What nasa should do is build something like klipper for near term while concurrently for long term work on what's known as a TSTO or two stage to orbit RLV and make use of the metalic thremo protection system from the X33.
The biggest issue with the shuttle seems to be the fragile TPS and the large foam covered ET.
So turn the STS into a heavy booster.
A space plane that rides on top it's booster like klipper would not suffer debris damage and could also sperate from it's launch vehical easily.
The TSTO type RLV would have no drop tanks to shed foam .
Eventually they would end up with the TSTO that can fly often atleast twice a month possibelly weekly for crew and smaller stuff under 15tons and most systems from the klipper type CEV could be reused on it and also a big dumb SDV for very large payloads and if you want to go to mars you will need to launch things that weigh 50 to 100tons into orbit.
Want to talk about a cpu thats sexy on the inside despite having the ugly X86 instruction set then lets talk about AMD who intel has been following for the past 6 years.
Also AMD's not only are faster then their intel equivalents they are a lot cheaper.
But on high level apps no you do not use assembly very often except for maybe implementing some single bit operations.
As for big endian and little endian it make little difference to most users.
But I can bash intel on one area l1 cache or the lack of it and having a narrow yet deep pipeline vs a wide and shallow pipeline.
Also remeber the fanciful claims intel made of the P4 being able to scale to 10GHz back in 2002.
Also not everything intel does is something to be envied remember the Willamette or worse Prescott and Netburst P4s?
Prescott needs to run at 5GHZ to equal an AMD FX running at 2.5GHz.
Oddly enough most of intel's efforts now center around the little funded in compairisoin Pentium M core which was designed by a small israeli team as almost an after thought but it's a far superior design to the P4 less transistors and thus less heat so you can put two or four on one die and not have a meltdown.
AMD would have been a more logical choice and do not dig up bull on AMD cannot meet demands. They are supplying semprons to walmart and opterons to all high end server manufactures and every hardcore gamer out there.
Also they really screwed up royally on the dev box by not including a graphics card powerful enough for modern game development. A radeon 9200 with 128MB dedicated vram is the bare minimum these days.Do not believe me go pickup a copy of any 3d game made in the past two years heck even tux racer plays badly on intel IGPs.
A low end radeon would have only been $28 more then that lame DVI riser they used.
Also embracing TC could prove a very bad PR move since TC is so hated they had to change it's name three times.
I'd still buy one if this feature can be turned off or if I can browse the contents of the protected memory sector and use this feature to my advantage vs having it used against me.
BTW I'm hardly ignorant as Vlad so elegantly put it. I work in software development with over 7 years of experience in the field he doesn't even seem to have webpage design down yet. So do not let his pointless banter and name calling get you down make your own desision based what you feel is right.
Also if you do not like the changes write apple let them know what you want and do not want in a machine.
It's a free country and a company must please it's customers if it wants their bussiness.
BTW I'm not bailing just waiting to see what will this mean to me as I always have when things like this happen. Also keep in mind rev 1.0 of anything is bug city.
Depends on what it entails I do not support TC but I do like OSX so this is a wait and see thing.
Put I do not worry apple will back away from TC when it hurts sales and will reimplament it right or just go back to PPC.
Also Vald where in the hell did you learn to make a web page jeeze you are not in any posistion to be calling anyone ignorant when showintg a link to such a horrid piece of work as your home page.
Talk about calling the kettle black.
China will not support US DRM as for customs they are joke 99% of all containers are never searched.
The US market is shinking while the china market is growing butthe chibnese ra epiratethe PRC does not have as tight of control on it's people you think;.
If a pirate movie will not play on a machine that machine will not find a buyer in china Chinese OEms are the purests kind of capitalist there are yes they well sell broken stuff for dell but they will sell their own non broken stuff for other markets.
HK and chinese direct suppliers sell all sorts of grey area products from game console chips to DVD duplicators that will copy anything.
In the US and europe we need to say no to DRM enough is enough it worked to stop the P3's PSN it was gone in the P4.We need to speak with our checkbooks and say no. Write intel and other manufactures tell them you will not buy these products and then follow though.
