NASA's Shuttle Plans 549
Gerhardius noted a NYT article (you know the obnoxious deal) about new "shuttle" designs coming out of NASA. The payloads are riding up top to avoid debris.
The major difference between bonds and bond traders is that the bonds will eventually mature.
Kind of sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kind of sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing you can possibly gain is simplicity for a reusable vehicle. That way, when it lands, you can just perform a checkout and refill the tanks, and you are ready to go for another launch.
But having a unified launch/CEV is a dumb idea as well for similar reasons to that of having a single stage to orbit launch vehicle.
Now this is all for chemical rockets, some day SSTO with anti-matter propulsion or something might be perfectly fine. But while we're still taking fuel and oxidizer, and combusting them together, staging is the way to go.
Re:Delta Clipper (Score:2, Insightful)
KISS (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea of a runway landing orbital vehicle is nice and, IMHO a great goal. But it turns out to be harder than originally thought. The vertical, rocket assisted capsule design seems to be good compromise for the short term (5 to 10 years).
In the medium term (say 10 - 15 years), advances by companies like Scaled Composites (http://www.scaled.com/ [scaled.com]) show that runway-to-orbit-to-runway is possible, but needs more work. Eventually that's how we'll get to orbit; using small, "space planes" to take humans to meet with low earth orbiting platforms that were launched with BDRs. We're good at putting together stuff in orbit and we're good at rendezvous and docking.
None of this is new. It's based on concepts from the Apollo days. Remember Earth-orbit-rendezvous? Heck, the Russians have never left the basic capsule design.
Keep It Simple (Stupid) is especially important for manned space flight. It'll never be safe, and the American public has to accept that there is risk, but the less complicated it is the less chance of something going wrong. And the cheaper it will be
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because fuel is dirt-cheap, at least by the standards of spaceflight costs.
What costs is high maintenance and long turn-around times... if you want cheap access to space, you want fully reusable, low-stressed, low-maintenance spacecraft which can operate like airliners (or, at least, like DC-3s).
If carrying a ton of extra weight will give you that, then you carry a ton of extra weight and burn another dozen tons of kerosene on each flight. Kerosene is cheap, overhauling engines, assembling shuttle/ET/SRBs, fixing heat-shield tiles and all the other junk NASA do costs a lot.
Re:Delta Clipper (Score:2, Insightful)
Those are important only if your goal is something arcane like, say, improving access to space.
For many in this thread, the goal is (1) NASA bashing and (2) celebrating the cult of What Might Have Been, of the Road Not Taken, and of My Powerpoint Works Better Than Your Hardware.
We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast of "How I Would Have Avoided All the Obvious Mistakes the Dumb STS Designers Made." (copyright 1981-2005, Hindsight Media Inc.)
Re:Delta Clipper (Score:3, Insightful)
Well maybe that is it, but it could also be called the process of good engineering. Good engineering usually involved thowing ideas out there, proposing new and different ways of doing things, and then tearing apart the ideas on paper before they get torn apart at high altitudes and velocities.
I'm sure NASA does do a lot of this engineering process but within the U.S. they have suffered for far to long from having no competition and no accountability. Their process seems to come down to one fiefdom of bureaucrats and contractors eventually shoving through their approach whether it was a good one or not. Using 20/20 hindsight the Shuttle and the ISS were bad and expensive ones and have cost the U.S. dearly in lost opportunity cost. Those are 2 strikes in a row. One more and they are probably out.
It is a totally great thing to have Scaled Composite, Blue Origin, Armadillo, SpaceX, and Sealaunch try new things and give the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed hegemony a little competition. Only problem is the hegemony has relatively vast amounts of money to spend and no need to turn a profit. Manned space operations so far are still very expensive and have a dubious return on investment. Its tough sledding for private enterprise. Which is why launching satellites is doing a lot better in the private sector, less investment, better return. Maybe space tourism or something will tip the scales but that is thrill seeking by the rich, and not anything of actual economic value.
Only project I've EVER been able to see justifying much manned presence in space is putting a permanent colony on Mars, and start aggressive terraforming and resource exploitation there so we have another biosphere in case something bad happens to this one. That is going to be really expensive and the ROI is way out there.
Re:Delta Clipper (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreement abounds.
I could bash NASA with the best of them, but in fact I don't think it's more (or less) dysfunctional than other agencies. Specifically, where hardware development and procurement is concerned, for better and worse it looks a lot like (surprise!) DoD.
At the root of a lot of the bashing, I think, is simple frustration at what people perceive as slow progress by comparison with the Apollo years. I think that's because
(1) space is hard and expensive... no matter who pays for it
(2) making space activity frequent, sustainable and affordable is a lot harder than a sprint (or seven) to the Moon... no matter who pays for it
(3) we want space real bad.
For some people, especially