Posted on 01/20/2006 4:48:00 PM PST by KevinDavis
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Project Constellation program has been overhauled to include a slightly smaller Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and a new human-rated booster with an Apollo-era upper stage engine.
Project Constellation is the name NASA has given for the effort to develop hardware necessary to replace the space shuttle and return astronauts to the Moon late next decade.
NASA still intends to make use of the solid-rocket booster technology that has helped lift the space shuttle off the pad for a quarter century. But the agency recently approved CEV launcher plans calling for development of a new five-segment solid-rocket booster instead of the four-segment motor currently in production.
NASA also has dropped plans to power the so-called Crew Launch Vehicle’s upper stage with a Space Shuttle Main Engine modified to start in flight, opting instead to go with an updated version of the J-2 engine that was used on NASA’s Saturn 5 rocket.
Project Constellation Manager Jeffrey Hanley briefed engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., on these and other changes Wednesday, according to individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the changes had not yet been officially announced.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
The J-2 is a good engine, but look for NASA critics to hype the two J-2 failures (due not to the J-2 engines but to the spacecraft's empty cavities being unfilled with inert gas) on Apollo 6. Many critics are shallow enough to say that a failure is a failure.
Apollo 6 is only forgotten because it flew (and made 3 orbits) on the day that MLK was assasinated.
For trivia: one of Apollo 6's two cameras (air dropped into an ocean) was never recovered.
SecDef Cheney did require the F14 tooling destroyed. Now that was a stroke of genius. Clinton couldn't let that stuff be
sold to foreign adversaries for campaign/library contributions....
The S-1 booster highly refined kerosene and oxygen giving it roughly 2/3 the ISP of the STS's LH/O2. BUT...imagine rebuilding the S-1 booster using LH and O2? Would probably throw 500 tons into space...8-).The hydrogen tank(s) would be too bulky, and the sheer quantity needed would make the main booster too difficult to fuel up before launch. This is also of interest...
SSTO delta-V and dense fuels"A steeper mass line means that at any time after liftoff, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO has lower mass than the LOX/LH2 one, and since they have the same thrust... the H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster. If they have the same total delta-V requirement, that last assumption must be wrong: the H2O2/kerosene burn time is shorter.
by Henry Spencer
"But... the biggest penalty on top of the theoretical delta-V is gravity losses, and gravity losses are a function of burn time! The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster, so it has lower gravity losses, and needs less total delta-V. Moreover, that makes its burn time still shorter, and its mass line still steeper, so the difference in acceleration is even larger than it first seems...
"The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is operating in a very steep part of the mass-ratio curve. A 6% saving in delta-V is *not* trivial. For engines with a vacuum Isp of 320, the required mass ratio drops from 20 to 16. Given the aforementioned sophisticated scaling models, at this mass ratio, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO's payload at the same GLOM is now equal to that of the LOX/LH2 design."
I don't buy that for a second.
Check out what Rutan and friends are up to now:
http://www.virgingalactic.com/en/
Hydrogen Peroxide Detected in Mars' AtmosphereWhat impact does this result have for the search for life on Mars? Dr Clancy says "Hydrogen peroxide is actually used as an antiseptic here on Earth, and so it would tend to retard any biological activity on the surface on Mars. For this reason, as well as the ultraviolet radiation and lack of water, bacteria-like organisms are not expected to be viable on the surface. Most arguments for finding life on Mars now center on subsurface regions."
University of Hawaii
Monday, March 1, 2004Static Test of Hydrogen Peroxide Kerosene Motor"Our present plan for the coming year is to develop an 8'' diameter 500 lb/sec throttleable regeneratively cooled motor. The performance of the H2O2/kerosene motors is not trivial producing the highest density impulse of any usable oxidizer/fuel combination. We hope this report will encourage further development among amateur rocket designers."
by Robert Compton
Don't buy what?
Virgin Galactic - the most exciting development in the story of modern space history - is planning to make it possible for almost anyone to visit the final frontier at an affordable price.That's a joke.
That Johnson had the tech suppressed for the SR 71.
The B1, B2 and F117 is proof of that, not to mention the F22 and the F31.
And that's just the stuff we know about! Skunk works moved on from the SR71 quite nicely.
Sorry, F35- not F31.
They're taking it pretty seriously for a joke.
There was a proposal for a Mach-3 craft to be developed from the SR-71 design, I think for a bomber, but I'm not sure; LBJ really, really didn't want that to happen, probably because he figured that the design would be stolen by spies and traitors and lead to the USSR's building a kajillion of them while the US was squandering lives and treasure on Johnson's war.
Virgin Galactic - the most exciting development in the story of modern space history - is planning to make it possible for almost anyone to visit the final frontier at an affordable price.The "affordable price" is $200,000 -- and that is not for "almost anyone". That is a joke. The customer list will eventually include some showbiz types who will fly after a few industrialist millionaires have sought their thrills and returned alive. 99 per cent plus do not have that kind of money to spend on a glorified amusement park ride. Rutan is a genius (and DARPA dollars helped him develop his genius), but he hasn't shown that he can build an orbiter, or even scale up the design to hold a handful of passengers.
Well, there was the B58, and the XB70 too. The XB70, in particular, was a promising candidate. The Soviets could have stolen those ideas just as easily, but they didn't have the money to build and sustain it either.
I don't know- that story sounds like urban legend to me.
"The United States of America has just made history by launching the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond," says Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "No other nation has this capability. This is the kind of exploration that forefathers, like Lewis and Clark 200 years ago this year, made a trademark of our nation."
spaceflightnow.com
That's almost a good tagline!
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