In addition to the existing Falcon I and V features, Musk said SpaceX has "a long-term interest" in making the Falcon V upper stage and the first stage recoverable. He has also held formal discussions with NASA about using later versions for manned missions such as to the International Space Station. With that in mind, the avionics and other parameters of the Falcon V will be man-rated from the beginning, Musk said.
I also don't see any capsule system for the Falcon V to hold passengers
That's Bigelow's job. SpaceX will provide the booster, and Bigelow will provide the spacecraft and destination. (read: Inflatable Space Station)
that is not a trivial undertaking as no capsule has been built in the USA since Apollo. We have lost a lot of that know how.
Rubbish. Look at the Lockheed design from yesterday's story. It's nothing more than an advanced and reusable capsule design. In fact, it looks very much like the Big Gemini design which was supposed to be the first reusable capsule.
Not to say they can't get there if they wanted to, but right now Falcon is a low-cost challenge to the current launchers like Delta IV, Arianne, etc.
That's really the trick when it comes down to it. A booster is a booster is a booster. Combining it with the spacecraft only makes for a lot of unnecessary complications. Take the Energia-Buran as an example. The Russians designed it to almost exactly the US Shuttle Specs. *But* they had over a decade of NASA's mistakes behind them, so they made a variety of tweaks to the design. One of those tweaks was to strap the shuttle to a BDB instead of using the whole fuel-tank->engines piping mess.
After the DoD gets thru with the "safety" modifications and other things to make it conform to the range requirements
The Falcon V is built to *man rated* specifications. Which means that they've probably already got all the necessary gizmos in place. Especially since they're already slated to fly. And you can't fly without a self-destruct mechanism.
Not to mention that the FV has cool safety features not seen since the Saturn V. e.g. It has engine-out ability for *up to three engines*! That means that the craft can have a flame out on three of its five engines, and *still* make orbit on the remaining two! That's a pretty darn good design. Not even the Space Shuttle can do that.
The Millennium Falcon made the run in a short distance which shows it was able to steer a course very close to the black holes - which makes it very fast.../tenuous
Oooorrrr... Solo was full of shit and was just trying to impress what he figured were a couple of chumps.
The falcons *already are* reducing launch costs by a factor of ten. Your figures would be by a factor of 100!
Let me put it this way:
The "average" cost per pound to fly something into space is considered $10,000/lb. The goal of NASA and areospace companies has always been to get that down to $1000/lb. While they've had partial success, it can still cost as much as $5000/lb. to reach orbit.
SpaceX's Falcon 1 is a low cargo prototype that can lift about 1,480 lbs to LEO. At a cost of $6,000,000 per lauch, it manages to get get the cost per pound down to ~$4000 or 2/5ths the average.
The Falcon V is then intended to use scale to it advantage by flying 13,270 lbs at a cost of ~$16,000,000. At that rate, the cost per pound is about $1200. Just slightly above the 1/10th cost reduction that SpaceX is targetting. And if these rockets become popular, SpaceX may be able to further reduce costs to be *just under* the 1/10th range.
That said, is it feasible that we will see it reduced by a factor of 1000? That would allow us mere mortals to have access to other solar systems for vacations and deep space missions to find Eden, baby, hell yeah!:-)
One step at a time. Bigelow's Falcon rockets will shake up the space industry if his cost projections are correct. The lower price might result more launches of private sats. More launchs == economics of scale, so the cost of the launch vehicle should go *down*. The added competition should then force other space companies to develop cheaper launch methods as well, possibly culminating in the much coveted "space plane".
I know that a lot of people are thinking that Rutan is going to be the guy who takes us to the stars. Despite the fact that he's a really smart guy and an excellent aeronautics designer, I think Bigelow is the one we should actually be watching. Low cost rockets, inflatable space stations, and human rated spacecraft are all pies that he has his fingers dipped into. And he's doing them all better and cheaper than the competition.
If Bigelow gets his way, the next few years should be very interesting.
I realize the English might not be your first language and I'm kind of embarrassed that I have to point this out but USian is not a real word.
It is now! Expect to see it in the next copies of Oxford and Webster's Dictionaries, along with such other great terms like "ain't", "doh", and "supercalafragilisticexpialadotious".
Amazing how living languages keep changing, isn't it?:-)
As I understand it, the benchmarks were presented at the CeBit2005 conference. I don't know what paper they're in, but you can probably find them by starting here.
reusability isnt a requirement of the CEV and none of the proposals say anything about reusability.