If you get a machine that acts odd because of DRM demand your money back.Yes hollywood is powerful but they are not gods they can be beaten they were in the 1980s on the VCR issue they can be beaten on this too.If they refuse to release fair use movies then it's not worth watching.
An ISp that tries to force use of trusted only machines will find it'sself with no customers very quickly.
As for web pages I boycott web pages that refuse to work in firefox even.
China and tiawan and malaysia already all have fabs and guess what in china the PRC owns 51% of anything built there so if china wanted to they can sieze it. so yes this will back fire maybe bad enough the people behind DRM are destoryed by it.
On china what are going to do to make china do anything it does not want to do?That would be like trying to get godzilla to obey an order he'd just ignore you if you are lucky because if he does take notice you'll get stomped on.
The USA is loosing influance in ten years it will mostly likely be superceddeed both politically and economicly by the EU and China.
As for military might it's nolonger #1.
If it wants to force IP laws on the thirdworld it's fall will only happen with more expidiance as it made one mistake to taught the thirdworld about technology and then outsource production of it.
The US could have locked down IP laws back in the 80s or even the early 90s but now that opertunity is gone.
Any other anti globalization move will only do it harm now.
Then boycott DRM media .
On DRM though there is a special place in hell for any DSRM developer.
The RIAA and MPAA have too much power they must be broken up.
Well I will just boycott intel and their DRM. beside I have not used intel processor since 1998 this will make me stay with AMD and go to VIA for low power applications. Besides the Pentium D is not all that good. As for chip sets lets see we Got VIA,SIS,and nVidia also I belive ATI is making a MB chipset too. I've been using nvidia,SIS and VIA based chipsets as of late all this will do is make me adviod intel for one more reason the price/performace alone. As for stability I never had any issues even when running a board OC'ed This was writtin on an AMD 3400 mounted in a epox VIA based MB. This setup has been stable under both linux and XP pro.
Why buy a mac now someone will make a loader like sheep shaver or MOL and make OSX run on a standard PC.Then you can build a cheaper faster mac clone around an opteron board more cache and a faster BUS and the HT you really want hyper transport not the one that only helps 15% of the time.
As for any silly DRM tricks those last what 3 months and then they get broken.Also scary DRm will cause many of the best coders to break it on principal.
But then maybe Apple will become an OS distrubuter OSX on a dual opteron sounds nice and cheap.
Not a real use Cell is awsome an under $300 chip that eats xeons for snacks and can eat an opteron for lunch? This would be a big seller for people in engineering the movie industry etc. With linux on it I want to see a standard PC board with a Cell processor and an X86 emu in rom for X86 OSes and using X86 cards roms. But for speed it'll run native cell compiled applications. Another odd effect is if cell finds it way into printers we'll have a situation we had back in the 80s where the printer is more powerful then it's host PC is so people will do crazy stuff like write apps in postscript again for simulations and rendering.
The BSd box just had bigger caps for it's PSu size or just better quality capcitors. I had the same thing happen when my PC rebooted but my old powermac rode though a brown out. The mac's psu was physically 2x the size of the atx in the pc ie far bigger caps and heat sinks.
I would not worry about the opensource movment being killed it's got too much momentum now they had their chance back in the 90s now it's got a life of it's own beyound the US and the EU nations it's a global phenonamon now.
If Bill Gates thinks he can force the fareast to pay of MS mal ware he'd better think agian they now make most of the board chipsets and do make their own CPUs their governments might lock out microsoft from products sold in their respective nations. Bill Gates needs them but they do not need him.
It's offical china and japan have adopted linux as the offical OS for use by their goverments even the US goverment uses linux for it's super computers.
The open source movement is now bigger then microsoft and bigger then hollywood they can't kill it now.
As for DMCA and software patents I think they should be scrapped as it harms innovation.Any country the keeps such laws will only fall behind the rest of the world.
This is not 1984 as no single country controls technology or standards now.
If they want to stifle innovation it will move elsewhere such as india or tiawan.
