NASA Shuttle Replacement's Problems Are Worsening 344
ausoleil noted that NASA's replacement for the shuttle, the Orion, is slipping behind schedule "'We're probably going to have to move our target date,' NASA exploration chief Doug Cooke told The Associated Press on Wednesday after Nasawatch.com posted the 117-page internal status report (PDF) on the moon program. The cost problems include an $80 million overrun on a motor system. The Orion spacecraft's design remains too heavy for the proposed Ares 1 rocket. Software development, heat shield testing and other complex work remain behind schedule or over budget. There are dozens of such serious challenges, many of which are 'worsening.'"
Shocker!!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
News would be if they were under budget and finished a year early.
Re:yeah, that's right. i'm not a rocket scientist (Score:5, Informative)
but i'll play one on slashdot and come up with all kinds of rubber band and duct tape solutions
You mean like the ones that saved Apollo 13 [wikipedia.org]? IIRC the solution to the problem of running out of breathable air involved rubber bands and duct tape.
Re:yeah, that's right. i'm not a rocket scientist (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Did we really make it to the moon? - Can't (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Did we really make it to the moon? (Score:2, Informative)
40 years later we can barely make it out of Earth's atmosphere. Just use the equipment from the Apollo program...problem solved.
Not only does NASA not have the Apollo equipment, they don't even have the plans anymore! It was all stored in some humid Florida closet, and is unreadable today. All the design, right down to the wind tunnel testing, would have to be redone.
Re:I'm outraged? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that's sucks I guess. But since NASA has something like a $17 billion budget, isn't that a colossal non-issue? I realize this was just the motor system, but if I had a $40,000 budget to furnish a new home, I don't think I would be concerned if the coffee table was $20 more than I was expecting.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"NASA's current FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget."
I'll let the reader come to his own conclusions about US priorities. Without linking to the DoD budget.
Re:Just wait (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're confusing Ares I [wikipedia.org] and Ares V [wikipedia.org]. Ares I isn't all that big. It's a single stack of capsule -> fuel tank -> stage 2 engine -> stage 1 solid rocket booster. If anything, it's quite a bit thinner than most rockets. However, it does make up for this by towering a massive 94m high. Which does mean a few upgrades to the scaffolding.
The Ares V, however, she's gonna be a beasty. With six (!) main engines, two outboard Solid Rocket Boosters, a plump width of 10m on the central stack, and a towering 116m tall, she's going to put every other rocket to shame. Personally, I can't wait. ;-)
Re:Fortunately for NASA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fortunately for NASA (Score:5, Informative)
The post office is, roughly, a crown corporation. It operates under a government mandate and follows some special rules regarding taxes, but it has been self funded for quite a long time now.
Re:Why the Ares I? -- Uhh, payload? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you look at how much payload each rocket can take to orbit before you made this post? Look at the payload capacity to GTO (not LEO)
Let me list the estimated maximum payloads since you did not:
Delta IV: 20,000 pounds or so
Atlas V: 18,000 pounds or so
SpaceX Falcon 9: 27,000 pounds or so
Ares I: 50,000 pounds or so
See the difference? Ares I is also rated for man-flight, which just makes everything much more complicated.
The article is from a florida newspaper. Of course florida newspapers are going to print doom stories because they don't want to lose Shuttle business. Losing business happens.
Re:Did we really make it to the moon? (Score:4, Informative)
err, the S-1C was a Kerosene/LOX burner, and the upper stages were hydrogen/LOX. The Titan, which was obviously not part of Apollo, used some really toxic hypergolic fuels, but Apollo was relatively clean. I'm sure the spacecraft itself had plenty of toxic crap in it, but the booster was relatively safe.
Re:I'm outraged? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just wait (Score:5, Informative)
The Ares V will even put the Sat V to shame.
The Ares V is going to be the large booster we SHOULD have built after the Saturn V. It's late, but it's finally coming. :-)
Re:Gap? (Score:3, Informative)
Had Shuttle flown as scheduled Skylab would still have eventually re-entered - the purpose of the reboost flight(s) was to control, not prevent, reentry.
Re:What has happened to us? (Score:5, Informative)
The resource on the moon is the isotope He3. It might be useful for certain fusion scenarios. However, investing $billions now would be putting the cart before the horse.
We don't know if *any* kind of hot or cold fusion will be feasible with any fuel. IIRC, He3 will be harder to fuse (but less radioactive) than the usual D/T combination. OTOH, there are other more abundant fuels, harder to fuse than He3, which would also have low radioactivity. We'll have to see which, if any, fusion reactors end up as workable possibilities.
The He3 is in trace quantities distributed across the surface of the moon. Mining it would require gathering moon dirt in quantities comparable to the amount of coal mined here on earth, then distilling a few tons of He3 annually from these countless megatons of dust. This doesn't seem economical with any foreseeable space technology.
The huge amounts of money it would take to develop this moon fuel capability would probably be better spent on fusion cycles that don't need He3, or other energy technologies altogether.
Re:Gap? (Score:3, Informative)
This is incorrect. Missions were planned to service Skylab using the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle was simply not available in time, the funding didn't materialize for an automated boost, and Skylab's orbit degraded faster than expected. NASA would have been much happier continuing to run and expand Skylab than build the International Space Station.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#End_of_Skylab [wikipedia.org]
Re:Inefficiency (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fortunately for NASA (Score:2, Informative)
Looking around, it looks like you are correct, but it also looks like it is still better than 90% self funded, which isn't enormously terrible.