No, but quick turnaround and low cost are part of the proposals. Building a new craft out of Titanium each time would drive the price of flights to levels similar to that of the current shuttle. You see, titanium is not only expensive, it's extremely expensive and difficult to work with.
Trust me, everything about this design screams "reusable". From the non-ablative shielding, to the hull design, to the internal configuration. It *is* a reusable craft.
But don't take my word for it. Go find a rocket scientist and argue the point with him. He could probably use a good laugh.:-)
You're quoting the price for >500,000 units. That's $4.5 million worth of just FPGAs! I seriously doubt that they're going to convince their distributor that they'll need that many chips. (At least at first.) And if they *do* need that many chips, then the ASIC route may make more sense.
50 years ago, the US government wanted a man on the moon by the most expedient method possible. As a result, the efficient solution (LEO -> Moon transfer) was ignored, and the effort was put into using a superbooster for the task. The result was a rocket the size of a skyscrapper that returned a vehicle about the size of a compact car. Efficient? No. Effective? Yes.
Yes it is. Where did you get the idea that it was one shot? The CEV will fly on an expendable booster, but the craft itself needs to have a quick and inexpensive turnaround time. If NASA was going to throw this thing away, they sure as heck wouldn't make it out of Titanium!
Reusability. With non-ablative shielding, you don't have to refurbish the craft after every flight thus leading to lower costs and faster turnarounds. It also is safer since it can theoretically withstand some error in the reentry vector.
The Shuttle was supposed to have non-ablative shielding, but cost cuts resulted in the current hybrid solution of using non-ablative tiles. These tiles have become a major source of ongoing costs and slow turnaround times.
ablative heat shielding is tried and true and very reliable, plus it's cheap.
There's definitely merit to this line of thinking. But since we have non-ablative shielding today, why not use it? It *has* been tested on several of the shuttle's surfaces, so it's a proven technology.
I think you'll start seeing ablative shielding again if we ever start making drops of mined material from space. A simple container with an ablative shield could make for a *very* inexpensive reentry vehicle. It would drop like a rock, but who cares as long as we don't lose the cargo?:-)
Slower reentry means more time for heat dissipation.
It also means heavy heat loads for longer periods of time. Faster decent may cause the craft to heat up quicker, but it also causes it to bleed off that heat quicker. IIRC, the Space Shuttle was originally designed with a steeper reentry vector in mind, but was changed when the Military demanded strong crossrange abilities. (One orbit up and down, taking pictures or dropping bombs along the way.)
Oh, no doubt. The Lockheed design is far more advanced than the Big Gemini. But from the looks of this design, I'd say it captures many of the features that would have made the Big G an attractive proposition. Tack on a bit more modern technology (e.g. lifting body, non-ablative heat shielding, RCC, etc.) and you've got yourself a winner.
At least, that is, I *hope* they haven't screwed up the design. For example, the Big G used a Parawing for mid-air descent and landing control. The Parawing gave the Big G all the advantages of the Shuttle's landing capabilities without the massive wingspan and dangerous landing velocity. The article merely describes the Lockheed system as "a parachute". Given their flight profile, however, I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't use a parawing.
If the first of these were to be named Constellation, could they be considered a Constellation class space vehicle?
In that case the first four ships should be named:
USS Constellation USS Gettysburg USS Hathaway USS Magellan USS Stargazer USS Valkyrie USS Victory
When Picard finally loses his... erm... Crew Exploration Vehicle to the Ferengi, we can give him the new Galaxy class Mars Exploration Vehicle!
Or not.
Here's an interesting factoid: The Space Shuttle Enterprise was slated to be called "Constitution". Which would have made the Space Shuttles "Constitution-class". Just like the USS Enterprise NCC-1701!
If the device cannot land like a plane it has no hopes of recovering anything from space.
The Big Gemini (upon which this design appears to be based) used a parawing. This gave it the best of both parachute and landing gear systems. i.e. Slow rate of descent and horizontal flight path.
That's because shipping cargo on the Space Shuttle was a dumb idea. Humans have very special needs (e.g. safety, atmosphere, low G tolerance, etc.) that cargo doesn't usually have. As a result, it's usually more cost effective to split manned missions and cargo missions into two seperate craft.
