Well, it compromises the flight path a little. You have to burn longer and hotter, and probably decrease the lifetime of the other engines a bit. However, you get to the same orbit, which is what really matters.
Also, what causes an engine failure isn't that it wears out, but is usually a failure to ignite or some other 'gremlin.' This is the same capability that Saturn V had, and they made use of that capability (it was in the Apollo 13 movie, if you remember).
No, actually, Lockheed and Boeing exclusively offer launch services through ULA now, and ULA exclusively deals with DoD payloads.
As the article points out, commercial launches in the US have dwindled to nothing, largely due to ITAR restrictions -- its difficult to tell a customer how to interface with the LV when you have to ensure that only US citizens can see the documentation. Only because SpaceX is relatively inexpensive is it worth the hassle. The commercial launch business in the US is all but dead (Orbital does some too), so this is a big deal for the US industry as a whole and not just for the particular company.
Ultimately, this just shows that ITAR reforms need to be passed -- security theater isn't worth the decimation of US high-tech industries. SpaceX will suffer the same fate when foreign companies reduce costs to their levels.
When a scientist says "this stuff is impossible," they actually mean "given our best understanding, evidence and theories, we don't believe these things are possible."
They know that fundamental changes or misunderstandings or new discoveries can change that, it just doesn't make much sense to say that every single time. The qualifications are assumed.
Re:NASA shutting down manned exploration doesn't h
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 1
The only thing being shut down is Constellation, which has been on the books for about 6 years, and I think many people would take issue with claiming that its the most prestigious scientific program in the US.
NASA is still alive, human spaceflight is still alive -- Ares 1, which was over-priced from the beginning, over-budget on top of that, and way behind schedule, is dead.
We can and do afford a few billion - more actually. NASA's budget is $17B, and very little of that goes to aeronautics.
While it would be nice to have more money, maybe our space program needs to figure out how to use the money we have more effectively. Its a much more effective plan than hoping that politics ceases to be petty and short-sighted.
It's a common theme -- but I think its a little misguided. It occurs to me that part of the problem is that NASA thinks of Apollo-level funding as the rule rather than the exception.
Done right, we could do quite a bit with the current Human Spaceflight (HSF) budget. Given that the post-Apollo budget levels are relatively consistent, it seems that current funding level is the politically sustainable level, without external influences (i.e. Cold Wars). If there had been no space race, I can't help but think that NASA would be much better at doing impressive things on the HSF side on their more modest budget.
$17B is a pretty good chunk of change, and the fact that its been increased despite an across-the-board budget cut on other non-defense discretionary spending shows that there is some significant support for it. We (the space community) tend to think of 1% GDP as the "correct" amount that should be spent on space exploration. Maybe if we get used to the idea that what we have now is closer to normal, we'll be much better off.
Of course we could go back to the moon in 5-10 years if we wanted to -- we just need the budget. Constellation (which I believe should be shut down) was perfectly capable of getting back there, if only it were funded properly.
The research we need is in ways to do it better and cheaper, because Apollo-level funding was an apparition of the cold war and was unsustainable. Things like propellant depots, electric propulsion, radiation shields, and long term life support are what we need.
Going back to the analogy, the high-school jock is perfectly capable of doing new things, he just needs a kick in the pants to show him that he can't keep doing it the old way, because he doesn't have the youthful body (politically-expedient funding) that he used to.
No, they're saying consumers aren't going to understand that its an incomplete standard at this point, and they want it to be rock-solid, which means using a single known browswer.
Developers will realize that chrome, firefox, etc. are at different stages of implementing different things, so if something doesn't work its not that HTML 5 is bad, its just that its not quite there yet.
STS was designed with a lot of astronaut input, and it was designed so you had to have people on board -- landing gear could not be controlled automatically. Astronauts want nothing more than to keep flying, and to feel like they're pilots and not cargo. Having a spacecraft be designed by the military test-pilot variety of astronaut is often just asking for trouble.
Amusingly, John Young, the commander for STS-1 has recently said that it was foolish to be on that flight.
Running hot refers to the engine putting out more thrust than expected, not a literal higher engine temperature. My reasoning for this is based on the fact that it achieved orbit earlier than the expected cut-off time, not that the nozzle was glowing.
