They shutdown the Shuttle supply chain years ago. A lot of parts are now irreplaceable. The Shuttle was canceled by a Republican Administration and congress. The initial follow-on program with a lot of tested hardware (OSP and related programs were actually at the flight testing stage) was canceled by Griffin and turned into a jobs program.
Also, on a somewhat bureaucratic side, but with real implications, the Shuttle's Certificate of Airworthiness needed recertification this year. It could not pass any real safety inspection. They would have had to waiver most of their certification criteria. And, at its current demonstrated safety level of around 98%, that amounts to a 50% chance of Shuttle loss over the next 30 launches. Nor is there any real expectation that Orion would have been ready in 2015. Constellation is not a good engineering design. You could pour money and get a marginally useful vehicle, but its not *necessary*. The O'Keefe plan of building manned capsule for existing launch vehicles is a much more compact realistic approach than concurrently building a manned capsule and launch vehicle.
The funny thing is that there is actually no official "manned certification" in NASA. No set criteria. No testing procedure. Nothing. The closest thing to a certification is the FAA's certificate of airworthiness and that is a completely different creature. Man-rated is a political question usually used to get funding for another vehicle.
Last point - there are very few, if any, people in NASA who have actually developed a working manned launch vehicle. The Shuttle was designed 40 years ago. And most of it was contracted out. Since Shuttle, NASA's development of vehicles has been good at the R&D level, but once ramped up to flight testing, it becomes just plain dismal.
Look, the reality is that we would have had a working prototype flying now had they not brought Constellation into the picture. X-38 and the X-37 programs were concurrent and shared pretty much the same design concept and programs. (I would even go so far as argue they were the same program saved by the military after NASA dropped the ball). It is not out of the question that the X-37 could be adapted for manned use by keeping the shell and combining the forward section with the cargo bay. It would be tight, but so is Soyuz. Or, they could modify the X-37 to use the parasail used by X-38. Either modification would be a lot faster than anything NASA has proposed wrt Constellation.
You do recall Columbia, yes? They determined that the systemic flaw that caused its accident was not fixable. And that we saw similar damage on a large number of other flights that had just not reached the point of destroying the vehicle. Flying the Shuttle was Russian Roulette. They were going to lose other orbiters. (98% safety over the schedule from 2005-2010 as originally scheduled with 6 flights per year gave a 54% expected survival rate over the course of the program. Taking that out to 2020 gives a 16% survival rate.. and safety generally deteriorates towards the end of programs). The loss of a crew was survivable, but they could not lose another orbiter.
A replacement was an imperative.
So, what sort of design should the follow-on vehicle follow?
As for most of your post, not really seeing what the heck you are talking about because the Constellation program was even more an artist drawing than the X-38, X-37 development lines. Shuttle was getting axed no matter what. That was not Griffin. That was a decision that was dictated by the reality that Shuttle was 30 year old hardware based on a flawed design. It was *not* leading to anything beyond itself as it was eating up every dollar it could.
But, most of those "you's" are not directed at anything I said or discussed, so I am guessing you have your own private agenda that I frankly don't care much about one way or another as it seems to be based on the rather flawed assumption that Shuttle was not going to blow up or break up again.
Well, as near as I can determine, they figured that the one way to keep HLV was to integrate that into their one strategic mission. Once the core concept was developed, you go on to develop Shuttle-C, which would be the Shuttle gutted and then converted over to carrying nothing but cargo. (ie, just the boattail from the Shuttle design, which would be cheap to build and an end-of-life SSME, mount them in an aeroshell shaped like the Shuttle, then launch).
At the time, they really did feel that keeping an HLV of near the Saturn class was a strategic necessity that would provide and infrastructure for later development.
Which is kinda true. A Shuttle-C could have launched ISS in a couple launches, if that. But, ISS and its predecessors were always jobs programs and political rather than technical in nature. There was also no reason the Shuttle was necessary for a lot of ISS construction either. In the end, they tied Shuttle to their strategic paths to keep it from getting canceled. Without ISS, Shuttle would have died in the late 1990's.
The reality is that there is no Iron Triangle in space any longer. We have essentially 2 major design bureaus that are going to get the significant portion of any project approved. Even if a specific project gets axed, they go right back to the same set of contractors for the next one.
Remember that STS stood for Shuttle Transportation System. The Orbiter was just 1 of 4 elements.
1) Orbiter 2) Station 3) Orbital Transport Vehicle 4) Orbital Rendezvous (iirc)
The Shuttle program had many of the exact same problems Ares has. Oversold, bad design. The sort of vehicle being flown now (X-37 and a couple others) were variations of the design Faget proposed. The problem back then was that they had an HLV that put everything else launched since to shame, but they could not afford both Saturn and Shuttle and the one design that could was DOA. (They did propose scrapping most of the SSME and SRB R&D and other stuff and use the lower stage of Saturn. In retrospect, it might have been the better choice, but on paper, Shuttle SSME's and SRB's were completely reusable and would have been more cost effective). NASA *knew* then Shuttle was going to go into cost overruns and was not going to perform, and flat out lied about it, which caused *working* systems to be shelved.
Which really does bring us back to the present. O'Keefe realized one important thing that Goldin also picked up on.. Congress doesn't particularly care about details, for the most part. Before Goldin, it was just as hard to get large mission approved as a small mission approved. Goldin hit on an important point with Pathfinder and its follow-ons. Its just as easy to get a *program* approved as a mission. You go in with a budget request and a defined program and sell that. As long as you show good results and don't go over budget, you're fine. Goldin blasted his way through more X-programs and space missions than anyone since the early 1960's. O'Keefe came in and then designed a program around existing hardware and test flights from Goldin and then asked his engineers what sort of vehicle they could reasonably build within that budget. They gave him that vehicle. (Basically, a small ferry vehicle with about a 1500 cargo built on existing EELV's with enough funds left over for R&D and enough slack to handle cost overruns). He sold that *program* to Congress.