Well people will probley start advioding TC the first time it causes them problems and this may help fareast semiconductor manufactors get the embedded cpu market. I accually like some of VIA's offerings. TC if anything will hurt those who use it against the end user as biting the hand that feeds you is a foolish thing to do.Those who make a computer or software that might betray you will loose customers esp cooperate ones. Intel does not own the processor market they don't even have the best products or the fastest chips when mesured by flops vs MHz. If customers feel less free they will shop elsewhere and companies like NEC and hitachi are more then willing to sell a better chip. But from what I can tell you should be able to reflash the rom via the JTAG interface removing the worthless TC enabled bios. As for ISPs and sites requiring TC vote with your wallet and tell them you do not need their service if they require TC. You will not be missing anything except for the feeling of being ripped off. On linux and BSD I will not worry about them being locked out as they are mainstream now and not supporting linux/bsd is bad for bussiness ESP for server and embedded markets.
Mine was to use a soyuz and a progress to carry the equipment this would be a very cheap solution and would cost around 100 million to implament less thena shuttle mission which runs 300million. Also lockheed martin's CEV/OSP can have custom service modules. Boeing's retro apollo design also could be given a special mission module. Heck apollo was suposed to had a vesion for earth orbit science missions that added nice things like 15 cubic yards more living space and a real bathroom like the shuttle's. It was called the extended duration configuration for missions upto 28 days free flight.It was dropped when the program was cutted back in the 70s and only funding for skylab and ASTP remained. These could be used for future hubble missions and for repair and upgrade of JSWT.
My ideal to save hubble is accually very simple as it would involve a modified cargo carrier like progress and a soyuz or CEV mission.
One reason is you really don't need a large space plane to do a repair mission.
They repaired skylab back in the 70s with nothing more then apollo hardware and basicly saved the entire mission.
Sky lab was pretty much 80tons of space junk at first due to a stuck solar array and a missing metor/thermo shield.
.
It should be possible to send up a soyuz and a progress ATV or the Kistler K1 space craft to carry the parts and a kick motor.
This would also be quite affordable too since a soyuz and progress only cost 50 million each to launch.
This would be good pratice for building a lunar station which will have to be done no shuttle since that class of spacecraft can't make it to lunar orbit.
Though ironicly it's HLLV derivitives like shuttle-c will probley end up becoming the work horse of the lunar program and other heavy items like JIMO.
Now if their going to do such stuff all with EELVs such experiance will be very nessiscary.
I think they hold alot of promis esp for deep space eninges.
We really need rockets like this for mars missions as they could cut what would have been a dangerous 2.5 year mission to a 4 month round trip.
Plus you would also have abort capibility,in that if something goes wrong halfway though you can turn back to earth.
A chemical powered mission would have to at least go to mars and then use it gravity to help send it back to earth or even wait till mars and earth get back in to position.
As for danger if it over heats it wouldn't be chernybole since the fuel is a gas and all reactions would stop if containment failed.
I think if they enough people want to keep hubble in service or atleast decfommisssion it in a safe manner,We'll need a tug of some sort.
I propose modifying a progress freighter to dock with the mounting ring on hubble.
Main differance the progress will have gyros and an ion drive added in place of the usual cargo.
Also it will carry an extra large set of solar panels.
This should extend hubble's life till JWST is ready or a truely large replacemnt can be launched on a shuttle derived booster which BTW would be lower risk then JWST with it's complexe mirror.
It should be noted though Martin's hybrid OSP with the disposible epuiptment module could be used to service hubble or any other orbiting platform with a few changes to the service module heck and old apollo could rember skylab?
Accually in a way we have the tech to return to the moon. Take a shuttle stack remove the orbiter and place the SSMEs on the ET what you get is a 100+ton launcher that will cost 300million a flight. The frist thing before sending people would be first send permanmt orbital communication sats then send remote vehicals to explore for then to process raw materials and water ice at the poles. Once that has been done send the first habitats and people. With raw materials and water you have a reliable source of oxygen, food, and rocket fuel which is needed for permant colonization.
I'm supprised noone has wanted to partener with the russian and restart the MAKS program.
The russians had a project for a mini shuttle that would easily fill the needs for sending crew to ISS and space tourism rides.
