Competition to Build the Space Shuttle's Successor 345
Neil Halelamien writes "The competition for the prime contract to build the Crew Exploration Vehicle, the successor to the Space Shuttle, is ramping up. Currently, 11 different companies are creating preliminary designs for systems and vehicles which could be useful in implementing NASA's Vision for Space Exploration. By the end of the year, NASA will select two teams to independently develop and build a CEV design. The two teams will launch competing unmanned prototypes in 2008, at which point NASA will award a final winning contract. Aerospace giants Boeing and Northrop Grumman have formed one team. Another "all-star" team, announced a couple of days ago, is headed by Lockheed Martin. A third team in the running is underdog t/Space, a company with a free enterprise approach to space exploration, which includes notable figures from the commercial spaceflight arena, such as Burt Rutan and Gary Hudson. There is concern that a NASA budget boost to help pay for the exploration program could draw some opposition, as most other government programs are anticipating budget cuts."
Re:Well well well (Score:2, Insightful)
Common sense prevails at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hoo-ray for NASA! There's hope for them yet.
Isn't having a goal more important than a vehicle? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program."
Could they be any more vague? Whatever happened to the days of "land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth." You know, goals that people actually knew what the heck you were talking about?
A Replacement for the Shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe an underdog can win (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It writes itself (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe an underdog can win (Score:2, Insightful)
We should select Rutan as our stand in for old man Harriman. (obRAH reference) -- OPh
Be carefull. Rutan and Scaled Composites are better than Nasa because they are cheaper, no government intervention to screw everything up.
I think rutan would be making a mistake getting in bed with anything that is even remotely government sponsored. He should keep working on private ventures. et la Virgin etc.
Re:Common sense prevails at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
The mission for the CEV, "to boost national security by providing a presence in space" is so bland, so wishy-washy, so unmeasurable, that there will never be an accounting.
Oh, and Bush says we need to hack $300 Billion out of the budget to cut the deficit in half without raising taxes or undoing his precioussss tax cuts. Oh, and Defense is excluded. How big is the discretionary, non-defense budget? $440.9 Billion.
Benefits (Score:1, Insightful)
Is there anything they discovered that improved the qauality of life, in return for the zillions of dolars?
Military (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA Budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Having the wrong goal is worse than no goal (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention slightly safer.
Re:Common sense prevails at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
From an energy standpoint, Space Ship One only got 3% of the way to low-earth-orbit. They still have 97% more work to do. It design is totally unsuitable for going into or out of orbit; at hypersonic speeds it would snap apart like a toothpick an burn up. Scaled Composites is basically at square one with respect to an orbital vehicle.
Re:Common sense prevails at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully those designs have been put in the circular file drawer where they belong. 100 years from now, our fascination with space-planes will be seen as a great folly of the later 1900's.
Capsules are a superior re-entry vehicle in every way, and cheaper too, when you factor in maintenance costs on reusable space vehicles (with the exception of the suborbital "toys" that we hear so much about, but they won't get huge wings into LEO and back again cheaply).
NASA knew this simple truth back in the day when they were the crackinest aerospace research agency in the world. They had blank checks for designing ugly but functional space vehicles and boy did they. Aesthetics didn't enter to into the design of the capsule and LEM then, and shouldn't now.
Re:Well well well (Score:4, Insightful)
Cheap only accounts for one small criterion in the selection. I would imagine that experience would be of far greater importance. Not that the underdog shouldn't win, or doesn't have any experience, but if you were hiring someone to manage a critical huge project for your company would you hire somebody with 20 years experience doing this type of work or a new kid out of school who built a toy model of what you need for a science fair?
Space Tug Boat. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Addressing The Real Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress has never been able to give NASA a set of clear goals, and then provided it with the long-term funding to meet those goals. This has forced NASA into sort of bureaucratic survival mode, lurching along from fiscal year to fiscal year, trying to keep moving the ball forward without a long-term roadmap to follow.
Awesome... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Modern, yet tested hardware for the flight computers and a way to upgrade them easily should they be needed. I still like the idea of multiple redundant computers and a voting structure that the shuttle uses for it's flight computers.
2. Reuseablity is nice, but can be expensive as the shuttle has pointed out. If we do go reusable, I hope we find some new heat shielding that is less fragile.
3. Ejection seets for the crew or a crew module rescue system of some sort.
4. Sensor the HECK out of it. Put little cameras in the superstructure and have one monitor cycle through them on both launch and landing. If teh crew sees something the least bit suspicious, they can initiate a emergency eject.
5. Make it FAST to launch another incase there's damage to one crew module. Maybe make it so that we launch 2 at the same time with both being capable of holding the whole crew in a emergency landing situation. You could even make sure one is always on orbit and is in good shape(docked at ISS or whatever).
6. Make it REPAIRABLE in space either via ISS assistance or a small repair kit heald on board.
I could go on, but this is the opportunity to make a funcitonal system that is much safer then the shuttle. Consider that the shuttle's design is almost 30-40 years old and BOTH planes and cars are MUCH safer today then ones designed that long ago.
Re:Well well well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Common sense prevails at last! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, to 1960s design rather than technology. There is nothing wrong with this if the 1960s design turns out to still be the best anyone has come up with. You do the same kind of design with more modern technology and get the best available solution to the problem.
Just because Buck Rogers had space planes, that doesn't mean they are actually the best engineering solution, silver jump suits are not practical streetwear either.
Look at bridges, the fundamental designes of modern bridges are really nothing a Roman would be supprised by, it's the details of the technology applied to the basic designs which makes them better.
