The Return of Apollo? 653
hpulley writes "Bell bottoms are back, the Stones are still touring and Time has a piece on how NASA's _new_ space vehicle may actually be the return of a very old friend, a highly modified and modernized version of the Apollo Space Capsule. Manned spacecraft might actually leave low earth orbit again! Initially they'd fly with Delta and Atlas but more powerful boosters could be developed. We could go to the Moon again, and perhaps to Mars but I'm getting ahead of myself. Does that mean the last 30 years of space flight have been for naught? Expensive steps backward?"
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last 30 years haven't been for nothing... (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA beaurocrats got real complacent and lazy, perhaps not with Challenger but definitely so with Columbia. In future, they'll be less reluctant to listen to the advice of their engineering teams and will take fewer risks with the lives of their astronauts.
The lives lost on Challenger and Columbia won't be the last but, hopefully, they won't have been lost in vain.
mars + Apollo? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Shoot 'em up, let them drop like a rock. The inherent simplicity of Apollo is its virtue, IMO. The Shuttle is more like the government bureaucratic approch to space travel, while Apollo was designed by engineers back in the good-ol-days.
What spaceflight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have we really done spaceflight in the last 30 years? Certainly nothing manned, outside of low-earth orbit which is barely space at all. Sure, we've sent tin buckets with cameras to a few more planets, but we were already pretty good at that.
Escape velocity (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a step backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Space Elevators (Score:1, Insightful)
Agreed, humans are ill-suited for space (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet the reality is that all we know about space is that it is toxic to humans. And still we don't know of any way that we might travel anywhere meaningful in the two to three hundred years we might live as purely organic creatures under the best predictions of biotech (if we could even keep from going insane that long out there).
Face it, humans as they exist now are not getting off of this rock. It is likely we will have to merge with machinery to explore space..in essence, stop being purely organic. It is likely that meaningful space travel will require tens of thousands of years of time out there. This means unmanned is the best way to go, and a hybrid model is likely in the future once you get past all the crap scifi feeds us about present day humans surviving for long periods of time (physically and mentally) in space.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
The new technology does not.
Me, I'll put my money on the most successful technology, rather than the merely most recent idiocy.
KFG
Re:Space Elevators (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only fools don't learn from failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Cramped quarters would be the least of their concerns:
Getting back into space would be impossible with anything the size of the landers we used on the Moon. Anything like the Apollo hardware would be a one-way trip.
Spending a year weightless would probably be cripling without some kind of exercise.
I've read someplace that any Mars mission craft will need some sort of shielded "safe room" to protect the crew from bursts of radiation. That room alone would have to be atleast the size of an Apollo capsule. Also, while space is nearly empty, if you do hit something the damage to the hull could be massive, necessitating some sort of internal sealed room as well.
Then, of course, there's the issue of food. A year there and back would be quite a payload on its own.
Anything like the Apollo tech would make Mars impossible. Way too small.
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, duh (Score:5, Insightful)
The Russian space industry is doing things right in a way that NASA have never managed. The Russians have focused on making spaceflight boring: so boring, in fact, that the last accident in a Soyuz capsule was in 1971. That's a safety record that makes the shuttle look a bit sick. It also helps that the cost is a tiny fraction of the shuttle; I worked out once that you for the price of a single shuttle launch, you could get the Russians to lift about four times the amount of cargo, plus people, in five seperate vehicles and still have change.
From an engineering point of view, the lesson is painfully obvious: generalisation means compromises. The shuttle is trying to be a heavylifter and a man-rated lifter and a space station and a reentry vehicle, so no wonder it sucks. Much better to focus on small, simple vehicles that do one thing very well.
The Russians have the best man-rated lifter in the world: the Soyuz. It doesn't do much, just takes people from the ground to LEO and back again, but it does it cheaply and reliably. They have the Progress, which I believe is the world's only orbital tug; it can launch, rendezvous with a vehicle, dock, undock and ditch safely, all by remote control. No-one else has anything like it. They have a whole selection of reliable heavylifters, although they are beginning to get competition in that area.
If the Russians with their, ah, mostly broken economy can do it, why are the Americans having so much trouble?
I just wish it were politically feasible for someone with money to just buy the entire Russian space industry, lock stock and barrel, and do some decent investment...
Correct - no devolution. (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that mean the last 30 years of space flight have been for naught?