Basicly the craft was a blended wing design that used an antov 124 cargo plane to carry it to 45,000 feet and 500mph.
It then would burn fuel in a large drop tank first lox and kerosene and then switch to lox hydrogen with it's tripellant engines.
The orbiter had a crew of two and could carry 9tons of cargo or an extra crew module could be carried instead in that configuration it could carry eight to ten crew members.
The cargo only version of the system could launch 18tons to LEO.
EU was partly founding the project but backed out of it for unkown reason maybe because it would put ariane out of bussiness.
And russia was not able to afford to finsh the project and had to shelve it for the time being.
Most of the technology behind it got finished such as the engines which were successfully test fired.
To bad as the Russians claimed it would cut cost by a factor of 9 to 10.
It would have been a truely elegant solution to todays space tranportation problems.
Accually that could be a good ideal for a fairy craft of course the new gemni would have to have a prseeurised docking setup which would make it a cross with apollo.
I bet the apollo would be dirt cheap to build toowith todays technology.
another good ideal would be to add an apollo modified for 6 crew mebers as the emergacy return craft
The soyuz has an exelent saftly record but can only carry 3 people and little cargo.
It's well suited to be a fairy craft as thats what the present version were designed for from the outset.
Now nasa can learn a few things from the russians on what to do to the shuttle one loose the hydrizene Nitrogentetraoxide RCS and use something easier and cheaper to work on like lox and kerosene.
Two a cargo shuttle think shuttle stack minus the orbiter also an orbiter LEO payloads of 100+ tons can be achived.
An unmanned shuttle orbiter could carry 80,000lbs.
vs 60,000.
Also they need to build a mini shuttle same presurised volume and thus crew size as the old shuttle but no cargo bay.
Again the russians have experiance here as in 1994 they almost built a shuttle half the size of STS but would have been dirt cheap to run it was called MAKS.But their partners in europe backed out.
Too bad as it had a payload of 9tons more than soyuz and would have costed $978 a pound for it to launch cargo.
Unfortunetly that all to true the longer we stay confined to one planet the less chance we have to survive as a species.
As for shuttle problems the govrenment needs to set aside 10 billion to redesign the STS sytem and build new ships based on the latest technology other stuff that should be presued is a cargo only shuttle system where the orbiter is replace by a pod of SSMEs and a huge cargo module such a craft would have a lifting power equalt to the old saturn 5 rockets yet would cost the same per launch as a shuttle probley less as the shuttle's main cost is whats called touch labor or hands on spacecraft maintaince.
Also they should bring back the X34 and DCX.
A near term solution if money is short and prsent shuttle counldn't be made safe would be to ready the X34 and titain or delta 4 to be man rated in a crash program or bring back the old apollo capsule for a short time and use the shuttles unmanned.
Soyuz is a good craft but the apollo is much larger and can be modified to carry more crew members of course this new capsule would be larger than the old one and include stuff the old apollo never had such a newer computers N2 O2 atmopshere and a proper WCS.
Accually shuttle-c could match saturn 5 and energia the verion on astronutix is a two SSME shuttle-c a three SSME version would carry almost equaly to energia or even use disposable RS68s you'll gain payload by not having to have an areoshell for the SSMEs would carry more.
The best thing aboput shuttle-c is it would accually cost less than a normal shuttle launch not as much craft maintinace as an orbiter but would carrry 3 to 4 times the cargo.
Also it may be possible to make some truely huge launchers using shuttle parts that would even exceed saturn 5 by a large margin.
maybe use a core with 5 or 6 SSMEs two ETs and 4 SRBs and you'll have 2x saturn 5s lift capacity.
Which would equal you can go to mars if you wanted.
R&D for it would be alomst mothing compaired to making a heavylift booster from scatch or bringing back saturn 5 which it's self would not be too costly to do way under the 1.5 billion wasted on dead end projects.
As for manning ISS I sugest make a new version of apollo that can carry 5 people they could have it built in a year it would make a good life boat and could be launched on a delta 4 .
Also an apollo built with 21'st century technology would weigh much less than the 60s version yet have more room inside.
The service module could use a single shuttle OMS engine so you don't even have to revamp production on the apollo SPS engine.