Robotic Exploration? (Score:3, Insightful)
Leave Human exploration to harder goals (Mars). But for experiments in orbit, repair missions, etc. Why not consider robotics?
The Mars rovers have done a very impressive job. I'd bet if NASA put the effort into robotics that it did into the Moon Launch effort.... they would be 10000X better.
They can also work more, don't suffer from fatigue, don't need life support systems, etc.
I'd like to see the human/robot space exporation roles change. Save humans for stuff like going to Mars, or the Moon, or other places where the goal is to get a person there. But lets use Robots for the most dangerious stuff, and situations where a Robot can easily do the job.
IMHO a shuttle should be looking at Earth --> Mars.
Re:Common sense prevails at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at what you what you need for re-entry:
Wings
A hugely increased heat shield
Flaps
Hydraulic motors for flaps
landing gear
more hydraulics
more sensors
more wiring
more computer control
more everything
The weight just spirals up and up until you have a fuel tank the size of the Good Year and achieve at best a moderately safe vehicle.
Re:Benefits (Score:4, Insightful)
Where has our Manifest Destiny gone these days? We all would rather watch American Idol than ponder the real stars. What a shame.
Re:NASA Budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh?
I suspect that there might be some rather important things going on in some other [nih.gov] agencies [nsf.gov]. Just a thought. I suppose it depends how one chooses to define 'important' and 'beneficial'.
Rockets: Win launch efficency (Score:1, Insightful)
1) Send rockets into space with a space capsule (reusable or not, we really don't care).
2) Use a reusable space plane.
Now the people in the first camp will argue about efficiency, and cost, and reliability. They've got a million reasons, much like those that advocate only sending robotic space probes into space, and forget manned space flight.
Because I don't agree with them, and also to bring a smile to my face, I like to believe they like this idea because rockets resemble a big penis (something they may be lacking themselves), and that the "capsule" at the end is like the ejaculation of sperm into space. But again this is just my personal opinion.
What the people in the first camp DO lack is efficiency of the imagination. Thats for sure. They see a short term solution which forestalls a long term one.
The people in the second group, are more visionairy, and understand that in order to make space really accessible and interesting to humanity, you need something thats more like a space plane. Something that does not need to be manufactured for each flight and transported to a certain location (rocket). Something that can be turned around maintenance wise within 24-48 hours, and is preferably SSTO. Its no coincidence that Scaled Composites space ship that won the X-Prize was a space plane. And its no coincidence that Richard Branson signed up with Scaled Composits right away to start Virgin Galactic -- a service to take people up into outer space for around $250,000 a flight. It matches all of these qualifications, and more than just some metallic cylendar sitting on a launch pad, it captures the imagination.
Also with a rocket you lack the pushing of technology forward. Building something that does SSTO and goes from Tokyo to New York in an hour, will require serious advances. And these advances could have (and probably would have) a huge impact in other areas. With a rocket, you just use refined 50s and 60s technology. In fact, if you consider that most rocket designs are still based on the V2, this would in fact be 40s technology. Sure reliable and cheap. Save it for Arianne Space. But for NASA, who's initial setup was to push the envelope as it were in space and space related technologies, its a bit disappointing to take a BACKWARDS step.
Anyways here's a neat little page [spacefuture.com] that talks about past and future launch vehciles. Notice that there aren't alot of rockets.
Am I overly optimistic? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am very optimistic about this endeavor. Is anyone else going to be disappointed with a vehicle that is not a standard takeoff and landing vehicle (instead of a multiple rocket/stage, shuttle like vehicle)? It would seem to be the next logical step. Apollo was rocket launched and uncontrolled descent. The shuttle was multi-stage rocket launch, but a controlled, gliding descent, re-usable vehicle. The next logical step, to me, woud be a vehicle that is more aircraft like, losing the rocket launch all together. Is the technology there? Will it be in 10 years?
Just a thought........Re:Maybe an underdog can win (Score:3, Insightful)
What, you say? Vinnie would be horrible for the job? He doesn't have experience dealing with *real* space missions? He's only managed tiny teams, and this is a huge project? He'd probably just run it into the ground?
Well, Scaled Composites is no different. They built roughly the aerial equivalent of a rocketsled. They built the bloody thing out of epoxy
Not to demean what Rutan did, mind you. It is a very impressive example of what a small group of people can do with a couple tens of millions of dollars, modern design software, a lot of dedication, and a lot of guts. And while they had significant stability problems on acceleration, their supersonic deceleration is a great testament to how well you can design a craft nowadays using computer models. But that doesn't change the fact that SS1 isn't even remotely in the same league as real spacecraft, and Rutan's experience isn't in the same league as real spacecraft design/construction experience. Just like my cousin Vinnie.
P.S. - I don't actually have a cousin Vinnie.
Re:Having the wrong goal is worse than no goal (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the one thing that humans can give is their perception of what they see and feel. This sort of information is something that no robot can possibly provide us.
And how is seeing and feeling worth multi-billions of dollars?
We honestly have no idea how much we would learn from being out exploring, but most of the advances of our race have come from exploring the unknown and taking risks.
Exploring has with few exceptions been driven by economics and need, not wonder. Columbus was looking for gold and a cheaper spice route. The people who crossed the land bridge into North America were looking for food. I suspect the same thing will occur for space. Mining operations for rare elements like Helium 3 will be what likely creates the colonization of space. Science needs, like you say are far cheaper to do with robots.
Maintenece (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Having the wrong goal is worse than no goal (Score:3, Insightful)