Griffin came in and basically trashed it all. All the design work. All the years of development. Everything.
O'Keefe had it right. Build to within the capabilities of your existing budget. As long as you don't do budget overruns, Congress will leave you alone. Griffin was counting on it being too big to fail, so thought he'd get additional funding to cover the overruns.
NASA does realize that. The core tenant of design for a long, long time has been modularity and leveragability. Orion and CEV were both designated as needing to form a core for an orbital assembly. The capsule was supposed to be able to be docked with other modules launched from Earth to form a core for space-space transport. (Apollo with the CSM was also such a design. It mated with a lunar module. They elected to do an all-in-one launch, but it could also have been done with orbital assembly.)
If you look at the current NASA budget, it is weighed heavily towards R&D on space-to-space and exploration. By dropping Ares, this freed up a lot of money towards other areas that have been neglected for a long time. NASA's R&D side has been gutted by decades of operational and large project costs that kept going over budget. They invariably have enough money to design and sometimes even build rather significant advances, but not the budget to move them into a production environment. (Linear Aerospike and TransHab are two prime examples. Linear Aerospike is sitting on a shelf at LockMart as the vehicle it was to fly on was canceled. TransHab was licensed to Bigelow who has already flow a couple proof-of-concept missions, which NASA cold have easily done with any decent budget).
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
The long pole in the development cycle was Ares, not the capsule. The capsule really could not go into final design until Ares settled down in terms of weight and they were a long way off.
They can start designing tomorrow for this with a fixed target. That alone is a huge gain.
Umm. The Augustine Commission report clearly states that Orion is overdesigned and should be scaled back and that EELV-derivatives would significantly reduce the costs of development, they just felt it may have been too late for that. That part was a judgement call on whether you wanted to keep funding or bite the bullet. The Boeing capsule listed is the Orion scaled properly to existing vehicles. It isn't like we have a bunch of Orion capsules sitting around and going to get thrown away. They are years away from bending hardware. There is also the matter that Constellation and how Griffin handled it was the real fly in the ointment. The capsule/EELV was the design that was originally approved for the ELV program under O'Keefe and that was trashed by Griffin and they had to restart from scratch. They have several years worth of design already done for the exact configuration awarded this contract.
Even if the capsule set the design back a year, so what? The full scale Orion on Ares would not be flying until 2016, or so. By designing to existing launchers, we can eliminate the delays caused by concurrently designing a launch vehicle and capsule. If it takes 4 years to design a capsule, it'll still fly long before NASA managed to launch Ares and Orion.
When you consider the differences in scale, you are not talking a significant change. The aerodynamic modeling is easily scaled, the command, navigation, and control aspects are also pretty much the same. The materials are pretty much the same. When you get right down to it, the setback in time is pretty minimal as they had not even finalized the launch weight on Orion yet as it had to keep adjusting for design changes in Ares. By having a sitting target to shoot at (the existing payload capabilities/requirements on EELV-derivatives are fixed), they will likely actually finish the design faster than waiting to see what those parameters on Ares would really turn out to be.
Depends on the type of license. The manned reusable license is actually pretty well thought out. (Scaled was easily able to get such a license). The FAA is more than reasonable about that. You might want to actually research that.
Mexico is not really an option as American companies - or companies with primary American ownership/staff - are still subject to US laws. Space and associated technologies are too close to arms proliferation and the laws are written with that in mind.
The reality is that US companies can, and do, get all the necessary licenses.
What is difficult is the reverse engineering of existing technologies. Almost everything NASA paid for in X programs the last 30 years is still owned exclusively by the company whom they contracted the work. The Linear Aerospike engines that were tested for X-33 has been sitting on shelf at LockMart for almost 10 years, so other companies wanting to explore the concept have to rebuild the design. The only real design in the last decade to come out of NASA itself without outside contracts has been TransHab. (Which they promptly signed a sole-source distribution contract with Bigelow to handle).
And therein lies the problem with NASA. Their R&D programs are not like the old NACA development programs. The technology is not moving to off-the-shelf. They are on-the-shelf technologies because that is primarily where they stay. Any company that wants to build a small orbital vehicle will have to do that from scratch or with whatever they can leverage.
They built Ares to keep a lot of the old Shuttle infrastructure in place. The EELV rockets are more than powerful enough and safe enough to use as a base for manned flights. In fact, Griffin canceled an already funded and designed and initially tested programs so that Ares/Constellation would be the only game in town.
(X-38 was already flight tested for a re-entry profile and could have been modified for a manned launch profile http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x38.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x37.htm)
The fact of the matter is that NASA can't get into orbit with existing rockets *because it decided not to*. The designs above were the ones originally approved by NASA for the next generation space craft, then Griffin came in for political reasons and axed them and replaced them with Shuttle derived. The designs above were flight tested and were well on their way to being launched on existing launchers for the next stage of development and testing.
Ares was a piece of crap. It is essentially a new launch vehicle that gets to call itself a derivative. They funded it as a derivative, which was going to assure it was going to have cost overruns for its entire life.
Griffin did more damage to NASA than any other administrator. He came in at a time when all NASA had to do was just build existing designs to prove it was once more able to do this, but he blew it. He destroyed a well planned and fiscally responsible program with clear milestones for his own agenda. He canceled hardware that was 80% of the way through testing for a pipedream.
Have you *ever* seen a pilot project where they had not already made the decision to deploy regardless of the outcome?
It always plays out the same way..