Considering how well they hit their orbit, and that they hit it early (engine appeared to cut-off before the official time), it had to be an on-axis roll. Otherwise they would have been wasting their thrust and would have taken longer to achieve the desired orbit.
I'd guess that it was something expected but not necessarily on purpose.
Yes, although crashing back down just means it'll burn up in the atmosphere. No risk to anyone on the ground.
Estimates for orbit lifetime are about 1 year from what I've seen. What brings them down is that there is still a tiny bit of atmosphere in low orbits, and this provides enough drag to slow things down slowly but surely.
To be fair, comparing reboot on the shuttle to this is a little unfair, since STS launched for the first time with people on board. Nonetheless, quite impressive.
As far as the liftoff occurring early -- I see it too. The stream was laggy, so that could be it, but it also seemed like the engines were running rather hot (second stage engine cutoff was early but it nailed its target orbit), so it could be that the sensors detected that it was dangerous to continue to hold it down and let go early.
NASA still has a good shot... a better shot really, with things like Falcon 9 happening.
If programs like COTS and CCDev can take the hassle of maintaining our basic LEO flight capability away from NASA, it makes it easier for them to pursue those things that are truly frontier-expanding. Think of something like the Odyssey (from 2001) built in orbit that we can get astronauts to and from (relatively) cheaply using simple capsules like Dragon or an LM Orion-lite.
Commercial space isn't in competition with NASA, its supporting it.
Two reasons: 1. The technology hasn't improved that much (there just isn't that much room to improve rocket technology) 2. The budget has been cut to a quarter of what it was in the 60s
We could probably repeat Apollo at about half of what it cost the first time, but its expensive just to operate that architecture. Constellation would have suffered the same issue -- as an Augustine commission member said, if we were given a fully usable system right now, we would still have to cancel it under the current budget constraints, because we couldn't afford to operate it.
Apollo was ideal for its time and goals. It got there quick, and it got there spectacularly, and they had money to burn due to external geopolitical factors. However, NASA thought that level of funding would go on forever and never had a good scale-back option. In order to do more than a mission to LEO under the current budget we need to rethink how an exploration system should look - small cheap manned launchers, on-orbit construction, and a focus on permanence. While these things may take longer, and be a little more expensive to build, we can do it piecemeal, and it will ultimately be far more sustainable.
Its more likely to be challenged on the grounds that many of the people of Texas feel that the state board was way out of line on this, and have already voted out a few of the members. More moderate members were elected recently, but don't take office till later in the year I believe. Because state budgets are still in trouble its unlikely printings will happen in time so theres a chance that it could be reversed.
So beyond the particulars of the proposed curriculum, the more disturbing thing is that its a complete bastardization of the will of the people. The lame ducks of the board should respect the people they are supposed to represent, but if not, we can hope that the particulars of the incident will make it easy to reverse.
Thats very possibly true (thus the appended "as we know it".) Unfortunately saying "Here are all the reasons you might be wrong" is a lot easier than determining new approaches and going out and looking, and you've got to start somewhere.
So until new evidence points us in another direction, "follow the water" is the best direction we have.
You have a complete misinterpretation of what 'commercial space' means in this case. The government is still buying the vehicles, launching missions, and deciding where to go -- NASA is in no way being dismantled. What we're doing is just changing how we pay for developing vehicles, and trying to set up a system thats less vulnerable to political disturbances.
Clearly the current way of doing HSF is failing. The only viable option to keep flying on an American vehicle right now is to keep flying the shuttle, and probably kill another 7 astronauts in a few more years. NASA/MSFC has completely failed to develop a new manned vehicle since the shuttle. This is not the fault of the workers and engineers there, but rather constant requirement changes from on high and a focus on doing fancier things rather than keeping it simple.
Doing the same things again and expecting new results is defined as insanity, and hoping that congress will become something other than a short-sighted political body is not a valid exploration plan. If you have a better plan than doing fixed price contracts with multiple vendors I'd like to hear them.
