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NASA's Orion Moon Craft Unveiled
Velcroman1 writes "Lockheed Martin on Tuesday unveiled the first Orion spacecraft, a part of what NASA had planned as the sprawlingly ambitious Constellation project that would offer a replacement for the space shuttle — and a means to ferry humans into outer space and back to the moon. Orion and the companion Ares heavy-lift rocket were part of Constellation, a program cancelled under President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
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"The spacecraft is an incredibly robust, technically advanced vehicle capable of safely transporting humans to asteroids, Lagrange Points and other deep space destinations that will put us on an affordable and sustainable path to Mars.”
Many of Orion's components can be re-used in subsequent flights, including some electronic systems, Bray said. The spaceship itself won't be reused because of the tremendous forces it endures on liftoff and re-entry, he said.
Rep. Ed Perlmutter and Sen. Michael Bennet, Colorado Democrats who pressed Obama to salvage the Orion project, said they were confident the spacecraft will fly, but neither discussed specifics in brief remarks at the dedication ceremony for the test building.
I think there's a type somewhere... seems more like the Onion Moon Craft.
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Most paints applied to spacecraft are chosen due to their thermal properties. Some paints will give higher reflective indexes, while others will absorb more energy, and still others are designed to let a certain amount of energy through the paint and into whatever surface it is covering. I don't know which paint, specifically, has the "baby puke green" color that you are referring to, but I would wager that the entire body of this spacecraft was coated in that paint specifically to control the thermal pathways through the spacecraft body.
It's worth noting that one of the most difficult and most important aspects of spacecraft design involve the energy management within the spacecraft. Spacecraft are subject to high levels of radiation, high and low temperature extremes, and house multiple boxes of electronics that cannot be cooled via typical convective methods as they are on the ground. Thus, to keep a spacecraft operating effectively, a full analysis must be done to take into account all energy (thermal or otherwise) sources in a spacecraft and redirect energy to appropriately sized energy sinks (radiators, heat-pies, etc.). This is one aspect of spacecraft design that many folks fail to take into account when discussing how simple it would be to build a spacecraft that does [insert theoretical task here].
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Excuse me... would you mind telling me where the "dig" is at the President?
The only passage I see that references our President is "Orion and the companion Ares heavy-lift rocket were part of Constellation, a program cancelled under President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal."
That is a statement of fact. It is in no way biased, skewed or twisted. It's just about as plain a statement as one can make.
But I guess it must be hard to notice these details when you've got to read over such a highly-held nose.
I suggest that everybody read about Orion at the Lockheed Martin Website.
I highly recommend this video.
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The Orion capsule is intended to be the baseline for both missions.
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It also goes along the line of why not utilize the previous designs for the shuttle and improve on it rather than making a whole new launch system?
Because the shuttle is a flawed design created by committee to meet numerous contradictory requirements?
Fairly significant, actually. Kistler's original launcher design was an 'SSTO' which would have launched from a platform lifted to around 100,000 feet; they reckoned that made the difference between viable and non-viable for that design.
There are two main benefits: you don't have to worry about aerodynamic drag, and you can use engines optimised for vacuum operation which are more efficient than engines optimised for sea-level operation.
Capsules are an extremely capable form factor when talking about spacecraft. When something is orbiting a gravity well in a vacuum or near vacuum, the geometry of that thing has some very powerful effects on the design of the system in general. Capsule are nice in that they are symmetric about one axis. This makes controlling and pointing them very easy. If you take a geometry like that of the space shuttle, the control problems become much more difficult. Those large wings and that vertical stabilizer act as moment arms about your roll axis. Any forces that act upon those moment arms turn into large, asymmetrical torques (these forces can be due to atmospheric drag, radiation gradients, thermal gradients, micro-meteor impacts, etc.). Damping out the increase in angular momentum due to torques applied to such large moment arms requires more powerful, more massive, more power-hungry momentum exchange devices (like reaction wheels, CMG's whatever). Thus, such a clunky geometric design puts some heavy restrictions on your system design space.
Now, if you take a form factor like the capsule, you find that you don't have those giant moment arms (save for the solar arrays which, if designed properly, should go a long way in canceling out each other's torques). What's more, you have a nice aerodynamic shape that can reenter atmospheres much more elegantly than, say a brick with wings bolted on. All in all, the capsule is a beautifully elegant design that solves many of the difficult space-environment design problems through passive geometry, rather than through more active systems like large control mechanisms or expensive ceramic tiles.
Just because a design is 40 years old doesn't mean it's poor. The car is the same form factor that it was back when it was design in the early 1900's, but that's because there is a lot to be said for a 4-wheel base vehicle. That doesn't mean all cars are the same as the Model T though.
Finally, you should probably realize that The Orion was built and designed by Lockheed-Martin, not NASA.
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I disagree. NASA hasn't bungled anything. The reason we don't have a replacement is that it takes more than 8 years and every president cancels the last guy's program. We wouldn't have made it to the moon if JFK hadn't been a hugely popular martyr. And even then, as soon as we set foot on the moon, they canceled Apollo. And every president since has canceled the last guy's program - except Carter. Carter, being a one-term president tried but failed to cancel the shuttle and that's the only reason we ever had it.
So Regan had the shuttle. Bush #1 supported a replacement but Clinton canceled it. Clinton supported a replacement (venturestar) but Bush #2 canceled it. Bush #2 supported a replacement (constellation) but Obama canceled it.
I don't see how any of this is NASA's fault.