Slashdot Mirror
What nasa should do is build something like klipper for near term while concurrently for long term work on what's known as a TSTO or two stage to orbit RLV and make use of the metalic thremo protection system from the X33. The biggest issue with the shuttle seems to be the fragile TPS and the large foam covered ET. So turn the STS into a heavy booster. A space plane that rides on top it's booster like klipper would not suffer debris damage and could also sperate from it's launch vehical easily. The TSTO type RLV would have no drop tanks to shed foam . Eventually they would end up with the TSTO that can fly often atleast twice a month possibelly weekly for crew and smaller stuff under 15tons and most systems from the klipper type CEV could be reused on it and also a big dumb SDV for very large payloads and if you want to go to mars you will need to launch things that weigh 50 to 100tons into orbit.
Want to talk about a cpu thats sexy on the inside despite having the ugly X86 instruction set then lets talk about AMD who intel has been following for the past 6 years. Also AMD's not only are faster then their intel equivalents they are a lot cheaper. But on high level apps no you do not use assembly very often except for maybe implementing some single bit operations. As for big endian and little endian it make little difference to most users. But I can bash intel on one area l1 cache or the lack of it and having a narrow yet deep pipeline vs a wide and shallow pipeline. Also remeber the fanciful claims intel made of the P4 being able to scale to 10GHz back in 2002. Also not everything intel does is something to be envied remember the Willamette or worse Prescott and Netburst P4s? Prescott needs to run at 5GHZ to equal an AMD FX running at 2.5GHz. Oddly enough most of intel's efforts now center around the little funded in compairisoin Pentium M core which was designed by a small israeli team as almost an after thought but it's a far superior design to the P4 less transistors and thus less heat so you can put two or four on one die and not have a meltdown.
AMD would have been a more logical choice and do not dig up bull on AMD cannot meet demands. They are supplying semprons to walmart and opterons to all high end server manufactures and every hardcore gamer out there. Also they really screwed up royally on the dev box by not including a graphics card powerful enough for modern game development. A radeon 9200 with 128MB dedicated vram is the bare minimum these days.Do not believe me go pickup a copy of any 3d game made in the past two years heck even tux racer plays badly on intel IGPs. A low end radeon would have only been $28 more then that lame DVI riser they used. Also embracing TC could prove a very bad PR move since TC is so hated they had to change it's name three times. I'd still buy one if this feature can be turned off or if I can browse the contents of the protected memory sector and use this feature to my advantage vs having it used against me. BTW I'm hardly ignorant as Vlad so elegantly put it. I work in software development with over 7 years of experience in the field he doesn't even seem to have webpage design down yet. So do not let his pointless banter and name calling get you down make your own desision based what you feel is right. Also if you do not like the changes write apple let them know what you want and do not want in a machine. It's a free country and a company must please it's customers if it wants their bussiness. BTW I'm not bailing just waiting to see what will this mean to me as I always have when things like this happen. Also keep in mind rev 1.0 of anything is bug city.
Depends on what it entails I do not support TC but I do like OSX so this is a wait and see thing. Put I do not worry apple will back away from TC when it hurts sales and will reimplament it right or just go back to PPC. Also Vald where in the hell did you learn to make a web page jeeze you are not in any posistion to be calling anyone ignorant when showintg a link to such a horrid piece of work as your home page. Talk about calling the kettle black.
China will not support US DRM as for customs they are joke 99% of all containers are never searched. The US market is shinking while the china market is growing butthe chibnese ra epiratethe PRC does not have as tight of control on it's people you think;. If a pirate movie will not play on a machine that machine will not find a buyer in china Chinese OEms are the purests kind of capitalist there are yes they well sell broken stuff for dell but they will sell their own non broken stuff for other markets. HK and chinese direct suppliers sell all sorts of grey area products from game console chips to DVD duplicators that will copy anything. In the US and europe we need to say no to DRM enough is enough it worked to stop the P3's PSN it was gone in the P4 .We need to speak with our checkbooks and say no. Write intel and other manufactures tell them you will not buy these products and then follow though.