Client admin: we had problem A, Problem B, Problem C Sales dude: Hey.. we worked out the bugs... Client CIO: Cool. Let's move the rest in now that all the problems are fixed.
Honestly.. pilot programs are supposed to have problems. You can't get a good feel for the situation because almost invariably you are working with project support and not steady state support in a large farm. They will throw resources to fix major problems when they know there is a sale on the line. Its *always* questionable, even if you have great support during the pilot. If you are dealing with their steady state support during the pilot, you might actually getting a better deal than elsewhere.
Seriously.. pilot programs are *never* representative. You either have more resources available or more technical issues to be resolved than you will have in steady state.
Can you come out and service your equipment? Do you have to be escorted?
How quickly can equipment go from being ordered to being deployed?
What are their change procedures? Are their change windows when all work needs to be done?
Do they have phones in the server farm? If so, how close to your servers? Cell phones?
Are they operating their systems headless? Crash cart? HMC? Management consoles?
The physical stuff is fairly easy to evaluate. Generally, you can get a feel for that in about 60 seconds. But, the questions above can turn a 20 minute glitch into hours of outage. Having a remote console or RSA ports connected to the network can save someone from having to go to the farm.
Your own architecture will also define a lot of the acceptable answers. If you are running large systems with a lot of remote access via management consoles, you are not as concerned about a lot of these. If you are running standalone boxes, some of these will be brutal if they are not in place.
If it takes a week to schedule one of your people to come onto site and be escorted to your machine, then you have to leave because their escort has something more important they have to do.. you have the wrong farm.
And no.. that's not hypothetical.. I was stuck in that situation too many times with one company..
Very correct, btw. That was my main sticking point. I'd be looking at putting in quad 10GB ethernet cards or fiber. Then, running tests to see if the ATA over ethernet process will work.
Having a couple decades of working both sides of the Support Divide, I am now of the opinion that the sole purpose of a Support Contract is to have someone at the other end of the phone to yell at. It makes people feel better and have a warm fuzzy. But, having had to schedule CE's to come onto site to replace failed hardware, I have generally found that that adds hours to any repair job. I would guess that you could power off this array, remove every single drive, move them to a new chassis, reformat them in NTFS, then back to JFS and still finish before a CE shows up on site. I recall that in the winter of 1994, *every* Seagate 4GB drive in our Sun boxes died.
What happens now when a drive goes bad now is that a drive goes bad. You spot it through some monitoring software. You pick up the phone and call a 1-800 number. Someone asks a few questions like "What is you name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color?", then you hear typing in the background. After a bit, if you're lucky, they have you in the system correctly and can find your support contract for that box. Then, they give you a ticket number and put you on hold. Then, after a bit, an "engineering" rep will come appear and say "What is the nature of the emergency" and you then tell them the same stuff, except you get to add works like "var adm messages" or something. They'll tell you to send them some email so they can do some troubleshooting. You send them what they ask for. About an hour or so later, you get an email or call back saying that the drive has gone bad and need replaced, which is pretty much the same thing you told them when you called in. They then tell you that you are on a Gold Contract with 24/7 support and that the CE has a 4 hour callback requirement from the time the call is dispatched to the CE. By this point, you are about 3-4 hours after the disk drive failed in the first place. Finally, the CE will call back after some amount of time to schedule a replacement. And here comes the real kicker.... In almost every instance for the last 10 years, we have had to do all maintenance during a scheduled window. At 1AM.
What happens now when something breaks is that someone fixes it.
Any business is faced with a Buy-It-Or-Build-It dilemma for any service or equipment. Since this was their core business, it certainly makes sense. And, it makes sense for any business of a certain size or set of skills. The reality is that the math is favoring consumer electronics for most applications because they are good enough for 85% of the business needs out there. The whole Cost-Benefit analysis must be periodically re-addressed. If you do not have $1 million a year in billed repair from a Support contract, is it worth $1 million a year for the contract? Seriously.. Even if you have a support contract, you're probably going to get billed time and materials on top of everything else.
With the math on this unit, you can build in massive layers of redundancy to greatly reduce even the possibility of the data being inaccessible and still come in far, far cheaper than any support contract and you can schedule downtown because you have redundancy across multiple chassis.
Well, to start with, the jets you refer to fly at about 35,000 feet. That's 50,000-70,000 feet lower than the balloon.
Even on launch, it would not be much of an issue. The launch team notifies air traffic control of this and they issue a NOTAM. That is a notice that such-and-such area will be launching something during a certain timeframe and should be avoided.
Also, balloons ascend at about given known rate. Let's say the balloon is 100 feet long and ascends as 200 feet/minute (a low rate), that means there is about a 30 second window for it to be at the same elevation as the jet in question. Then, it would have to be in exactly the right place and time to be hit.
This isn't something that even barely touches on a safety concern. High traffic aviation routes have far larger encroachments in their space daily.
The reality is that hardware has pulled so far ahead of software, it will be years before we exploit out current level of technology to its capacity.
We have some apps that don't understand how to task between CPU's. (We have some OS's that barely grasp that). We have applications that were designed in a time of 16 bit machines and fairly low limits on memory that have been patched and slowly moved along when they really need a completely new architecture underneath now to function well. We have some software companies that have pressed the limits in terms of graphics or number crunching, but that has not had time to diffuse through the overall industry.
Within a few years, we will have computer architectures that have an arbitrary number of processor cores and no real apps to handle that. We have a lot of stuff that was in enterprise level boxes that have worked their way down into desktops and laptops.
How about we get some balance back. The current technology has been barely scratched in terms of its capabilities.
It may be that times have passed the political parties and politicians behind.
