Posted on 08/12/2006 5:27:28 AM PDT by Paul Ross
Old rocket science tied to today's at Marshall
Thursday, August 10, 2006
KENT FAULK, News staff writer
HUNTSVILLE - NASA engineers are going old-school with a new twist as they design rockets to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually give them a boost toward Mars.
Marshall Space Flight Center engineers have enlisted the help of retired rocket scientists, dug through archives and taken parts off museum pieces as they look toward mixing Apollo and space shuttle technology with later innovations into the Ares I and Ares II rockets.
"We're marrying the best of historical knowledge and understanding with the best of today's tools and computing power," said Don Krupp, chief of the vehicle analysis branch at Marshall.
About 540 people at Marshall, where NASA built the engines that first lifted Americans into space, are working on development of Ares I and Ares II under the Constellation Program. Their goal is to return people to the moon and prepare for future missions to Mars. That number will steadily grow, NASA officials said.
NASA hopes to have the Ares I rocket ready by 2014 to take capsules containing up to six astronauts to the International Space Station. By 2020, the Ares I rocket is expected to launch four astronauts into orbit for a trip to the moon. The astronauts will dock in orbit with a lunar lander and other equipment boosted into space by the larger and more powerful Ares V.
The Ares I and Ares V will use updated parts from the Saturn V rockets that shot men to the moon nearly 40 years ago. They also will use updated parts from space shuttles, which are scheduled to be retired in 2010, and some new hardware and manufacturing and welding techniques.
Marshall developed the Saturn V and space shuttle rockets.
The lower, or first stage, of the Ares I will be a juiced-up version of the reusable solid-fuel rocket boosters made by ATK Thiokol for space shuttle launches. The second stage will be powered by a Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne J-2X engine fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. It's an updated version of the J-2 engines used on Saturn V's upper stages.
NASA plans to award a contract in about 30 days for development of the capsule astronauts will ride into space.
Ares V will be powered by two reusable solid-fuel rocket boosters mated to the sides of a taller two-stage rocket. The first stage of the central rocket will be powered by five Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne RS-68 engines, the same type used for Boeing Delta IV rockets built in Decatur. The upper stage that gives the final boost to put up to 290,000 pounds of cargo into low Earth orbit also will be powered by the J-2X engine.
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne announced Tuesday that it will add 200 to its current 85-member work force in Huntsville by next August because of the engine development for Ares.
Building the J-2X is the biggest challenge in meeting the 2014 deadline to send astronauts to the space station on Ares I, NASA engineers told reporters last week.
J-2's `graybeards'
Jim Snoddy, the J-2X project manager at Marshall, said the first thing he did was gather 28 of the "graybeards" who designed and built the J-2 engine for the Saturn rockets. "We laid out our design and got those guys to come in and say what we're doing wrong," he said.
"You've got to go back and talk to your forefathers," Snoddy said. "We may think we know it all, but we don't know half of what they know. ... Those guys have a lot of wisdom."
Engineers continue to meet with the older scientists, many of whom still live in Alabama and California, Snoddy said. Two have been hired by NASA, and two others are with Pratt & Whitney, he said.
Marshall engineers also got out old drawings of the J-2 engine from NASA archives, Snoddy said, and pulled pumps, valves and other hardware off old engines in storage.
Marshall engineers recently removed parts from a Saturn I rocket on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, said Al Whitaker, spokesman for that museum. "We've had folks from NASA and subcontractors looking at the old Saturn V (display) ... and in the archives over the course of the last year and a half or so," he said.
Marshall has performed about 650 of the 1,300 wind tunnel tests done so far at NASA centers around the country on small-scale stainless steel and aluminum models of Ares. An 18-inch model was tested last week at the 50-year-old facility, simulating wind the Ares I rocket would experience at more than three times the speed of sound.
Ares safer than shuttle
At Marshall's Test Stand 116, built during the Apollo era, J-2X engineers also are test-firing a small-scale version of the fuel injection system for that engine. The tests are designed to tell engineers what kind of fuel mileage to expect with the full-scale engine.
"I've got to build a dump truck that has the gas mileage of a Yugo and runs like a Ferrari," Snoddy said.
Updating proven designs, including the J-2 engine and the space shuttle boosters, gives engineers more confidence the rockets will be reliable. But don't get them wrong, engineers say: The Ares I and Ares V will be different.
Ares I and Ares V are being designed so they can fly in all types of weather, which the shuttle can't do, NASA engineers said. Ares I will be 10 times safer for astronauts than the space shuttle, primarily because it will have a capsule abort system, engineers said.
Ares V will lift more cargo and fuel into space than the Saturn V. More equipment and fuel will give NASA the ability to put four - instead of two - astronauts on the moon, allow them to stay longer and land anywhere on the moon, NASA engineers said.
Apollo missions were tied to landing on the moon's equator.
Ares V will have 10.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff - about 3 million pounds more than a Saturn V, said Scott "Doc" Horowitz, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.
Growing up, Horowitz said, he lived 10 miles from the Kennedy Space Center and witnessed the launch of the Huntsville-designed Saturn V rockets. "I can't wait to watch Ares V," he said.
Blow the forward port. Thrust falls to zero quickly.
Hoagland?
I didn't know that about the pop-top on the SRBs. Never thought about it, but it sure would need a solution, wouldn't it!
is it just me or is it odd that the SRB joints have an upright "U" for the joint so when the solid propellent passes by the joint, it is burning DOWN INTO THE JOINT where as if the "U" were UP-SIDE-DOWN... as the propellent burns it's way past the joint, the O-Ring is untouched.
Part of the weather issues with Shuttle are related to the fact that for some launch abort modes it has to be able to return to KSC for a landing.
There are also some structural issues related to high-altitude wind shears.
Finally, post-Challenger there were a lot of temperature-related constraints added to preculude the sorts of low-temperature effects that led to the O-ring failures.
Of all of these, I think the first (landing weather) is the primary constraint.
Not true. You just have to size the escape rockets to outrun the booster.
Not true. The Saturn V can't be rebuilt, however -- it would be like trying to build a new '47 Chevy from a set of plans. The problem is that nobody makes things like '50s-era electronics or alloys anymore, and fabrication processes have changed tremendously.
Mr. Hoblein is FOS. The "missing" information is television moon footage that was collected from telemetry and stored on tape. The problem is simply this: NASA has many millions of big, circular data tapes. These tapes are undoubtedly in storage somewhere -- but since nobody has wanted for them in 30 years, they got lost.
The link above opens a PDF document from the "Kline for Congress" website ...
http://www.klineforcongress.com/Bailey_DirtyTricks.pdf
???
Guys, I live in Huntsville. Duh, this is rocket city USA. Where do you want to go? The moon? Mars? Beyond? We will put you there. It has been our pride for many many years. I am not saying it will be cheap, but we deliver.
BTW, this is only good for like 7 days from the publishing.
Thanks :)
The plans for the Saturn V still exist but the ability to build it no longer exists although with enough time and resources, we could modernize the design and build them again.
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