With that in mind, we've already got the cargo craft in the form of the Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets. Now all we need is a human capable craft that doesn't haul 80 metric tons of (mostly) useless material into orbit.
Orbital rendezvous is good for a number of things. It allows you to have modularity so you can assembler larger crafts, add special modules later on that you haven't even thought of now (as more advanced technology becomes available 10 years down the road), use it to dock with the International Space Station, use it to dock with possible rescue crafts, etc.
I think the big point of it will be to either:
a) Dock with new engines for the trip from LEO to the moon
b) Dock with a specialized moon courier to transfer the passengers.
Isn't it intersting, one of the primary goals of the Gemini program was to develop space docking technology? Then they design a much larger version just before the end of the program. Now we're getting a craft 50 years later that looks like the Big Gemini design but with a new body. Coincidence?
Is it just me, or does that design look a lot like the Big Gemini? I was amazed at how similar the designs looked, and then I saw this line:
The CEV is not designed to glide upon re-entry like the shuttle; rather, it will be equipped with parachutes and airbags to set down on land or water. Interchangeable computer systems will increase adaptability between modules.
I'm thinking it *is* a Big Gemini. In which case...
Way to go Lockheed! Reusing proven technology rocks! (Maybe they actually listened to my comments on reusing the design?... Nah.)
Most testing boards have pinouts for expansion cards. You can then manufacture whatever you need using a service like Pad2Pad (mentioned in my previous post). When you get your card, you can just plug it in and go. (Assuming you didn't screw up the design or need to modify the card.)
Alternatively, you can use a bit of breadboard and create the circut yourself. Thankfully there's often not *too* much to screw up since it's a matter of getting pin X from the FPGA to connect to pin Y on the output port or control chip. As usual, KISS.
Slashdot Mirror
From here:
I also don't see any capsule system for the Falcon V to hold passengers
That's Bigelow's job. SpaceX will provide the booster, and Bigelow will provide the spacecraft and destination. (read: Inflatable Space Station)
that is not a trivial undertaking as no capsule has been built in the USA since Apollo. We have lost a lot of that know how.
Rubbish. Look at the Lockheed design from yesterday's story. It's nothing more than an advanced and reusable capsule design. In fact, it looks very much like the Big Gemini design which was supposed to be the first reusable capsule.
Not to say they can't get there if they wanted to, but right now Falcon is a low-cost challenge to the current launchers like Delta IV, Arianne, etc.
That's really the trick when it comes down to it. A booster is a booster is a booster. Combining it with the spacecraft only makes for a lot of unnecessary complications. Take the Energia-Buran as an example. The Russians designed it to almost exactly the US Shuttle Specs. *But* they had over a decade of NASA's mistakes behind them, so they made a variety of tweaks to the design. One of those tweaks was to strap the shuttle to a BDB instead of using the whole fuel-tank->engines piping mess.
After the DoD gets thru with the "safety" modifications and other things to make it conform to the range requirements
The Falcon V is built to *man rated* specifications. Which means that they've probably already got all the necessary gizmos in place. Especially since they're already slated to fly. And you can't fly without a self-destruct mechanism.
Not to mention that the FV has cool safety features not seen since the Saturn V. e.g. It has engine-out ability for *up to three engines*! That means that the craft can have a flame out on three of its five engines, and *still* make orbit on the remaining two! That's a pretty darn good design. Not even the Space Shuttle can do that.
The Millennium Falcon made the run in a short distance which shows it was able to steer a course very close to the black holes - which makes it very fast... /tenuous
:-)
Oooorrrr... Solo was full of shit and was just trying to impress what he figured were a couple of chumps.
Applying Occam's Razor... I win.
The falcons *already are* reducing launch costs by a factor of ten. Your figures would be by a factor of 100!
Let me put it this way:
The "average" cost per pound to fly something into space is considered $10,000/lb. The goal of NASA and areospace companies has always been to get that down to $1000/lb. While they've had partial success, it can still cost as much as $5000/lb. to reach orbit.
SpaceX's Falcon 1 is a low cargo prototype that can lift about 1,480 lbs to LEO. At a cost of $6,000,000 per lauch, it manages to get get the cost per pound down to ~$4000 or 2/5ths the average.
The Falcon V is then intended to use scale to it advantage by flying 13,270 lbs at a cost of ~$16,000,000. At that rate, the cost per pound is about $1200. Just slightly above the 1/10th cost reduction that SpaceX is targetting. And if these rockets become popular, SpaceX may be able to further reduce costs to be *just under* the 1/10th range.