Re:I am a Rocket Scientist (Score:5, Informative)
If they're serious about replacing the shuttle with only a couple years of downtime, they should already be gearing up to test the system as a whole. I'm not personally involved in the project, but it doesn't even look like they're ready to test big pieces yet. Maybe 2020 is a more reasonable date to actually begin flights.
Disclaimer: I'm a NASA employee at Stennis Space Center, programmer not rocket scientist. The first round of testing on the powerpacks for the new J-2X engines was last month, second round is scheduled for early 2009. That's not the fully assembled engine assemblies, but it's progress.
Re:Just wait (Score:2, Informative)
Um, you just described the Ares program.
Ares V - unmanned rocket with huge lift capability.
Ares I - manned rocket designed to be extremely safe and get a manned capsule to LEO, period.
Plans for a moon shot involve using Ares V to launch the hardware, Ares I to launch the people, and a rendezvous in orbit before proceeding to the moon. Read all about it. [nasa.gov]
Re:Just wait (Score:4, Informative)
Annnnddd the thread comes full circle. You just confused Ares I and Ares V.
Ares I - Small, man rated rocket
Ares V - Heavy cargo rocket that is NOT man-rated
The profile for a moon launch requires two separate launches. The first is an Ares V launch to place the necessary equipment (e.g. Altair Lander) and boosters (Earth Departure Stage) into orbit. The Ares I rocket would then launch the Orion capsule carrying the crew. The capsule would dock with the cargo launched by the Ares V, then use the Earth Departure Stage to make a Trans-Lunar Injection burn.
As a result, the figures for the Ares V TLI burn are a bit misleading. The Ares V will be unlikely to send cargo directly to the moon. At least at first. Such capability might be used later on in support of a base or colony.
More information on the Constellation Project can be found at the usual sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Constellation [wikipedia.org]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index.html [nasa.gov]
Re:yeah, that's right. i'm not a rocket scientist (Score:3, Informative)
We've used 100MPH tape more than once in space [wikipedia.org]. In the Army we had a variant we call missile tape which we used to cover the leading edges of the missiles elevons.
Re:Fortunately for NASA (Score:2, Informative)
SpaceX has a rocket with slightly higher payload than the Ares I scheduled to fly in 2010.
Didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out.
I still have a major problem with anything SpaceX at this point, though. It isn't flight proven. Both Atlas and Delta are riding streaks of ~90 successful launches in a row, spanning several vehicles. The Atlas V and has had 14 launches, with one minor upper stage glitch (this wouldn't have killed anyone). Delta IV has launched 8 times, one partial failure in an experimental heavy launch configuration (wouldn't have killed anyone).
SpaceX has launched twice - two total failures, at least one of which would have killed the crew. There's a good quote from Elon Musk here [wikipedia.org].
"I think they had something like 12 Atlas failures before the 13th one was success. To get this far on our second launch being an all-new rocket -- new main engine, new first stage, new second stage engine, new second stage, new fairing, new launch pad system, with so many new things -- to have gotten this far is great."
SpaceX has plans to man-rate their line of rockets. But it is a long way off, and they need a few successful launches before you could actually strap a human on.
Any way you look at it though, NASA is flat wasting years of time and $5Billion in cool hard cash developing the Ares I.
Yep. Or more.
Re:yeah, that's right. i'm not a rocket scientist (Score:4, Informative)
You can buy from your self but you still have to disclose the costs to the government. In the paperwork the you disclose what the base costs are plus all the markups and profit. Not only that but you have to prove to the DCAA auditor that your stuff is cost competitive, usually by showing a comparison to three other independent solutions. It's actually quite interesting on the government side to see how open they force you to be in your proposal and billing compared to the private sector.
Re:Did we really make it to the moon? (Score:4, Informative)
"No one (with power in NASA or gov't) is interested in getting back to the moon without a billion rules, regulations, and safety measures."
Even if that were true the cost of five really nice seats is not much. What costs is the thousands of people that stay on the ground. The flight hardware is "nothing"
Where do yo think those billions go? Almost all of it is paid in saleray to middle class enginers and technicains. Noe of those guys are ritch. Upper middle class mostly.
People always think of the big rocket as being the expensive part. It isn't. It's that army of people who support it. Just one simple little thing like inspecting a weld joint with X-ray. You need to maintain a whole lab and trained people. and then you have the mission asserace people who check that the work was done and that the correct weld was inspeced and so on and so on. And then you have to pay me (I'm typing this while waiting for a test to complete.) Me and 12 others work on getting telemerty from some data link to about 50 or 100 computer screens. Next you have the engineers that look at that data and not just durring flight. We support tests on the pad or hangers, several a week.
And yes we have to follow dumb OSHA rules like not placing large object on file cabinets that might fall on our heads and we have to hold fire drills twice a year and I've got to take a CPR class even if I'm a software engineer because we need 1 in 20 or so people to know CPR.
Oh, and recently the window washer outside is required to use a safety harness and helmet. Darn rules running up the costs. But would you change them?
OK back to work,....
Re:Just wait (Score:3, Informative)
Shuttle design payload was 65,000 pounds. Heaviest payload I can quickly find on the net was STS-93 carrying 49,789 pounds. (I think the nominal max is 55,000, that's what I based my 80% on). This is only 76% of original design goals. Launch profile has nothing to do with it. They have to fly upside-down so that the thrust vector of the SSMEs when pointed through the center of mass of the assembly is upward (and downrange).
Payloads to to the ISS are less (heaviest was about 36,000 pounds) because ISS is in a fairly high inclination orbit (which makes it easier to reach from Baikonur).