The FY2011 budget doesn't intend for Armadillo or Virgin or any suborbital company to take the lead in HSF development. For the most part that money is going to be going to the same people it was before: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and all of their various subcontractors. The big difference is in that NASA will be moving towards a system where they pay a fixed price for a service rather than using nebulous cost-plus contracts with variable accountability to build them to ever-changing requirements.
Also, Carmack knows what he's talking about when it comes to these machines -- he's hands on in the design and can spout of critical parameters like Q-star like nobodies business. While they may not be visibly as far as Virgin in manned flights, that doesn't mean they don't have a decent chance to catch up. Suborbital is "easier," so the various players can be a lot more nimble and turn-around can go a lot quicker.
Finally, over-hyping the shuttle is as big a blunder as over-hyping anything else. I can't help but feel that if we keep flying it, we'll be killing another 7 astronauts before too long. The shuttle was set to be retired 5 years ago -- unfortunately Griffin pushed for a retro-style Apollo clone that was too expensive for the budget thats politically sustainable for NASA, and thats why we're in this mess. Moving to a system that removes some of the inherent instability of politics seems like a good bet to me.
Actually, the risk is probably going to be significantly lower (after some appropriate flight testing of course). This isn't because of any free market magic pixie dust or anything like that, and is not to disparage NASA or the shuttle -- its a matter of complexity and the levels of energy required.
The amount of energy required to send a person into orbit is an order of magnitude higher than whats being considered here. Combined with simpler systems (fewer points of failure) this means that failures are less likely, and those failures are less likely to be catastrophic.
All else being equal, you're far more likely to be blown to kingdom come by an artillery shell than a.22 bullet.
Space is not orbit. If you want to stay in space for a significant period of time, you must attain an orbit, but they're not one and the same. And I'm pretty sure anyone paying serious attention to this field recognizes that a suborbital shot is significantly easier than an orbital one. At any rate, easy is relative.
Don't play semantics, you usually end up making an ass of yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Thats the track record. Every single development effort since the shuttle ended has failed. Lets try something different.
I think a more appropriate comparison is of a Model-T to contemporary Olds or Daimler. Less flashy, but more affordable.
I've never understood why people say that the shuttle is one of the most complex machines in the world like its a good thing.
What track record? NASA hasn't managed to develop a new manned spacecraft in 30 years.
Well, it compromises the flight path a little. You have to burn longer and hotter, and probably decrease the lifetime of the other engines a bit. However, you get to the same orbit, which is what really matters.
Also, what causes an engine failure isn't that it wears out, but is usually a failure to ignite or some other 'gremlin.' This is the same capability that Saturn V had, and they made use of that capability (it was in the Apollo 13 movie, if you remember).
No, actually, Lockheed and Boeing exclusively offer launch services through ULA now, and ULA exclusively deals with DoD payloads.
As the article points out, commercial launches in the US have dwindled to nothing, largely due to ITAR restrictions -- its difficult to tell a customer how to interface with the LV when you have to ensure that only US citizens can see the documentation. Only because SpaceX is relatively inexpensive is it worth the hassle. The commercial launch business in the US is all but dead (Orbital does some too), so this is a big deal for the US industry as a whole and not just for the particular company.
Ultimately, this just shows that ITAR reforms need to be passed -- security theater isn't worth the decimation of US high-tech industries. SpaceX will suffer the same fate when foreign companies reduce costs to their levels.
When a scientist says "this stuff is impossible," they actually mean "given our best understanding, evidence and theories, we don't believe these things are possible."
They know that fundamental changes or misunderstandings or new discoveries can change that, it just doesn't make much sense to say that every single time. The qualifications are assumed.
The only thing being shut down is Constellation, which has been on the books for about 6 years, and I think many people would take issue with claiming that its the most prestigious scientific program in the US.
NASA is still alive, human spaceflight is still alive -- Ares 1, which was over-priced from the beginning, over-budget on top of that, and way behind schedule, is dead.
We can and do afford a few billion - more actually. NASA's budget is $17B, and very little of that goes to aeronautics.
While it would be nice to have more money, maybe our space program needs to figure out how to use the money we have more effectively. Its a much more effective plan than hoping that politics ceases to be petty and short-sighted.
