Posted on 09/07/2003 8:23:14 AM PDT by mikegi
NASA has seen the future, and it is the space capsule. Seven months after the Columbia debacle the agency is giving serious consideration to bringing back a new version of the Apollo capsule, the expendable spacecraft that served the U.S. space program during its glory days in the 1960s through the mid-1970s. Supporters say they are not retreating into the past so much as waking up, at last, to the dangers of attempting spaceflight with winged shuttles, a notion given ample support by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report released last week. Boosters on Capital Hill, in the aerospace industry and even inside the astronaut corps point out the capsule has is a more versatile design: it is modular and can be outfitted to the specific needs of any mission. And unlike the shuttle, it can venture beyond low Earth orbit, which means the U.S. could once again send astronauts to the moon.
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(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Ignorance must be bliss
you are so wrong that I don't know where to start. Please name one robotic explorer that has been repaired in flight after a failure? Not coming up with any? That's because there are none. Now, let's start talking about manned missions that have been saved by MEN on the scene. Apollo 13 is a good one that most people remember, now that Tom Hanks made a movie (not many did before that, sad to say). Skylab, Gemini 8, Hubble and many others. The man in the loop makes all the difference in more cases than not. If everything is perfect then remote instruments are fine. How often does that happen?
Robot craft have their value, but they can't do what men (that includes women) can do.
Oh, and it is my money, so please refrain from throwing in your two cents, or sheckels, or whatever. We "stupid Americans" seem to have done fairly well, compared to every other nation on Earth. We must have something on the ball.
If Isabella had to build the living quarters for everyone living in North America, import even the air that Columbus breathed, and retrieve nothing of economic value in return, then yeah, she might have found a better use for a few hundred billion gold pieces.
Not to mention the sheer joy of discovery and adding to the total of mankind’s knowledge.
I'm all for a real manned space program with real exploration but it's not going to happen until we park all the shuttles in museums and put the savings into something more exploration-oriented.
Ah, a brilliant piece of ignorance. Go and read any "long-term occupation" scenario for either the Moon or Mars to see just how wrong you are. Here's a hint--all involve "bootstrap" approaches, but eventually the resources for expansion come from the occupied bodies themselves. The KEY to "bootstrapping" is the availability of WATER, which has been found to be present in sufficient quantity on both Moon and Mars.
No, the problem is that NASA was not allowed to build the correct design for shuttle due to budget cuts. There is nothing wrong with the concept of reusable spacecraft--the problem is that NASA was never allowed to actually build one.
As just one example that I recall--the NASA engineers wanted to build the shuttle airframe with titanium, but back in those days, titanium was exotic, expensive, and difficult to fabricate and, because of the budget cuts, they couldn't use it. In the intervening time, technology has dropped the price and increased the ease of manufacture so much that today we even make GOLF CLUBS out of the stuff.
I probably owe an apology to one and all. I've just been told that my corneal transplant is probably rejecting and I have to up my steroids to once an hour (Oh fun). I needed someone to vent on. This topic is one near and dear to my heart. The two circumstances combined to overwhelm my usual impeccable tact (also (g)).
However, we will ride that fire in the sky again. We're going back, come hell or high water.
http://gessaman.com/history/2003/02/fire_in_the_sky/
I have worked with the space program for close to 20 years and in many ways I agree with you on this one.
I can live with that.
"Would a return to expendable capsules be safer and cheaper than the existing shuttle fleet? I think so."
Given that a "return to expendable capsules" would STILL have to start all over again from zero (I'm sure all the parts, production equipment, personnel, etc. have all long-ago been phased out and "surplussed") I doubt that it would be cheaper. Safer, maybe???
Far better to go with "Shuttle II"--a CORRECTLY designed fully reusable earth-to-LEO system. Build the orbiter out of titanium this time. Make the booster stage "flyably" recoverable as planned (but not built) for the original shuttle. Scrap the damned SRB (solid rocket boosters). Just using TODAY's off-the-shelf technology would result in a better design. Heck, you could probably replace all of Shuttle's computers with two or three "laptop equivalents".
I have been reading NASA tech briefs for twenty years and it has become a pathetic journal of reruns and commerical advertising. There is very little left of NASA that would qualify as inovation, I am afraid. NASA is all about pork, diveristy fellowships, and bureacratic CYA anymore.
As far as the capsule concept, I think it is a great idea. Technology has progressed a long way since the days of phenolic ablative heat sheilds. The Russians still use capsules and they work, which is more than can be said for the shuttle. Liquid engines are a good idea too, as long as they aren't LOX-Hydrogen boondoggles. They should bring the capsule concept back. The question of the day is:
Is NASA still capable of engineering a capsule type mission without turning it into another ISS or shuttle ?
I don't have a quick answer. Most of my work was either on Space Station or interplanetary spacecraft.
Who needs to repair a failure? You abandon it. What you do is send up lots of robotic explorers instead of one dinky little crew of wannabe celebrity pilots. 'Cause one crew lost amounts to years of fruitless agonizing debriefings.
We lost five just looking for Columbia junk. (Helicopter crash in Texas.) If that flight had been unmanned, there wouldn't have been the need for an intensive, media-driven investigation.
The celebrity pilots serve only one purpose--as a vicarious object of fantasy for the wannabes. What a waste--
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