The space advocates are now looking at private sector and have a more DIY attitude. The technological barriers of entry have been greatly reduced to the point where there are multiple competing private ventures that are likely to succeed.
I think a lot of space advocates are disillusioned with governmental programs. The US and NASA does not do well with large scale programs. After the mess that was ISS, NASA had a fairly reasonable development path into space under O'Keefe. But, when Griffin came in, he ditched that approach and technology and instead went with the Stick and Orion, which bears a striking resemblance to the worst aspects of the Shuttle and ISS development paths.
Quite honestly, the US government just needs to allow room for private enterprise at this time. The FAA made some needed changes to their licensing of launch vehicles, which is what is really opening the door for private ventures. The technology requirements for space access are moving a lot closer to what can be handled by smaller companies.
I might look for a government policy for environmental protection. I might look to the government for a policy covering mining. But, I really don't expect the government to pay for the mining operations. Give some guidelines and provide oversight.
The reality is that the private sector has been quietly moved into manned space activity to the point that an official NASA vehicle will likely be a white elephant when, and if, it ever flies.
Shuttle was always a stretch in the first place. They could have built a number of designs which would still be viable. It was the inclusion of a fairly large cargo bay to a manned ferry vehicle which made Shuttle economically non-viable. They could have built a smaller winged reusable ferry for the crew. The Rutan design is pretty much the same stuff that NASA discarded back in the 1960's - not because it was not viable, but because they wanted a Swiss Army Chainsaw of a vehicle.
We don't need another vehicle of Shuttle's capabilities. As a broad class, we can break down Shuttle into a manned ferry vehicle, a 2 week long experiment platform, a cargo launch vehicle, and work platform. You can probably combine the 2nd and 4th of those capabilities into a single vehicle with no real cash penalty. A manned vehicle can be in the 10-20 ton range for most uses. Cargo does not really require a manned capability. Just a good unpiloted capability to dock with your destination.
(And, I think the proposed CEV/Stick configuration is a not-funny joke. CEV is much larger than it needs to be and the Stick is a completely unnecessary vehicle to meet the demands of getting things into orbit).
Most solar sail ideas are based on photons hitting a reflective surface.
Solar wind is variable in terms of concentration and speed, which is why it tends to get downplayed a bit. You know at any distance from the sun roughly the amount of energy you will have available, it really is not that variable.
Well, to be fair, 20 years active service is actually a long period of service.
If you look at the F-16 and F-18, you'll find that the current flying models are many generations evolved from their predecessors. A 1970's era F-16 can not carry modern payload packages and we had to retire a lot of them for cracked wing spars from carrying combat loads.
The vast - and I do mean vast - majority of military aircraft from the 1950's have long ago been retired. The B-52 is a very specialized aircraft that gets periodic refurbishment.
Which is actually more likely the cause for retiring the F-117. While there were noticable weaknesses to the original design, the most likely cause for its retirement is that the airframe and it shape are really not that well designed for refurbishment and deployment of other avionics and payload packages.
The other aspect of this is that operationally, they made a mistake when they changed the color from the Have Blue sky colored camo to black as that meant it was very visible during daylight hours. Also, at least one F-117 was shot down and its parts were captured. The plane was very vulnerable to long pulse duration radars of the sort used in the 1960's.
There are some weaknesses to CNC. The rapid prototyper they describe here can make hollow shapes. It can also do convoluted forms, which a CNC would need 6, or more, axis to create. You can do 3-4 axis fairly cheap, but the cost of the CNC machine increases rapidly with additional axis after that and the math for the tool-path becomes non-trivial.
If you are doing casting, you can create this in the rapid-prototyper and then burn the plastic out in the oven before casting. It gives you a different range of shapes than an equivalant-cost CNC machine.
That said, I saw their samples and I was caught by the linen lines where the tool-path is very evident. That is probably their biggest hurdle to overcome. You want the product to be as close to final form as possible when it exits the machine. These would need an additional machining step to smooth out the surface. It is most likely a product of the print head.
Well, that statement is now as true for any webhosting organization and their equipment.
The quote is misleading now though. A mainframe has a lot of redundant features and failover capability. You can lose a disk drive, or even an array, and there will be others to take their place. That applies to pretty much everything, except the chassis and a couple specific hardware buses.
The reality is that people design their environments now to act more like mainframes. You have physically separated components with the same level of redundancy (if possible). Even the base level pieces of hardware are moving towards a lot of the redundancy features of a mainframe. You take a mid-range box by IBM - say a middle of the road p-series box from IBM and you'll find that it has a lot of physical similarities to mainframes. Multiple redundant parts, power supplies, virtualization tech, etc, etc. Its no real surprise that IBM uses a lot of the same underlying hardware in its p-series and i-series boxes as the hardware concepts in support of availability tend to converge on a few paradigms. A lot of IBM's mainframes even ship on the same chassis as their p-series boxes. The core design philosophy behind the hardware engineering of a mainframe is pretty much the same as any required by enterprise concerns about availability of resiliency of the system. Even if you use nothing by pc's for your webhosting, you look at having that same sort of redundancy.
A few of the mainframe guys made some really good decisions a few years ago when they realized they had an installed base and leveragable hardware with other product lines.
If you put any enterprise level box out in front of a computer tech from the 1960's, he'll be able to recognize a lot of the same hardware concepts. The underlying paradigm is still around because it is quite sound.
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They shutdown the Shuttle supply chain years ago. A lot of parts are now irreplaceable. The Shuttle was canceled by a Republican Administration and congress. The initial follow-on program with a lot of tested hardware (OSP and related programs were actually at the flight testing stage) was canceled by Griffin and turned into a jobs program.