Is that a bit more clear?
Sorry, minor correction:
:-)
Musk's Falcon rockets which Bigelow will use will shake up the space industry.
Bigelow has been working pretty closly with SpaceX, so I sometimes get them confused.
My original point still holds though. Bigelow and SpaceX are the ones to watch.
That said, is it feasible that we will see it reduced by a factor of 1000? That would allow us mere mortals to have access to other solar systems for vacations and deep space missions to find Eden, baby, hell yeah! :-)
One step at a time. Bigelow's Falcon rockets will shake up the space industry if his cost projections are correct. The lower price might result more launches of private sats. More launchs == economics of scale, so the cost of the launch vehicle should go *down*. The added competition should then force other space companies to develop cheaper launch methods as well, possibly culminating in the much coveted "space plane".
I know that a lot of people are thinking that Rutan is going to be the guy who takes us to the stars. Despite the fact that he's a really smart guy and an excellent aeronautics designer, I think Bigelow is the one we should actually be watching. Low cost rockets, inflatable space stations, and human rated spacecraft are all pies that he has his fingers dipped into. And he's doing them all better and cheaper than the competition.
If Bigelow gets his way, the next few years should be very interesting.
I realize the English might not be your first language and I'm kind of embarrassed that I have to point this out but USian is not a real word.
:-)
It is now! Expect to see it in the next copies of Oxford and Webster's Dictionaries, along with such other great terms like "ain't", "doh", and "supercalafragilisticexpialadotious".
Amazing how living languages keep changing, isn't it?
As I understand it, the benchmarks were presented at the CeBit2005 conference. I don't know what paper they're in, but you can probably find them by starting here.
reusability isnt a requirement of the CEV and none of the proposals say anything about reusability.
:-)
No, but quick turnaround and low cost are part of the proposals. Building a new craft out of Titanium each time would drive the price of flights to levels similar to that of the current shuttle. You see, titanium is not only expensive, it's extremely expensive and difficult to work with.
Trust me, everything about this design screams "reusable". From the non-ablative shielding, to the hull design, to the internal configuration. It *is* a reusable craft.
But don't take my word for it. Go find a rocket scientist and argue the point with him. He could probably use a good laugh.
1.2M gates for $9 isn't bad at all
You're quoting the price for >500,000 units. That's $4.5 million worth of just FPGAs! I seriously doubt that they're going to convince their distributor that they'll need that many chips. (At least at first.) And if they *do* need that many chips, then the ASIC route may make more sense.
50 years ago, the US government wanted a man on the moon by the most expedient method possible. As a result, the efficient solution (LEO -> Moon transfer) was ignored, and the effort was put into using a superbooster for the task. The result was a rocket the size of a skyscrapper that returned a vehicle about the size of a compact car. Efficient? No. Effective? Yes.
Is anyone selling a board or kit fo rthe suckers?
:-)
If I were you, I'd contact the board maintainers here and here. They might be able to hook you up.
That's a good thing, as long as they're lighter loads.
:-)
It depends upon the reentry technology you use. In this case though, it should be a good thing.
this isnt a reusable craft though
Yes it is. Where did you get the idea that it was one shot? The CEV will fly on an expendable booster, but the craft itself needs to have a quick and inexpensive turnaround time. If NASA was going to throw this thing away, they sure as heck wouldn't make it out of Titanium!
why the fuss about non-ablative heat shielding?
:-)
Reusability. With non-ablative shielding, you don't have to refurbish the craft after every flight thus leading to lower costs and faster turnarounds. It also is safer since it can theoretically withstand some error in the reentry vector.
The Shuttle was supposed to have non-ablative shielding, but cost cuts resulted in the current hybrid solution of using non-ablative tiles. These tiles have become a major source of ongoing costs and slow turnaround times.
ablative heat shielding is tried and true and very reliable, plus it's cheap.
There's definitely merit to this line of thinking. But since we have non-ablative shielding today, why not use it? It *has* been tested on several of the shuttle's surfaces, so it's a proven technology.
I think you'll start seeing ablative shielding again if we ever start making drops of mined material from space. A simple container with an ablative shield could make for a *very* inexpensive reentry vehicle. It would drop like a rock, but who cares as long as we don't lose the cargo?
