Posted on 08/02/2005 8:56:13 AM PDT by jbstrick
For its next generation of space vehicles, NASA has decided to abandon the design principles that went into the aging space shuttle, agency officials and private experts say.
Instead, they say, the new vehicles will rearrange the shuttle's components into a safer, more powerful family of traditional rockets...
..."As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."...
...A main advantage, supporters say, is that the big rocket could lift five or six times as much cargo as the shuttle (roughly 100 tons versus 20 tons), making it the world's most powerful space vehicle. In theory, it would be strong enough to haul into orbit whole spaceships destined for the Moon, Mars and beyond....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Actually, the SRBs do look useful from the standpoint of being "off-the shelf" and our clearly not having $20-30 billion to start over. Perhaps we won't get to some ideal per-launch cost in a bean-counter's imagination, but it wil be good, reliable, comparatively cheaper than current operations by, in round numbers, a billion or so and get us an alternate space-lift capacity pretty darn quickly.
And as for the Heavy-Lift variant, we certainly have a chance of reducing the cost by redesigning the SRBs to be throw-aways, as will be the rest of the booster, ET, and Disposable Orbiter. Not being man-rated will drastically lower all the costs of the HLV.
Without a serious sea-change in launch costs, manned space simply has no point. If all we can ever foresee being able to afford is a couple of dozen people in space at once, then every manned space idea and endeavor should be ended and the money put to much better use.
Really, though, we have the technology to lower launch costs by a factor of 100 or so right now. We don't do it because NASA can't imagine what it would do with the extra capacity and money.
No, not having to bring the shuttle itself back in one piece will just change the cost per pound ratio very much in the right direction. But the mission cost is still high enough to make it an academic exercise. Plus it pushes us in the wrong direction as far as developing sustainable infrastructure.
>> ...I'd like to see the scenarios...
http://www.safesimplesoon.com/assets/documents/Reliability+CrewSafety.pdf
How dare you inject real data into the underinformed
speculation here :-)
Thanks for the link.
The big thing was his relation to Rickover. I never actually met Rickover, but I was minutes away several times. He used to come down in the submarines we were building for the Navy. I have heard some stories; he was a tough customer, something like General Patton in some ways. If Rickover thought Carter was worth something, that was a big plus. I even read Carter's book. But I just couldn't quite bring myself to vote for him.
We get the crews up on the scramjet, & meet the "Cargo" in orbit.
Doc
BFLR = bump for later reading
"Probably the "Best Way" is a Hypersonic "RAMJET/SCRAMJET"
I think the scramjet is at least a decade away.
The X-33 was X'ed out.
What happened to the all in one using a scamjet?
That was just a scam...
Read remianing comments later?
SpaceflightNow.com:
Probe whips past Earth on long voyage to Mercury
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: August 2, 2005
Earth's first extended visit to the planet Mercury is now one step closer to success after the MESSENGER probe celebrated its birthday one day early on Tuesday with a speedy flyby of its home planet to tweak its course for arrival in orbit in 2011.
MESSENGER made its closest approach to terra firma at 1913 GMT (3:13 p.m. EDT) as it flew 1,458 miles over central Mongolia near the capital of Ulaanbaatar.
In an effort to reduce the amount of propellant MESSENGER had to carry during its launch, engineers designed the mission to include a series of six gravity assist maneuvers past Earth, Venus, and Mercury. These flybys can utilize the force of gravity to alter the future trajectory of the spacecraft, allowing it to swing from planet to planet before eventually entering orbit around Mercury.
"One flyby down, five more to go," said Mark Holdridge, mission operations manager for MESSENGER at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "Now the mission begins."
Me too. And where's my VTOL jet car that was supposed to be right around the corner?
I don't think that even mag-lev rail launches off the side of the Rockies quite gets us down to under a million per launch. Amortizing the infrastructure, and re-proofing the man-rating of the space vehicle itself will chew up more than that. Sorry, your math just doesn't add up.
Cool, RW! I din't realise that we just had a flyby.
And wasn't that terrific what Steve & company did yesterday? I was glued to my moniter! NASA did good.
I just noticed my spelling needs some tweeking on above post. Whoops.
The problem isn't technology, and people dreaming up magical technology to throw at the problem simply show that they don't understand it.
The problem is economic. NASA has an extremely limited notion of what they want to do and what is possible because they don't understand markets. They spent thirty years chasing those nasty capitalists out of their territory before they finally started to get a glimmer of an understanding that they were limiting themselves as much as anyone else.
Space needs economies of scale and it will never get that from NASA.
You have lighted upon an eternal truth.
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