Come on. Satellites. Voyager. Hubble.
The right stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
When you have a bowl of soup, do you eat it with a fork just because the fork was invented thousands of years later than the spoon?
Sometimes an older approach is the right approach for a specific job.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
As the article states, Russia has had any problems since they've been using capsules in 1971. The US never lost a space crew in a capsule. We've lost two in the shuttle.
Ever hear of the Voyager spacecrafts? They worked for 30+ years with less computing power than your average dishwasher.
To bring it up a few decades, the standard, commercial 80386 processor is more radiation tolerant than some radiation-hardened newer chips.
Old technology doesn't mean out of date.
Your multimillion dollar Boeing 777 aircraft still has windshield wipers.
It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
No, we are always putting stuff into space, and plain old rockets do that job very, very well.
If the thing took off like an airplane, then that would be different. But it doesn't.
It's almost as if they went to the drawing board asking themselves how they could make a craft that suffers from all the problems of reusable rockets while offering all new problems in re-entry.
Let's ground the damn things already.
Muito Appreciado! (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree wholeheartedly: A mars mission would be as much claptrap as our moon missions were. Pointless to any real space development.
Much better would be to start a moonbase.
Indeed, when it comes down to it, why bother sending men at all, initially? Send some radio/robotic controlled smelting factories, mining equipment, and transport equipment, and establish the base before you ever put anyone up there. Then send supplies and stock the place. Once that is all ready, then and only then send people. After that, get some real industries going, up there, such as better nanotube construction.
Meanwhile, down here on earth, start using our earthbound nanotube construction to make taller and taller launchpads [it turns out that, done right, nanotubes are about as strong compressively as in tension]. Those launchpads will amount to huge savings in rocket mass.
At some point, between the earthbound nanotube production, and space-based nanotube production, we should be able to get an actual space elevator going.
Article /.ed, But If Memory Serves (Score:5, Insightful)
This, I thought, was a great idea. After the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, the Command Module (CM) was drastically redesigned for safety and was a winning design throughout the program. It especially showed its toughness during Apollo 13. The CM was completely powered down after the accident, and, 3 days later, was restarted on its reentry batteries (with a tiny bit of juice from the Lunar Module), and no electrical shorts occurred despite the heavy condensation in the spacecraft.
The Apollo CM design is tried and true. I prefer it as a lifepod, and NASA should reconsider the viablity of a combined vehicle that launches (with an orbiter atop) like a heavy plane to high altitude, where it serves as the launcher for the orbiter, which can use conventional and disposable boosters for the return trip. I still believe that glider vehicles make more sense and provide more abort options. Consider that Columbia and her sisters still have more ways to bail or return than a typical airliner.
No aerodynamic vehicle can survive with a damaged wing, in any case, which is why a CM-style rescue vehicle and parachutes are appealing. I just don't like the use of old ballistics like the Atlas (which have a nice record of exploding). Man-rating rockets like these is a pain in the ass.
Re:Still thinking small... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry but this is probably coming from the same people who made the cost estimates on the shuttle. We don't even have the technology to do this (materials and more), and you already know the cost? The space elevator is not a bad idea, but it VERY far from a mature idea and should be treated as such.
GPS (Score:4, Insightful)
With modern technology, the capsule can tell the recovery fleet where it is.
There's one catch.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Winged spacecraft (Score:3, Insightful)
As mentioned briefly in the article, I would say that a *rocket-propelled* spacecraft with wings is a burden - it just doesn't make sense. However, if they could get something that takes off like a plane, then has a weaker rocket stage once it gets into the thinner upper atmosphere, that could be doable. Similarly, it could fly upon a very shallow re-entry, potentially preventing heat buildup, allowing it to land quite normally.
Ultimately, I think something like that is what they want, but is supposedly 20 years away.
We stood still (Score:3, Insightful)
"We" stood still. At best, we were marching in place. We got more experience in the Earth orbit matters, not space. "To boldly go where the Gemini capsule had gone before many years ago" is not any sort of advance.
Space race? (Score:2, Insightful)
This could be cool.
J
Re:What is wrong with unmanned flight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Niven's "Bottom of a Hole" (or a similar sounding title). Two men are talking, one very old man (about 150, I think; born pre-WWI) and one younger man, born after the colonization of the solar system. The age difference isn't addressed again until the end, and you've kind of forgotten it by that point.
