NASA Shows Off Mock-Up of Mars-Capable Spacecraft 247
N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer."
They're still working on the parachute.
I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
"Although similar, it builds on 1960s technology"? While the old one was build on 1860 technology? I don't get it.
Yeah well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong I hope we get off this rock and have a *real* space program but I suspect that I am not the only person reading this that thinks they were born before their time.
Good luck NASA, I hope it all goes well, this time.
Re:Yeah well. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity
We'll see a real push into space by humanity when there is an actual economic incentive for doing so. When Earth becomes completely overpopulated and/or runs into resource shortages, that's when we'll see space flight really take off. As much as I love NASA, as a Governmentally funded agency they are always going to be held hostage to political considerations -- and you just know some Congressman needs some pork^Weconomic development back home more than NASA needs to go to Mars.
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Interesting)
Explosives, Medicine, Air/Space Travel.
Re:How many years have they been working on this? (Score:2, Interesting)
It also screams failure to me. The ride to the moon was a sunday drive in a car, the trip to mars is quite a bit longer. Cramming 6 guys in a soupcan for that long is a BAD IDEA. why cant we build something larger? Yeah, yeah launch capacity.. who says it has to be assembled here on the planet, why cant they make the parts screw together in space? We launched skylab, and that was larger than this. use 3 launches. 1 for the engine and spacionics pack, 1 for the crew cab, and 1 for the mars lander. assemble the three pieces in space, man it with a smaller launch or even have them start from the ISS, it could be docked there for assembly. far less fuel would be needed to get to mars and they can even use the earth/moon gravity wells to use even less fuel.
I sat in Apollo 18's capsule that was at the cape. 3 guys in that was nuts (and I was a kid then) I cant see them scaling tat up enough to fit 6 comfortably for a month.
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
"Although similar, it builds on 1960s technology"? While the old one was build on 1860 technology? I don't get it.
You have to realize these guys are journalists. Its big, and vaguely cylindrical, therefore its "the same technology". Rest assured they aren't using discrete transistors and core memory.
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
A little reading, please (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it too much to ask for people who read a supposedly tech site actually read, and perhaps think, before pounding their keyboards with things like "how's that little thing going to get 6 astronauts to Mars?", "NASA is stoopid", and the like?
Its proposed use is to carry up to 6 astronauts to the space station, and from there, 4 to the Moon. For the Moon missions, Orion will travel along with the Altair lunar lander.
For Mars missions, "Orion could rendezvous in low Earth orbit with vehicles that will take explorers to other destinations in our solar system such as Mars." http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/306407main_orion_crew%20_expl_vehicle.pdf [nasa.gov]
These Mars-bound vehicles will be assembled in low Earth orbit. There is no reason to believe that 4 or 6 astronauts would be confined to the small Orion capsule for the duration of a Mars voyage.
On a side note, I was 5 years old when I watched the first manned landing on the Moon. It's amazing to me that a manned Mars mission may happen when I'm in my 70's. Certainly not how I imagined things when I was young.
Re:How many years have they been working on this? (Score:4, Interesting)
* Moon-Mars is basically unfunded. NASA has to steal from other missions just to study Moon-Mars
* The moon is a lousy steppingstone to Mars. Think about it: to land on a planet with an atmosphere, you can slow down with a parachute. To overcome your delta-V for a moon landing, you need to carry enough fuel to decelerate and to re-launch! If you just skip the moon entirely, you don't have that horribly expensive deceleration phase followed by that expensive acceleration phase.
Face it, most of the actual science done in space has been done by robots and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Humans in space is not a bad idea, but Bush didn't fund Moon-Mars and it's unlikely to get funded any time in the forseeable future. Personally, I've always thought Moon-Mars was a cynical political ploy to win a slice of the nerd vote. But that's just me.
Re:I'm confused (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.
For the X-15 series, you might just be right. But the proposed X-20 was the plane that eventually got the chop. This one had a rocket too, which essentially made it a prototype space shuttle. Reusable. What's more, the Titan rockets they wanted for it had 2.5 million pounds of thrust (11,100,000 force newtons) compared with the Mercury-Atlas' 367,000 (1,600,000). What made them cut the project was that the Atlas rockets were already available whereas the more powerful Titan rockets were still four years away.
Re:This seems misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a discussion about this in one of the space-related usenet groups a couple of years ago.
As I recall it, the problem is that it takes a lot of fuel and engine power to brake a big spacecraft into Earth orbit on the return from Mars (or anywhere else outside the Earth-Moon system for that matter). And there is no particular reason why the returning crew and their Martian samples -have- to do that.
So at this point NASA expects the return from Mars to be a straight in ballistic return to Earth's atmosphere without a stop in Earth orbit. Hence the Orion CM with its heatshield has to be carried to Mars and back.