If you get a machine that acts odd because of DRM demand your money back .Yes hollywood is powerful but they are not gods they can be beaten they were in the 1980s on the VCR issue they can be beaten on this too.If they refuse to release fair use movies then it's not worth watching.
An ISp that tries to force use of trusted only machines will find it'sself with no customers very quickly.
As for web pages I boycott web pages that refuse to work in firefox even.
China and tiawan and malaysia already all have fabs and guess what in china the PRC owns 51% of anything built there so if china wanted to they can sieze it. so yes this will back fire maybe bad enough the people behind DRM are destoryed by it. On china what are going to do to make china do anything it does not want to do?That would be like trying to get godzilla to obey an order he'd just ignore you if you are lucky because if he does take notice you'll get stomped on.
The USA is loosing influance in ten years it will mostly likely be superceddeed both politically and economicly by the EU and China. As for military might it's nolonger #1. If it wants to force IP laws on the thirdworld it's fall will only happen with more expidiance as it made one mistake to taught the thirdworld about technology and then outsource production of it. The US could have locked down IP laws back in the 80s or even the early 90s but now that opertunity is gone. Any other anti globalization move will only do it harm now.
Then boycott DRM media . On DRM though there is a special place in hell for any DSRM developer. The RIAA and MPAA have too much power they must be broken up.
Well I will just boycott intel and their DRM. . ,SIS and VIA based chipsets as of late all this will do is make me adviod intel for one more reason the price/performace alone.
beside I have not used intel processor since 1998 this will make me stay with AMD and go to VIA for low power applications.
Besides the Pentium D is not all that good
As for chip sets lets see we Got VIA,SIS,and nVidia also I belive ATI is making a MB chipset too.
I've been using nvidia
As for stability I never had any issues even when running a board OC'ed
This was writtin on an AMD 3400 mounted in a epox VIA based MB.
This setup has been stable under both linux and XP pro.
Why buy a mac now someone will make a loader like sheep shaver or MOL and make OSX run on a standard PC .Then you can build a cheaper faster mac clone around an opteron board more cache and a faster BUS and the HT you really want hyper transport not the one that only helps 15% of the time.
As for any silly DRM tricks those last what 3 months and then they get broken.Also scary DRm will cause many of the best coders to break it on principal.
But then maybe Apple will become an OS distrubuter OSX on a dual opteron sounds nice and cheap.
Not a real use Cell is awsome an under $300 chip that eats xeons for snacks and can eat an opteron for lunch?
This would be a big seller for people in engineering the movie industry etc.
With linux on it I want to see a standard PC board with a Cell processor and an X86 emu in rom for X86 OSes and using X86 cards roms.
But for speed it'll run native cell compiled applications.
Another odd effect is if cell finds it way into printers we'll have a situation we had back in the 80s where the printer is more powerful then it's host PC is so people will do crazy stuff like write apps in postscript again for simulations and rendering.
The BSd box just had bigger caps for it's PSu size or just better quality capcitors.
I had the same thing happen when my PC rebooted but my old powermac rode though a brown out.
The mac's psu was physically 2x the size of the atx in the pc ie far bigger caps and heat sinks.
I would not worry about the opensource movment being killed it's got too much momentum now they had their chance back in the 90s now it's got a life of it's own beyound the US and the EU nations it's a global phenonamon now. If Bill Gates thinks he can force the fareast to pay of MS mal ware he'd better think agian they now make most of the board chipsets and do make their own CPUs their governments might lock out microsoft from products sold in their respective nations. Bill Gates needs them but they do not need him. It's offical china and japan have adopted linux as the offical OS for use by their goverments even the US goverment uses linux for it's super computers. The open source movement is now bigger then microsoft and bigger then hollywood they can't kill it now. As for DMCA and software patents I think they should be scrapped as it harms innovation.Any country the keeps such laws will only fall behind the rest of the world. This is not 1984 as no single country controls technology or standards now. If they want to stifle innovation it will move elsewhere such as india or tiawan.
Well people will probley start advioding TC the first time it causes them problems and this may help fareast semiconductor manufactors get the embedded cpu market.
I accually like some of VIA's offerings.