At the end, the question of "Why explore, why seek esoteric knowledge?" comes up. The younger man asserts that entering space was not to seek esoteric knowledge, that the benefits of going into space are obvious, and lists them.
The old man counters by asking, "But did they know about all that before they went?". The younger instantly replies "Of course they did!", then remembers the other man's age, and adds, "Didn't they?"
The rest of the story was OK...not great. But that last line stuck with me.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that that comparing these stats really means anything. People die on tugboats and on cruise ships, but comparing those two numbers won't tell you which is "better". Space is dangerous. We can make it safer, but some people are going to die. It's about time we get past that.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue is not capsule vs. winged, the issue is whether or not you want to be able to accomplish a controlled, low-impact landing at a precise location. If you want to be able to re-use your spacecraft you pretty much have to be able to avoid bodies of water, large boulders, cliffs etc etc. A low-impact landing is important so that you don't break things when you land. As shown by the Shuttle, extensive refurbishment before every flight is a good way to make this too expensive. Almost as importantly, you want to be able to put down close to recovery facilities so you can get back to flying again quickly.
Now, to get such a precise landing requires mass. If you use wings, they are heavy. If you insist on a capsule then you'll either have to have a big para-wing (heavy, complex to deploy, perhaps not so reliable), or landing rockets (heavy, and definitiely complex). Either way, you pay a mass penalty.
The point I want to make is that you shouldn't be arguing over wings (at this point in the deisgn process), you should be deicing whether or not you need controlled landings.
well, duh (Score:1, Insightful)
Capsules are inherently stable ballistically. Aerodynamically speaking they must plunge through the atmosphere at the exact correct angle because of their very shape. Which is why waybackwhen, Von Braun et al chose that shape in the first place (and why the Russian TMA could land without computer guidance without coming to pieces and killing american astronauts.)
The shuttle, on the other hand, is NOT aerodynamically stable and the margin between safe reentry and horrible disaster is breathtakingly small, as we have seen. It was a noble experiment which failed, which does not mean the experiment itself was a failure.
Now if we continue to fly these things, that would be.
Re:Escape velocity (Score:3, Insightful)
The Space Shuttle would be a good case study for why the federal government is not able to take on these sorts of projects. The politics and bureaucracy destroy any optimism of the original plans.
While it might be a bit scary at first, privatization is the only practical route to space from now on.
Now if we could only convince them to stay out of matters of public schools, health care, taxation....
Re:Back to the Past? (Score:3, Insightful)
The shuttle was a good experiment, it was good to do it. However, it went on far too long.
We kept throwing good money after bad, trying to salvage something from it, and we lost the gamble. In hindsight, it was a bad choice, but at the time (the 80s, early 90s), there was good reason to think it would work and we could salvage the program. It turns out the detractors were right. Now, let's move on. Back to the drawing board. In the meantime, we need something that we know works well; and the last truly successful design was Apollo.
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only fools don't learn from failure (Score:2, Insightful)
That's why we should build a Mars vehicle in LEO, ferrying components/crew using Apollo tech. Ambition is key here - build a craft as large as we can, so it can take the large payload required and allow the crew enough room to prevent them going insane. Oh, and it would rotate to produce artificial gravity. And it would be nuclear powered too. With a ship's cat.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
But as with most things, people aren't looking at how to design a different craft to meet those requirements, they are instead saying that the requirements arn't what they'd have done. Well see - that's why they're called requirements. If you have a mission that requires something, you have to build a vehicle that does that. To do otherwise would be like saying 'well helicopters are too slow so they get shot a lot so instead of making a helicopter we made a jet'.
If you're going to debate things, at least debate within the parameters of the original requirements - not just your own desire to orbit the moon. While I would certainly argue that the shuttle and the saturn/titan programs should have been pursued in parallel, to suggest that only one of them makes sense defies reason.
Re:The Russians figured this one out years ago ... (Score:1, Insightful)
It just takes one to reset the counter, and the Russians keep banging the Soyuz' around.
To be fair, though, they haven't been as creative in finding uses for their spacecraft. The Soyuz is fine for what it does. It can do all it does, but it does all it can.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just remember that the old technology was from the mid-60's and required huge budgets and support staffs.
The 'new' technology (i.e. the space shuttle) is actually from the mid to late 70's and was constrained by a vastly reduced budget.