Also, on a somewhat bureaucratic side, but with real implications, the Shuttle's Certificate of Airworthiness needed recertification this year. It could not pass any real safety inspection. They would have had to waiver most of their certification criteria. And, at its current demonstrated safety level of around 98%, that amounts to a 50% chance of Shuttle loss over the next 30 launches. Nor is there any real expectation that Orion would have been ready in 2015. Constellation is not a good engineering design. You could pour money and get a marginally useful vehicle, but its not *necessary*. The O'Keefe plan of building manned capsule for existing launch vehicles is a much more compact realistic approach than concurrently building a manned capsule and launch vehicle.
The funny thing is that there is actually no official "manned certification" in NASA. No set criteria. No testing procedure. Nothing. The closest thing to a certification is the FAA's certificate of airworthiness and that is a completely different creature. Man-rated is a political question usually used to get funding for another vehicle.
Last point - there are very few, if any, people in NASA who have actually developed a working manned launch vehicle. The Shuttle was designed 40 years ago. And most of it was contracted out. Since Shuttle, NASA's development of vehicles has been good at the R&D level, but once ramped up to flight testing, it becomes just plain dismal.
Look, the reality is that we would have had a working prototype flying now had they not brought Constellation into the picture. X-38 and the X-37 programs were concurrent and shared pretty much the same design concept and programs. (I would even go so far as argue they were the same program saved by the military after NASA dropped the ball). It is not out of the question that the X-37 could be adapted for manned use by keeping the shell and combining the forward section with the cargo bay. It would be tight, but so is Soyuz. Or, they could modify the X-37 to use the parasail used by X-38. Either modification would be a lot faster than anything NASA has proposed wrt Constellation.
You do recall Columbia, yes? They determined that the systemic flaw that caused its accident was not fixable. And that we saw similar damage on a large number of other flights that had just not reached the point of destroying the vehicle. Flying the Shuttle was Russian Roulette. They were going to lose other orbiters. (98% safety over the schedule from 2005-2010 as originally scheduled with 6 flights per year gave a 54% expected survival rate over the course of the program. Taking that out to 2020 gives a 16% survival rate.. and safety generally deteriorates towards the end of programs). The loss of a crew was survivable, but they could not lose another orbiter.
A replacement was an imperative.
So, what sort of design should the follow-on vehicle follow?
As for most of your post, not really seeing what the heck you are talking about because the Constellation program was even more an artist drawing than the X-38, X-37 development lines. Shuttle was getting axed no matter what. That was not Griffin. That was a decision that was dictated by the reality that Shuttle was 30 year old hardware based on a flawed design. It was *not* leading to anything beyond itself as it was eating up every dollar it could.
But, most of those "you's" are not directed at anything I said or discussed, so I am guessing you have your own private agenda that I frankly don't care much about one way or another as it seems to be based on the rather flawed assumption that Shuttle was not going to blow up or break up again.
Well, as near as I can determine, they figured that the one way to keep HLV was to integrate that into their one strategic mission. Once the core concept was developed, you go on to develop Shuttle-C, which would be the Shuttle gutted and then converted over to carrying nothing but cargo. (ie, just the boattail from the Shuttle design, which would be cheap to build and an end-of-life SSME, mount them in an aeroshell shaped like the Shuttle, then launch).
At the time, they really did feel that keeping an HLV of near the Saturn class was a strategic necessity that would provide and infrastructure for later development.
Which is kinda true. A Shuttle-C could have launched ISS in a couple launches, if that. But, ISS and its predecessors were always jobs programs and political rather than technical in nature. There was also no reason the Shuttle was necessary for a lot of ISS construction either. In the end, they tied Shuttle to their strategic paths to keep it from getting canceled. Without ISS, Shuttle would have died in the late 1990's.
The reality is that there is no Iron Triangle in space any longer. We have essentially 2 major design bureaus that are going to get the significant portion of any project approved. Even if a specific project gets axed, they go right back to the same set of contractors for the next one.
Remember that STS stood for Shuttle Transportation System. The Orbiter was just 1 of 4 elements.
1) Orbiter
2) Station
3) Orbital Transport Vehicle
4) Orbital Rendezvous (iirc)
The Shuttle program had many of the exact same problems Ares has. Oversold, bad design. The sort of vehicle being flown now (X-37 and a couple others) were variations of the design Faget proposed. The problem back then was that they had an HLV that put everything else launched since to shame, but they could not afford both Saturn and Shuttle and the one design that could was DOA. (They did propose scrapping most of the SSME and SRB R&D and other stuff and use the lower stage of Saturn. In retrospect, it might have been the better choice, but on paper, Shuttle SSME's and SRB's were completely reusable and would have been more cost effective). NASA *knew* then Shuttle was going to go into cost overruns and was not going to perform, and flat out lied about it, which caused *working* systems to be shelved.
Which really does bring us back to the present. O'Keefe realized one important thing that Goldin also picked up on.. Congress doesn't particularly care about details, for the most part. Before Goldin, it was just as hard to get large mission approved as a small mission approved. Goldin hit on an important point with Pathfinder and its follow-ons. Its just as easy to get a *program* approved as a mission. You go in with a budget request and a defined program and sell that. As long as you show good results and don't go over budget, you're fine. Goldin blasted his way through more X-programs and space missions than anyone since the early 1960's. O'Keefe came in and then designed a program around existing hardware and test flights from Goldin and then asked his engineers what sort of vehicle they could reasonably build within that budget. They gave him that vehicle. (Basically, a small ferry vehicle with about a 1500 cargo built on existing EELV's with enough funds left over for R&D and enough slack to handle cost overruns). He sold that *program* to Congress.
Griffin came in and basically trashed it all. All the design work. All the years of development. Everything.