TC if anything will hurt those who use it against the end user as biting the hand that feeds you is a foolish thing to do.Those who make a computer or software that might betray you will loose customers esp cooperate ones. Intel does not own the processor market they don't even have the best products or the fastest chips when mesured by flops vs MHz.
If customers feel less free they will shop elsewhere and companies like NEC and hitachi are more then willing to sell a better chip.
But from what I can tell you should be able to reflash the rom via the JTAG interface removing the worthless TC enabled bios.
As for ISPs and sites requiring TC vote with your wallet and tell them you do not need their service if they require TC.
You will not be missing anything except for the feeling of being ripped off.
On linux and BSD I will not worry about them being locked out as they are mainstream now and not supporting linux/bsd is bad for bussiness ESP for server and embedded markets.
Mine was to use a soyuz and a progress to carry the equipment this would be a very cheap solution and would cost around 100 million to implament less thena shuttle mission which runs 300million.
Also lockheed martin's CEV/OSP can have custom service modules.
Boeing's retro apollo design also could be given a special mission module. Heck apollo was suposed to had a vesion for earth orbit science missions that added nice things like 15 cubic yards more living space and a real bathroom like the shuttle's.
It was called the extended duration configuration for missions upto 28 days free flight.It was dropped when the program was cutted back in the 70s and only funding for skylab and ASTP remained.
These could be used for future hubble missions and for repair and upgrade of JSWT.
My ideal to save hubble is accually very simple as it would involve a modified cargo carrier like progress and a soyuz or CEV mission. One reason is you really don't need a large space plane to do a repair mission. They repaired skylab back in the 70s with nothing more then apollo hardware and basicly saved the entire mission. Sky lab was pretty much 80tons of space junk at first due to a stuck solar array and a missing metor/thermo shield. . It should be possible to send up a soyuz and a progress ATV or the Kistler K1 space craft to carry the parts and a kick motor. This would also be quite affordable too since a soyuz and progress only cost 50 million each to launch. This would be good pratice for building a lunar station which will have to be done no shuttle since that class of spacecraft can't make it to lunar orbit. Though ironicly it's HLLV derivitives like shuttle-c will probley end up becoming the work horse of the lunar program and other heavy items like JIMO. Now if their going to do such stuff all with EELVs such experiance will be very nessiscary.
I think they hold alot of promis esp for deep space eninges. We really need rockets like this for mars missions as they could cut what would have been a dangerous 2.5 year mission to a 4 month round trip. Plus you would also have abort capibility,in that if something goes wrong halfway though you can turn back to earth. A chemical powered mission would have to at least go to mars and then use it gravity to help send it back to earth or even wait till mars and earth get back in to position. As for danger if it over heats it wouldn't be chernybole since the fuel is a gas and all reactions would stop if containment failed.
I think if they enough people want to keep hubble in service or atleast decfommisssion it in a safe manner,We'll need a tug of some sort. I propose modifying a progress freighter to dock with the mounting ring on hubble. Main differance the progress will have gyros and an ion drive added in place of the usual cargo. Also it will carry an extra large set of solar panels. This should extend hubble's life till JWST is ready or a truely large replacemnt can be launched on a shuttle derived booster which BTW would be lower risk then JWST with it's complexe mirror. It should be noted though Martin's hybrid OSP with the disposible epuiptment module could be used to service hubble or any other orbiting platform with a few changes to the service module heck and old apollo could rember skylab?
Accually in a way we have the tech to return to the moon.
Take a shuttle stack remove the orbiter and place the SSMEs on the ET what you get is a 100+ton launcher that will cost 300million a flight.
The frist thing before sending people would be first send permanmt orbital communication sats then send remote vehicals to explore for then to process raw materials and water ice at the poles.
Once that has been done send the first habitats and people.
With raw materials and water you have a reliable source of oxygen, food, and rocket fuel which is needed for permant colonization.
I propose a national lets use the skulls of the people at the RIAA as mugs day.
