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NASA Tests All-Composite Prototype Crew Module
coondoggie writes "With an eye toward building safer, lighter and tougher spacecraft, NASA said today its prototype space crew module made up of composite materials handled tests simulating structural stresses of launch and atmospheric reentry. The idea behind NASA's Composite Crew Module project is to test new structural materials for possible future NASA spacecraft. According to NASA, composite materials are being looked at because they are stiff and lightweight and can be formed into complex shapes that may be more structurally efficient. In space travel, where every additional pound of weight drives costs higher, any weight savings provides increased payload capacity and potentially reduces mission expense."
My only concern is how well the honeycomb material handles impacts (everything from birds to micrometeorites...). My experience is that composites have a very narrow elastic region in the stress-strain curve, then they snap. Also they tend to be brittle rather than bendable, causing them to shatter under impact. But I'm sure NASA knows what they're doing...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I am (or was before I got lazy) and avid Cyclist. And well the materials used in the bicycle industry are basically the high tech materials that are starting to be put into the aerospace industyr (due to safety and devolpment periods bikes tend to put out new materials first).
When Carbon Fibre started to become omnipresent in road cycling it was only sparing used in mountain biking. This was due to precieved, and real, issues dealing with durability. Rocks and branches hitting Carbon Fibre frames and causing small failures that normal use would increase and cause catastropic failure. But now carbon is everywhere because design and testing have overcome these problems, and the aerospace industry, with actual and good engineers will be able to do the same.
Granted not everything will be composite. There are lots of things that are done better by Aluminum, or steel, or titanium. But for large, odd shaped structural pieced carbon fibre can't be beat. This is a good thing, so long as NASA doesn't go Carbon Crazy like the bike industry. You can almost buy a 100% Carbon Fibre bike, gears, cables, everything.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
What also boggles me is they threw away a lot of the stuff - including data they got from the lunar missions.
A lot of the expertise has been lost. People have retired, the factories that built the parts (e.g. those huge Saturn V engines) may no longer exist.
Once you lose the expertise and infrastructure, it costs a lot to rebuild it.
Imagine if we were all nuked into the stone age and only crawled out of the bunkers 5-10 years later. Getting back to the state of fabricating 3GHz x86 chips would take a long time and lots of investment.
What boggles my mind? All of this effort in materials technology, to build a glorified Apollo capsule - c. 1967.
My view is that this is the best part of the Constellation program. The space capsule remains a great space vehicle design. The new ground that Orion breaks here is the use of modern materials and electronics systems. Down the road, I can see the manufacture of space capsules as being somewhere between an advanced bike and a modern car in complexity and cost.
This is excellent news. In addition to making the spacecraft lightweight, carbon composites will render it completely invisible to DRADIS!
I guess we better not use this capsule in hockey games then.
Contrary to what you might think, hydrocarbons actually provide better shielding against cosmic rays than aluminum, which produces secondary radiation even more dangerous than cosmic rays. Here is an article from NASA that explains this in more detail.
Ever seen a light aircraft?
They seem pretty fragile but can go 200 MPH.
Take a look at a Pitts special sometime at an airshow. The will go more than 200 MPH in a dive and take enough Gs to flatten your eyeballs.
They are covered in fabric.
You make them just strong enough to take the loads but you protect them from unneeded loads unlike your car which has take your kid standing on the hood.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't know about everyone else, but the image that shows up in the Layer 8 blog has the crew module squashed down so that it appears shorter than it is wide. This is the result of image distortion. The actual NASA press release has the original image with its correct aspect ratio, along with a short video about the testing that shows some of the static rig and test equipment.