O'Keefe had it right. Build to within the capabilities of your existing budget. As long as you don't do budget overruns, Congress will leave you alone. Griffin was counting on it being too big to fail, so thought he'd get additional funding to cover the overruns.
NASA does realize that. The core tenant of design for a long, long time has been modularity and leveragability. Orion and CEV were both designated as needing to form a core for an orbital assembly. The capsule was supposed to be able to be docked with other modules launched from Earth to form a core for space-space transport. (Apollo with the CSM was also such a design. It mated with a lunar module. They elected to do an all-in-one launch, but it could also have been done with orbital assembly.)
If you look at the current NASA budget, it is weighed heavily towards R&D on space-to-space and exploration. By dropping Ares, this freed up a lot of money towards other areas that have been neglected for a long time. NASA's R&D side has been gutted by decades of operational and large project costs that kept going over budget. They invariably have enough money to design and sometimes even build rather significant advances, but not the budget to move them into a production environment. (Linear Aerospike and TransHab are two prime examples. Linear Aerospike is sitting on a shelf at LockMart as the vehicle it was to fly on was canceled. TransHab was licensed to Bigelow who has already flow a couple proof-of-concept missions, which NASA cold have easily done with any decent budget).
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
Its Boeing's OSP proposal.
The long pole in the development cycle was Ares, not the capsule. The capsule really could not go into final design until Ares settled down in terms of weight and they were a long way off.
They can start designing tomorrow for this with a fixed target. That alone is a huge gain.
Umm. The Augustine Commission report clearly states that Orion is overdesigned and should be scaled back and that EELV-derivatives would significantly reduce the costs of development, they just felt it may have been too late for that. That part was a judgement call on whether you wanted to keep funding or bite the bullet. The Boeing capsule listed is the Orion scaled properly to existing vehicles. It isn't like we have a bunch of Orion capsules sitting around and going to get thrown away. They are years away from bending hardware. There is also the matter that Constellation and how Griffin handled it was the real fly in the ointment. The capsule/EELV was the design that was originally approved for the ELV program under O'Keefe and that was trashed by Griffin and they had to restart from scratch. They have several years worth of design already done for the exact configuration awarded this contract.
Even if the capsule set the design back a year, so what? The full scale Orion on Ares would not be flying until 2016, or so. By designing to existing launchers, we can eliminate the delays caused by concurrently designing a launch vehicle and capsule. If it takes 4 years to design a capsule, it'll still fly long before NASA managed to launch Ares and Orion.
When you consider the differences in scale, you are not talking a significant change. The aerodynamic modeling is easily scaled, the command, navigation, and control aspects are also pretty much the same. The materials are pretty much the same. When you get right down to it, the setback in time is pretty minimal as they had not even finalized the launch weight on Orion yet as it had to keep adjusting for design changes in Ares. By having a sitting target to shoot at (the existing payload capabilities/requirements on EELV-derivatives are fixed), they will likely actually finish the design faster than waiting to see what those parameters on Ares would really turn out to be.
Depends on the type of license. The manned reusable license is actually pretty well thought out. (Scaled was easily able to get such a license). The FAA is more than reasonable about that. You might want to actually research that.
Mexico is not really an option as American companies - or companies with primary American ownership/staff - are still subject to US laws. Space and associated technologies are too close to arms proliferation and the laws are written with that in mind.
The reality is that US companies can, and do, get all the necessary licenses.
What is difficult is the reverse engineering of existing technologies. Almost everything NASA paid for in X programs the last 30 years is still owned exclusively by the company whom they contracted the work. The Linear Aerospike engines that were tested for X-33 has been sitting on shelf at LockMart for almost 10 years, so other companies wanting to explore the concept have to rebuild the design. The only real design in the last decade to come out of NASA itself without outside contracts has been TransHab. (Which they promptly signed a sole-source distribution contract with Bigelow to handle).
And therein lies the problem with NASA. Their R&D programs are not like the old NACA development programs. The technology is not moving to off-the-shelf. They are on-the-shelf technologies because that is primarily where they stay. Any company that wants to build a small orbital vehicle will have to do that from scratch or with whatever they can leverage.
Nonsense.
They built Ares to keep a lot of the old Shuttle infrastructure in place. The EELV rockets are more than powerful enough and safe enough to use as a base for manned flights. In fact, Griffin canceled an already funded and designed and initially tested programs so that Ares/Constellation would be the only game in town.
(X-38 was already flight tested for a re-entry profile and could have been modified for a manned launch profile http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x38.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x37.htm)
The fact of the matter is that NASA can't get into orbit with existing rockets *because it decided not to*. The designs above were the ones originally approved by NASA for the next generation space craft, then Griffin came in for political reasons and axed them and replaced them with Shuttle derived. The designs above were flight tested and were well on their way to being launched on existing launchers for the next stage of development and testing.
Ares was a piece of crap. It is essentially a new launch vehicle that gets to call itself a derivative. They funded it as a derivative, which was going to assure it was going to have cost overruns for its entire life.
Griffin did more damage to NASA than any other administrator. He came in at a time when all NASA had to do was just build existing designs to prove it was once more able to do this, but he blew it. He destroyed a well planned and fiscally responsible program with clear milestones for his own agenda. He canceled hardware that was 80% of the way through testing for a pipedream.
Honestly...
Have you *ever* seen a pilot project where they had not already made the decision to deploy regardless of the outcome?
It always plays out the same way..
Client admin: we had problem A, Problem B, Problem C
Sales dude: Hey.. we worked out the bugs...
Client CIO: Cool. Let's move the rest in now that all the problems are fixed.