Slower reentry means more time for heat dissipation.
It also means heavy heat loads for longer periods of time. Faster decent may cause the craft to heat up quicker, but it also causes it to bleed off that heat quicker. IIRC, the Space Shuttle was originally designed with a steeper reentry vector in mind, but was changed when the Military demanded strong crossrange abilities. (One orbit up and down, taking pictures or dropping bombs along the way.)
Oh, no doubt. The Lockheed design is far more advanced than the Big Gemini. But from the looks of this design, I'd say it captures many of the features that would have made the Big G an attractive proposition. Tack on a bit more modern technology (e.g. lifting body, non-ablative heat shielding, RCC, etc.) and you've got yourself a winner.
At least, that is, I *hope* they haven't screwed up the design. For example, the Big G used a Parawing for mid-air descent and landing control. The Parawing gave the Big G all the advantages of the Shuttle's landing capabilities without the massive wingspan and dangerous landing velocity. The article merely describes the Lockheed system as "a parachute". Given their flight profile, however, I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't use a parawing.
...a TCP stack, 1280x1024x24 2D graphics display and X11 decoder with one of those, a stick of RAM and some interface chips?
Ummm... Here, knock yourself out.
you have an instant thin client.
Considering the amount of work needed to assemble all of those components, "instant" might be pushing it. More like, "design once, manufacture many".
If the first of these were to be named Constellation, could they be considered a Constellation class space vehicle?
In that case the first four ships should be named:
USS Constellation
USS Gettysburg
USS Hathaway
USS Magellan
USS Stargazer
USS Valkyrie
USS Victory
When Picard finally loses his... erm... Crew Exploration Vehicle to the Ferengi, we can give him the new Galaxy class Mars Exploration Vehicle!
Or not.
Here's an interesting factoid: The Space Shuttle Enterprise was slated to be called "Constitution". Which would have made the Space Shuttles "Constitution-class". Just like the USS Enterprise NCC-1701!
If the device cannot land like a plane it has no hopes of recovering anything from space.
The Big Gemini (upon which this design appears to be based) used a parawing. This gave it the best of both parachute and landing gear systems. i.e. Slow rate of descent and horizontal flight path.
Parawing Video
Big Gemini
That's because shipping cargo on the Space Shuttle was a dumb idea. Humans have very special needs (e.g. safety, atmosphere, low G tolerance, etc.) that cargo doesn't usually have. As a result, it's usually more cost effective to split manned missions and cargo missions into two seperate craft.
With that in mind, we've already got the cargo craft in the form of the Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets. Now all we need is a human capable craft that doesn't haul 80 metric tons of (mostly) useless material into orbit.
Orbital rendezvous is good for a number of things. It allows you to have modularity so you can assembler larger crafts, add special modules later on that you haven't even thought of now (as more advanced technology becomes available 10 years down the road), use it to dock with the International Space Station, use it to dock with possible rescue crafts, etc.
I think the big point of it will be to either:
a) Dock with new engines for the trip from LEO to the moon
b) Dock with a specialized moon courier to transfer the passengers.
Isn't it intersting, one of the primary goals of the Gemini program was to develop space docking technology? Then they design a much larger version just before the end of the program. Now we're getting a craft 50 years later that looks like the Big Gemini design but with a new body. Coincidence?
Is it just me, or does that design look a lot like the Big Gemini? I was amazed at how similar the designs looked, and then I saw this line:
... Nah.)
The CEV is not designed to glide upon re-entry like the shuttle; rather, it will be equipped with parachutes and airbags to set down on land or water. Interchangeable computer systems will increase adaptability between modules.
I'm thinking it *is* a Big Gemini. In which case...
Way to go Lockheed! Reusing proven technology rocks! (Maybe they actually listened to my comments on reusing the design?
Most testing boards have pinouts for expansion cards. You can then manufacture whatever you need using a service like Pad2Pad (mentioned in my previous post). When you get your card, you can just plug it in and go. (Assuming you didn't screw up the design or need to modify the card.)
Alternatively, you can use a bit of breadboard and create the circut yourself. Thankfully there's often not *too* much to screw up since it's a matter of getting pin X from the FPGA to connect to pin Y on the output port or control chip. As usual, KISS.
It just has to give decent, hi-res, 2D performance with no hassles using Libre drivers on Libre operating systems.
Merry Christmas