30 years ago. There was some talk about bringing it back to life with modern materials to make it lighter and STS engines instead of the JP-1's but that idea was quickly killed even though NASA still has the blueprints.
Correction:
No one knows that it would cost to launch a Saturn V today presuming that NASA/Congress/President Nixon didn't trash the whole infrastructure and do incremental improvements over the past 50 years with newer more modern materials and equipment upgrades. Certainly the Apollo Guidance Computer alone could fit on a single radiation-hardened programmable logic chip and do much, much more than what went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong.
Von Braun's dream was to have hundreds of Saturn Vs be put into a production line and to have continuous improvements in the overall design... and to reduce cost at the same time. Minor changes would be introduced in a gradual program of rapid prototyping and testing. In other words, if the manned spaceflight program had stuck with the Apollo hardware architecture, the Saturn V rocket of today would be only a passing resemblance to the Saturn V of 50 years ago.
It stands for logic that the fixed infrastructure costs had already been sunk with the development of the Apollo rockets to the Moon, so the incremental costs of additional hardware is all that would have been necessary for continuing the program. In the switch-over to the shuttle program, all of that knowledge, skill, and even knowledge base by workers who didn't bother to write down all of the "fixes" they did to get folks to the Moon has been lost. Much of that would have been preserved at the Saturn V been continued.
Restarting the Saturn V program after a 50 year hiatus? Yeah, that is about as stupid as it gets.
I argue that we would have been better off in terms of costs had the USA not gone with the Shuttle program in the first place. Yes, this is in hindsight, but unfortunately I see the same thing happening all over again with the termination of the Shuttle program and the proposal to de-orbit the ISS. If anything, I wish more serious study had been done on making a Shuttle Mark-2 program that would have built off of the existing knowledge base that comprises those involved in launching the current generation of shuttles.
Most of that expertise is also going to be lost in a fashion just as the knowledge lost from the cancellation of the Saturn V program has now been lost. Of course, a Shuttle Mark-2 should have been launched a decade or more ago, but that is a separate issue.
Now the $445 million price tag may be from development that has been done already for the entire program.
Actually, Ares I development costs has been $3 billion spent so far, and Orion development has been another $3 billion. The $445 million was specifically for the Ares I-X.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-09-06/news/0909050169_1_ares-1-rocket-astronauts
It is true that a Delta IV would be about $10 million or so, but these aren't man rated. To get to that level with anything is costly.
According to the Augustine Committee, man-rating and developing crew capsules and LES for commercial rockets like the Delta IV would cost $300 million - $2 billion, depending on the rocket.
Big friggin woop! I'm so impressed - in 2010 we have a rocket that doesn't work when in 1969 we had one that took us to the moon.
--The $445 million was specifically for the Ares I-X.--
Well, it appears you are right. Yeah there's something up with that number for sure.
I also know that NASA gets credit for inventing a lot of things they didn't like Tang and Teflon, but that they didn't get credit for inventing or improving some other things like O2 tanks for fire fighters for instance.
What they are really best at is finding a design and improving it with better materials, and maybe a better shape.
I still wonder who exactly to blame, them or congress or maybe a little of both.
Maybe they should get these guys to help them out.
http://www.porsche-design.com/live/deutsch_en.PorscheDesign
Pure Functional-Innovative Products for Men. I like the sound of that. Thanks for the information.