I'm supprised noone has wanted to partener with the russian and restart the MAKS program. The russians had a project for a mini shuttle that would easily fill the needs for sending crew to ISS and space tourism rides. Basicly the craft was a blended wing design that used an antov 124 cargo plane to carry it to 45,000 feet and 500mph. It then would burn fuel in a large drop tank first lox and kerosene and then switch to lox hydrogen with it's tripellant engines. The orbiter had a crew of two and could carry 9tons of cargo or an extra crew module could be carried instead in that configuration it could carry eight to ten crew members. The cargo only version of the system could launch 18tons to LEO. EU was partly founding the project but backed out of it for unkown reason maybe because it would put ariane out of bussiness. And russia was not able to afford to finsh the project and had to shelve it for the time being. Most of the technology behind it got finished such as the engines which were successfully test fired. To bad as the Russians claimed it would cut cost by a factor of 9 to 10. It would have been a truely elegant solution to todays space tranportation problems.
Accually that could be a good ideal for a fairy craft of course the new gemni would have to have a prseeurised docking setup which would make it a cross with apollo. I bet the apollo would be dirt cheap to build toowith todays technology. another good ideal would be to add an apollo modified for 6 crew mebers as the emergacy return craft
The soyuz has an exelent saftly record but can only carry 3 people and little cargo. It's well suited to be a fairy craft as thats what the present version were designed for from the outset. Now nasa can learn a few things from the russians on what to do to the shuttle one loose the hydrizene Nitrogentetraoxide RCS and use something easier and cheaper to work on like lox and kerosene. Two a cargo shuttle think shuttle stack minus the orbiter also an orbiter LEO payloads of 100+ tons can be achived. An unmanned shuttle orbiter could carry 80,000lbs. vs 60,000. Also they need to build a mini shuttle same presurised volume and thus crew size as the old shuttle but no cargo bay. Again the russians have experiance here as in 1994 they almost built a shuttle half the size of STS but would have been dirt cheap to run it was called MAKS.But their partners in europe backed out. Too bad as it had a payload of 9tons more than soyuz and would have costed $978 a pound for it to launch cargo.
Unfortunetly that all to true the longer we stay confined to one planet the less chance we have to survive as a species. As for shuttle problems the govrenment needs to set aside 10 billion to redesign the STS sytem and build new ships based on the latest technology other stuff that should be presued is a cargo only shuttle system where the orbiter is replace by a pod of SSMEs and a huge cargo module such a craft would have a lifting power equalt to the old saturn 5 rockets yet would cost the same per launch as a shuttle probley less as the shuttle's main cost is whats called touch labor or hands on spacecraft maintaince. Also they should bring back the X34 and DCX. A near term solution if money is short and prsent shuttle counldn't be made safe would be to ready the X34 and titain or delta 4 to be man rated in a crash program or bring back the old apollo capsule for a short time and use the shuttles unmanned. Soyuz is a good craft but the apollo is much larger and can be modified to carry more crew members of course this new capsule would be larger than the old one and include stuff the old apollo never had such a newer computers N2 O2 atmopshere and a proper WCS.
Accually shuttle-c could match saturn 5 and energia the verion on astronutix is a two SSME shuttle-c a three SSME version would carry almost equaly to energia or even use disposable RS68s you'll gain payload by not having to have an areoshell for the SSMEs would carry more. The best thing aboput shuttle-c is it would accually cost less than a normal shuttle launch not as much craft maintinace as an orbiter but would carrry 3 to 4 times the cargo. Also it may be possible to make some truely huge launchers using shuttle parts that would even exceed saturn 5 by a large margin. maybe use a core with 5 or 6 SSMEs two ETs and 4 SRBs and you'll have 2x saturn 5s lift capacity. Which would equal you can go to mars if you wanted. R&D for it would be alomst mothing compaired to making a heavylift booster from scatch or bringing back saturn 5 which it's self would not be too costly to do way under the 1.5 billion wasted on dead end projects. As for manning ISS I sugest make a new version of apollo that can carry 5 people they could have it built in a year it would make a good life boat and could be launched on a delta 4 . Also an apollo built with 21'st century technology would weigh much less than the 60s version yet have more room inside. The service module could use a single shuttle OMS engine so you don't even have to revamp production on the apollo SPS engine.