Honestly.. pilot programs are supposed to have problems. You can't get a good feel for the situation because almost invariably you are working with project support and not steady state support in a large farm. They will throw resources to fix major problems when they know there is a sale on the line. Its *always* questionable, even if you have great support during the pilot. If you are dealing with their steady state support during the pilot, you might actually getting a better deal than elsewhere.
Seriously.. pilot programs are *never* representative. You either have more resources available or more technical issues to be resolved than you will have in steady state.
Do they have remote console capability?
Onsite or offsite support?
Level of skills of onsite support.
How many people are onsite during offhours?
Is your equipment secure?
Can you come out and service your equipment? Do you have to be escorted?
How quickly can equipment go from being ordered to being deployed?
What are their change procedures? Are their change windows when all work needs to be done?
Do they have phones in the server farm? If so, how close to your servers? Cell phones?
Are they operating their systems headless? Crash cart? HMC? Management consoles?
The physical stuff is fairly easy to evaluate. Generally, you can get a feel for that in about 60 seconds. But, the questions above can turn a 20 minute glitch into hours of outage. Having a remote console or RSA ports connected to the network can save someone from having to go to the farm.
Your own architecture will also define a lot of the acceptable answers. If you are running large systems with a lot of remote access via management consoles, you are not as concerned about a lot of these. If you are running standalone boxes, some of these will be brutal if they are not in place.
If it takes a week to schedule one of your people to come onto site and be escorted to your machine, then you have to leave because their escort has something more important they have to do.. you have the wrong farm.
And no.. that's not hypothetical.. I was stuck in that situation too many times with one company..
I would try vblade http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoetools/files/vblade/10/
The underlying system they use is Linux. If you try SuSE. you use the steps in http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/55773 and use vlade.
Very correct, btw. That was my main sticking point. I'd be looking at putting in quad 10GB ethernet cards or fiber. Then, running tests to see if the ATA over ethernet process will work.
Having a couple decades of working both sides of the Support Divide, I am now of the opinion that the sole purpose of a Support Contract is to have someone at the other end of the phone to yell at. It makes people feel better and have a warm fuzzy. But, having had to schedule CE's to come onto site to replace failed hardware, I have generally found that that adds hours to any repair job. I would guess that you could power off this array, remove every single drive, move them to a new chassis, reformat them in NTFS, then back to JFS and still finish before a CE shows up on site. I recall that in the winter of 1994, *every* Seagate 4GB drive in our Sun boxes died.
What happens now when a drive goes bad now is that a drive goes bad. You spot it through some monitoring software. You pick up the phone and call a 1-800 number. Someone asks a few questions like "What is you name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color?", then you hear typing in the background. After a bit, if you're lucky, they have you in the system correctly and can find your support contract for that box. Then, they give you a ticket number and put you on hold. Then, after a bit, an "engineering" rep will come appear and say "What is the nature of the emergency" and you then tell them the same stuff, except you get to add works like "var adm messages" or something. They'll tell you to send them some email so they can do some troubleshooting. You send them what they ask for. About an hour or so later, you get an email or call back saying that the drive has gone bad and need replaced, which is pretty much the same thing you told them when you called in. They then tell you that you are on a Gold Contract with 24/7 support and that the CE has a 4 hour callback requirement from the time the call is dispatched to the CE. By this point, you are about 3-4 hours after the disk drive failed in the first place. Finally, the CE will call back after some amount of time to schedule a replacement. And here comes the real kicker.... In almost every instance for the last 10 years, we have had to do all maintenance during a scheduled window. At 1AM.
What happens now when something breaks is that someone fixes it.
Any business is faced with a Buy-It-Or-Build-It dilemma for any service or equipment. Since this was their core business, it certainly makes sense. And, it makes sense for any business of a certain size or set of skills. The reality is that the math is favoring consumer electronics for most applications because they are good enough for 85% of the business needs out there. The whole Cost-Benefit analysis must be periodically re-addressed. If you do not have $1 million a year in billed repair from a Support contract, is it worth $1 million a year for the contract? Seriously.. Even if you have a support contract, you're probably going to get billed time and materials on top of everything else.
With the math on this unit, you can build in massive layers of redundancy to greatly reduce even the possibility of the data being inaccessible and still come in far, far cheaper than any support contract and you can schedule downtown because you have redundancy across multiple chassis.
Well, to start with, the jets you refer to fly at about 35,000 feet. That's 50,000-70,000 feet lower than the balloon.
Even on launch, it would not be much of an issue. The launch team notifies air traffic control of this and they issue a NOTAM. That is a notice that such-and-such area will be launching something during a certain timeframe and should be avoided.
Also, balloons ascend at about given known rate. Let's say the balloon is 100 feet long and ascends as 200 feet/minute (a low rate), that means there is about a 30 second window for it to be at the same elevation as the jet in question. Then, it would have to be in exactly the right place and time to be hit.
This isn't something that even barely touches on a safety concern. High traffic aviation routes have far larger encroachments in their space daily.
The reality is that hardware has pulled so far ahead of software, it will be years before we exploit out current level of technology to its capacity.
We have some apps that don't understand how to task between CPU's. (We have some OS's that barely grasp that). We have applications that were designed in a time of 16 bit machines and fairly low limits on memory that have been patched and slowly moved along when they really need a completely new architecture underneath now to function well. We have some software companies that have pressed the limits in terms of graphics or number crunching, but that has not had time to diffuse through the overall industry.
Within a few years, we will have computer architectures that have an arbitrary number of processor cores and no real apps to handle that. We have a lot of stuff that was in enterprise level boxes that have worked their way down into desktops and laptops.
How about we get some balance back. The current technology has been barely scratched in terms of its capabilities.
It may be that times have passed the political parties and politicians behind.