Also the results of the shuttle program are probably a more reliable measure of the long term safety of space flight since they've flown for a lot more missions. The Gemini and Apollo programs had a combined total of less than 30 missions, each using custom, throw away vehicles.
Reasons to have wings (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:UNFAIR COMPARSION of space capsule & space (Score:3, Insightful)
A large, reusable, interplanetary craft should be built in orbit, using the space station as a building site. This craft doesn't have to endure the rigors of takeoff and reentry, so it won't be a problem using it over and over. The only problem is getting all the parts up into orbit to build it, but we're already getting experience with that in building the ISS.
Tiny, expendable, reentry capsules can be used to ferry people back and forth from Earth's surface. Stick one on top of a rocket, send some people up to the ISS, and they'll get in their interplanetary craft and go to Mars. Some other people, who just returned from Mars, will hop in the newly-arrived capsule and drop back to the Earth. A few extra capsules could even be stacked on top of one rocket to provide some spares to be kept at the space station in case an evacuation is necessary.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the day came that I could, and the offer was made, I had to turn it down because I could bear the idea of associating myself with the shuttle.
Some of my oldest friends, we're talking from childhood here, do. None of them are especially happy about because every one of them knows they could do much better.
You seem to have missed the point here. Look, when people talk about ressurecting our rail system they don't mean that we should replace all of our modern trucks with 1950's railroad technology. They mean we should return to using rail as a concept for mass transportation of goods and people with new and up to date trains because it's a concept that works.
No one is suggesting that we return to using 1960's computers, radar, engines or space suits.
What they're suggesting is that conventional payloads on top of a conventional rocket booster is a superiour solution to getting masses into space and returning a live crew.
And they're right. Apollo never had a tile fall off, a wing fail or some Rube Goldberged solid booster glued onto the rocket explode and set off the liquid fuel in the main tank.
The only failures of Apollo systems were systems that are still necessary for the support of a live crew; and those systems are already markedly better.
So is our recovery technology. We recover the booster shells from the space shuttle. What makes you think we couldn't recover them just because they launch a capsule instead of a "plane?"
Need I really go into the expense and support staffs required just to deal with the ludicrous heat tiles after every flight?
The shuttle does many things poorer than a capsule on top of a booster can. It does nothing better than that system does. It is more complicated, less sensical. . . and fails in ways that conventional boost system can't while retaining all possible ways a conventional boost system can fail.
It's silly.
You want a reusable space plane? Fine, so do I. I remember how completely cool the X-15 was. Let's build an up to date version. I'll help. For food.
You want to put a pile of hardware into low earth orbit? Fine. Put it on the nose of a rocket and send it up. It's the right thing to do.
Each technology according to its abilities, each mission according to its technological needs.
KFG
Re:Yay! (Score:1, Insightful)
We should be looking at what we want to do right *now* and in the near term. What kind of vehicles do we need, what are the requirements to do *just* that? Cost is still a major issue, but I hope we have learned that safety is also a big issue. Losing 7 people and a billion dollar+ vehicle at a time is a hard pill to swallow...
For LEO launch returns to ISS do we need a complex 7 person craft? No!
Do we need re-usable? Not if it's more expensive!
Do we need to land on a runway like a plane? Not if it's a small vehicle that can fit on the back of a semi! Not if they are cheap enough that you can have several of them ready to go at once.
Do you need to land on a dime? A quarter? A Helipad? A football field? A dry lake bed? The salt flats? A large lake? The ocean? They are all "controlled" to some extent. What's the most inexpensive, flexible and safe way to do it?
Lastly, do we need to return payload from orbit on the same vehicle as humans? No, design a separate vehicle specifically for that. Keep the human based vehicles simple and single functioned.
Adding uneeded requirements creates complexity. That costs us in design/operational effort and increases risk. The money saved from this approach can then be better spent on making significant breakthrough's on cargo transportation.
Re:The Russians figured this one out years ago ... (Score:3, Insightful)
That IS my point. That's what 'not statistically significant means'. Please try to keep up Mr Anonymous :-)
To be fair, though, they haven't been as creative in finding uses for their spacecraft.
But I don't agree with this point in the slightest. The Ruskies have actually launched paying space tourists, they've actually turned a profit on that third seat, but I don't see the Shuttle doing that; ever. It's all a big screw up on NASA's part really.