Somehow I think it will be easier to get some form of suspended animation working than to develop a functioning FTL drive.
It's a common theme -- but I think its a little misguided. It occurs to me that part of the problem is that NASA thinks of Apollo-level funding as the rule rather than the exception.
Done right, we could do quite a bit with the current Human Spaceflight (HSF) budget. Given that the post-Apollo budget levels are relatively consistent, it seems that current funding level is the politically sustainable level, without external influences (i.e. Cold Wars). If there had been no space race, I can't help but think that NASA would be much better at doing impressive things on the HSF side on their more modest budget.
$17B is a pretty good chunk of change, and the fact that its been increased despite an across-the-board budget cut on other non-defense discretionary spending shows that there is some significant support for it. We (the space community) tend to think of 1% GDP as the "correct" amount that should be spent on space exploration. Maybe if we get used to the idea that what we have now is closer to normal, we'll be much better off.
Of course we could go back to the moon in 5-10 years if we wanted to -- we just need the budget. Constellation (which I believe should be shut down) was perfectly capable of getting back there, if only it were funded properly.
The research we need is in ways to do it better and cheaper, because Apollo-level funding was an apparition of the cold war and was unsustainable. Things like propellant depots, electric propulsion, radiation shields, and long term life support are what we need.
Going back to the analogy, the high-school jock is perfectly capable of doing new things, he just needs a kick in the pants to show him that he can't keep doing it the old way, because he doesn't have the youthful body (politically-expedient funding) that he used to.
No, they're saying consumers aren't going to understand that its an incomplete standard at this point, and they want it to be rock-solid, which means using a single known browswer.
Developers will realize that chrome, firefox, etc. are at different stages of implementing different things, so if something doesn't work its not that HTML 5 is bad, its just that its not quite there yet.
STS was designed with a lot of astronaut input, and it was designed so you had to have people on board -- landing gear could not be controlled automatically. Astronauts want nothing more than to keep flying, and to feel like they're pilots and not cargo. Having a spacecraft be designed by the military test-pilot variety of astronaut is often just asking for trouble.
Amusingly, John Young, the commander for STS-1 has recently said that it was foolish to be on that flight.
Running hot refers to the engine putting out more thrust than expected, not a literal higher engine temperature. My reasoning for this is based on the fact that it achieved orbit earlier than the expected cut-off time, not that the nozzle was glowing.
Considering how well they hit their orbit, and that they hit it early (engine appeared to cut-off before the official time), it had to be an on-axis roll. Otherwise they would have been wasting their thrust and would have taken longer to achieve the desired orbit.
I'd guess that it was something expected but not necessarily on purpose.
Yes, although crashing back down just means it'll burn up in the atmosphere. No risk to anyone on the ground.
Estimates for orbit lifetime are about 1 year from what I've seen. What brings them down is that there is still a tiny bit of atmosphere in low orbits, and this provides enough drag to slow things down slowly but surely.
To be fair, comparing reboot on the shuttle to this is a little unfair, since STS launched for the first time with people on board. Nonetheless, quite impressive.
As far as the liftoff occurring early -- I see it too. The stream was laggy, so that could be it, but it also seemed like the engines were running rather hot (second stage engine cutoff was early but it nailed its target orbit), so it could be that the sensors detected that it was dangerous to continue to hold it down and let go early.
NASA still has a good shot... a better shot really, with things like Falcon 9 happening.
If programs like COTS and CCDev can take the hassle of maintaining our basic LEO flight capability away from NASA, it makes it easier for them to pursue those things that are truly frontier-expanding. Think of something like the Odyssey (from 2001) built in orbit that we can get astronauts to and from (relatively) cheaply using simple capsules like Dragon or an LM Orion-lite.
Commercial space isn't in competition with NASA, its supporting it.
Two reasons:
1. The technology hasn't improved that much (there just isn't that much room to improve rocket technology)
2. The budget has been cut to a quarter of what it was in the 60s
We could probably repeat Apollo at about half of what it cost the first time, but its expensive just to operate that architecture. Constellation would have suffered the same issue -- as an Augustine commission member said, if we were given a fully usable system right now, we would still have to cancel it under the current budget constraints, because we couldn't afford to operate it.
