New Moon: Planning the Return to Space

New York Times ^ | January 20, 2004 | KENNETH CHANG

[Captain Rhino]

The following is a link to the RSC Enegia website in Russia that details the company's concept for the vehicle and the mission:

http://www.energia.ru/english/energia/mars/concept.html

Energia, of course, builds the Energia rocket booster. Judging from the detail at the website, they have been working on the project for some time.

[hedgetrimmer]

We've got the Saturn V rockets and they work just fine getting things into space, including men on the moon. If they were good enough then they are still good now.

[hopespringseternal]

We've got the Saturn V rockets and they work just fine getting things into space, including men on the moon.

No, we don't have them anymore. Now, we could restart Saturn Vs with a lot of savings given that the engines are already designed, etc. But it wouldn't be trivial and a lot of things would need to be reengineered.

You could also try to make certain components reusable or go with nuclear upper stages, if you could work the politics out.

[hedgetrimmer]

A smaller team of folks likely would treat a future crew exploration vehicle as cargo and ready it at KSC's space station processing facility before being launched on commercially procured rockets, such as the Delta 4 Heavy, from neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.


On the other hand, if the idea is to retire the shuttle vehicles by modifying them to become unpiloted cargo carriers -- something many NASA officials have been hinting at for several months -- then the current shuttle team is going to stay busy for many years to come.

Continuing to fly the shuttle at that point might be a job for private industry to tackle, a topic that has been discussed time and again in recent years. Even the International Space Station eventually might be managed through a commercial contract.

http://space.com/news/bush_ksc_040113.html

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I'm so glad President Bush is in the White House setting our country back on course for exploration and technology. I think his initiative has put the spotlight on a real need. I guess Congress can sit on their royal butt and let us buy hardware from Russia and launch using Arianne but you'd think it would have dawned on them by now, that the U.S. needs to build its own capability. It's times like these Americans live for. As soon as the Presidential Commision reports back to Bush, I expect there will be a lot of ideas on the table.

A Proton booster rocket is assembled at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center in Moscow, in this Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2003 file photo. Khrunichev and other Russian space companies are counting on winning a share of the future U.S. manned missions to the moon and Mars announced by President George W. Bush. (AP Photo/Misha Japaridze)

Former Vice President Al Gore delivers a speech on Global Warming and the Environment at the Beacon Theater in New York, January 15, 2004. Gore scoffed at President George W. Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars and said Bush was a 'moral coward' for ignoring global environmental threats. Speaking at the event sponsored by political advocacy groups MoveOn.org and Environment2004, Gore said Bush's record on the environment routinely puts the wishes of the coal, oil, utility and mining industries ahead of public interests. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

[mvpel]

There's been proposals out there for "shuttle-derived" heavy-lift vehicles, using various components of the Shuttle system such as the ET, SRBs, and engines, and instead of hoisting 15,000 pounds of wings, 3,000 pounds of tail, 8,000 pounds worth of landing gear, etc, etc, etc, you could have that much more cargo.

There's also derivatives that place the main engines on the bottom of the ET and the cargo on top, with two more SRBs attached to the tank.

This website shows about 103,000 pounds worth of stuff attributable to the airplane-like components of the shuttle:

http://www.spacecoretech.org/coretech2000/Presentations/Systems/winged_vs_ballistic/Winged%20vs%20Ballistic%20Recovery%20of%20RLV.html

[mvpel]

The F-1 engine that hoisted the Saturn V was designed and built in the days before exotic ceramics and alloys, carbon-fiber composites, high-temperature superconductors, aerogel insulation, etc were available.

Designing a new expendable engine from scratch would probably be a better course than reviving the F1 and trying to bring it up to date to modern materials science.

[hopespringseternal]

Yes, as long as the design philosophy of the F1 is followed: Performance well within the design envelope for reliability and cost-effectiveness.

Some new technologies are great on a bang for the buck basis. Some are hideously expensive for marginal returns.

I say this will all deference to the problems NASA faces: One of their greatest failures is going off the deep end of diminishing returns.

An interesting tidbit: Even in the 60s, without all the advances in materials and structures, SSTO-like mass fractions were very close even in non-SSTO applications. Yet the conventional wisdom remains that SSTO is technically unfeasible.

One of the problems with the space industry is that it really is hard to do on the cheap. For small payloads, $/lb is ruinous. For really large payloads, $/lb improves dramatically, but not enough to offset the ruinous mission cost.

[mvpel]

Let's keep our fingers crossed for Burt Rutan and SpaceShip One for the small payloads.

[Brett66]

Is anyone aware of what components will be reusable. CEV, Lunar Lander etc.? Or will it all be disposables?