The space advocates are now looking at private sector and have a more DIY attitude. The technological barriers of entry have been greatly reduced to the point where there are multiple competing private ventures that are likely to succeed.
I think a lot of space advocates are disillusioned with governmental programs. The US and NASA does not do well with large scale programs. After the mess that was ISS, NASA had a fairly reasonable development path into space under O'Keefe. But, when Griffin came in, he ditched that approach and technology and instead went with the Stick and Orion, which bears a striking resemblance to the worst aspects of the Shuttle and ISS development paths.
Quite honestly, the US government just needs to allow room for private enterprise at this time. The FAA made some needed changes to their licensing of launch vehicles, which is what is really opening the door for private ventures. The technology requirements for space access are moving a lot closer to what can be handled by smaller companies.
I might look for a government policy for environmental protection. I might look to the government for a policy covering mining. But, I really don't expect the government to pay for the mining operations. Give some guidelines and provide oversight.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14300
Eh? gmail has a policy page for this exact situation..
This is a pretty standard industry policy. Death certificate and proof that you are nearest relative or executor.
http://www.howtoweb.com/cgi-bin/insider.pl?zone=361051
Yahoo requires an order from the probate court, but that looks to be the most restrictive.
The reality is that the private sector has been quietly moved into manned space activity to the point that an official NASA vehicle will likely be a white elephant when, and if, it ever flies.
Shuttle was always a stretch in the first place. They could have built a number of designs which would still be viable. It was the inclusion of a fairly large cargo bay to a manned ferry vehicle which made Shuttle economically non-viable. They could have built a smaller winged reusable ferry for the crew. The Rutan design is pretty much the same stuff that NASA discarded back in the 1960's - not because it was not viable, but because they wanted a Swiss Army Chainsaw of a vehicle.
We don't need another vehicle of Shuttle's capabilities. As a broad class, we can break down Shuttle into a manned ferry vehicle, a 2 week long experiment platform, a cargo launch vehicle, and work platform. You can probably combine the 2nd and 4th of those capabilities into a single vehicle with no real cash penalty. A manned vehicle can be in the 10-20 ton range for most uses. Cargo does not really require a manned capability. Just a good unpiloted capability to dock with your destination.
(And, I think the proposed CEV/Stick configuration is a not-funny joke. CEV is much larger than it needs to be and the Stick is a completely unnecessary vehicle to meet the demands of getting things into orbit).
Unusual design.
Most solar sail ideas are based on photons hitting a reflective surface.
Solar wind is variable in terms of concentration and speed, which is why it tends to get downplayed a bit. You know at any distance from the sun roughly the amount of energy you will have available, it really is not that variable.
Well, to be fair, 20 years active service is actually a long period of service.
If you look at the F-16 and F-18, you'll find that the current flying models are many generations evolved from their predecessors. A 1970's era F-16 can not carry modern payload packages and we had to retire a lot of them for cracked wing spars from carrying combat loads.
The vast - and I do mean vast - majority of military aircraft from the 1950's have long ago been retired. The B-52 is a very specialized aircraft that gets periodic refurbishment.
Which is actually more likely the cause for retiring the F-117. While there were noticable weaknesses to the original design, the most likely cause for its retirement is that the airframe and it shape are really not that well designed for refurbishment and deployment of other avionics and payload packages.
The other aspect of this is that operationally, they made a mistake when they changed the color from the Have Blue sky colored camo to black as that meant it was very visible during daylight hours. Also, at least one F-117 was shot down and its parts were captured. The plane was very vulnerable to long pulse duration radars of the sort used in the 1960's.
There are some weaknesses to CNC. The rapid prototyper they describe here can make hollow shapes. It can also do convoluted forms, which a CNC would need 6, or more, axis to create. You can do 3-4 axis fairly cheap, but the cost of the CNC machine increases rapidly with additional axis after that and the math for the tool-path becomes non-trivial.
If you are doing casting, you can create this in the rapid-prototyper and then burn the plastic out in the oven before casting. It gives you a different range of shapes than an equivalant-cost CNC machine.
That said, I saw their samples and I was caught by the linen lines where the tool-path is very evident. That is probably their biggest hurdle to overcome. You want the product to be as close to final form as possible when it exits the machine. These would need an additional machining step to smooth out the surface. It is most likely a product of the print head.
Well, that statement is now as true for any webhosting organization and their equipment.
The quote is misleading now though. A mainframe has a lot of redundant features and failover capability. You can lose a disk drive, or even an array, and there will be others to take their place. That applies to pretty much everything, except the chassis and a couple specific hardware buses.
The reality is that people design their environments now to act more like mainframes. You have physically separated components with the same level of redundancy (if possible). Even the base level pieces of hardware are moving towards a lot of the redundancy features of a mainframe. You take a mid-range box by IBM - say a middle of the road p-series box from IBM and you'll find that it has a lot of physical similarities to mainframes. Multiple redundant parts, power supplies, virtualization tech, etc, etc. Its no real surprise that IBM uses a lot of the same underlying hardware in its p-series and i-series boxes as the hardware concepts in support of availability tend to converge on a few paradigms. A lot of IBM's mainframes even ship on the same chassis as their p-series boxes. The core design philosophy behind the hardware engineering of a mainframe is pretty much the same as any required by enterprise concerns about availability of resiliency of the system. Even if you use nothing by pc's for your webhosting, you look at having that same sort of redundancy.
A few of the mainframe guys made some really good decisions a few years ago when they realized they had an installed base and leveragable hardware with other product lines.
If you put any enterprise level box out in front of a computer tech from the 1960's, he'll be able to recognize a lot of the same hardware concepts. The underlying paradigm is still around because it is quite sound.