Apollo was ideal for its time and goals. It got there quick, and it got there spectacularly, and they had money to burn due to external geopolitical factors. However, NASA thought that level of funding would go on forever and never had a good scale-back option. In order to do more than a mission to LEO under the current budget we need to rethink how an exploration system should look - small cheap manned launchers, on-orbit construction, and a focus on permanence. While these things may take longer, and be a little more expensive to build, we can do it piecemeal, and it will ultimately be far more sustainable.
Its more likely to be challenged on the grounds that many of the people of Texas feel that the state board was way out of line on this, and have already voted out a few of the members. More moderate members were elected recently, but don't take office till later in the year I believe. Because state budgets are still in trouble its unlikely printings will happen in time so theres a chance that it could be reversed.
So beyond the particulars of the proposed curriculum, the more disturbing thing is that its a complete bastardization of the will of the people. The lame ducks of the board should respect the people they are supposed to represent, but if not, we can hope that the particulars of the incident will make it easy to reverse.
Thats very possibly true (thus the appended "as we know it".) Unfortunately saying "Here are all the reasons you might be wrong" is a lot easier than determining new approaches and going out and looking, and you've got to start somewhere.
So until new evidence points us in another direction, "follow the water" is the best direction we have.
You have a complete misinterpretation of what 'commercial space' means in this case. The government is still buying the vehicles, launching missions, and deciding where to go -- NASA is in no way being dismantled. What we're doing is just changing how we pay for developing vehicles, and trying to set up a system thats less vulnerable to political disturbances.
Clearly the current way of doing HSF is failing. The only viable option to keep flying on an American vehicle right now is to keep flying the shuttle, and probably kill another 7 astronauts in a few more years. NASA/MSFC has completely failed to develop a new manned vehicle since the shuttle. This is not the fault of the workers and engineers there, but rather constant requirement changes from on high and a focus on doing fancier things rather than keeping it simple.
Doing the same things again and expecting new results is defined as insanity, and hoping that congress will become something other than a short-sighted political body is not a valid exploration plan. If you have a better plan than doing fixed price contracts with multiple vendors I'd like to hear them.
The FY2011 budget doesn't intend for Armadillo or Virgin or any suborbital company to take the lead in HSF development. For the most part that money is going to be going to the same people it was before: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and all of their various subcontractors. The big difference is in that NASA will be moving towards a system where they pay a fixed price for a service rather than using nebulous cost-plus contracts with variable accountability to build them to ever-changing requirements.
Also, Carmack knows what he's talking about when it comes to these machines -- he's hands on in the design and can spout of critical parameters like Q-star like nobodies business. While they may not be visibly as far as Virgin in manned flights, that doesn't mean they don't have a decent chance to catch up. Suborbital is "easier," so the various players can be a lot more nimble and turn-around can go a lot quicker.
Finally, over-hyping the shuttle is as big a blunder as over-hyping anything else. I can't help but feel that if we keep flying it, we'll be killing another 7 astronauts before too long. The shuttle was set to be retired 5 years ago -- unfortunately Griffin pushed for a retro-style Apollo clone that was too expensive for the budget thats politically sustainable for NASA, and thats why we're in this mess. Moving to a system that removes some of the inherent instability of politics seems like a good bet to me.
Actually, the risk is probably going to be significantly lower (after some appropriate flight testing of course). This isn't because of any free market magic pixie dust or anything like that, and is not to disparage NASA or the shuttle -- its a matter of complexity and the levels of energy required.
The amount of energy required to send a person into orbit is an order of magnitude higher than whats being considered here. Combined with simpler systems (fewer points of failure) this means that failures are less likely, and those failures are less likely to be catastrophic.
All else being equal, you're far more likely to be blown to kingdom come by an artillery shell than a .22 bullet.
Space is not orbit. If you want to stay in space for a significant period of time, you must attain an orbit, but they're not one and the same. And I'm pretty sure anyone paying serious attention to this field recognizes that a suborbital shot is significantly easier than an orbital one. At any rate, easy is relative.
Don't play semantics, you usually end up making an ass of yourself.
- A rocket scientist