NASA'S Orion Arrives At Kennedy, Work Underway For First Launch 103
An anonymous reader writes in with news about the arrival of the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center today. "More than 450 guests at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida welcomed the arrival of the agency’s first space-bound Orion spacecraft Monday, marking a major milestone in the construction of the vehicle that will carry astronauts farther into space than ever before. 'Orion’s arrival at Kennedy is an important step in meeting the president’s goal to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s,' NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said. 'As NASA acquires services for delivery of cargo and crew to the International Space Station and other low-Earth destinations from private companies, NASA can concentrate its efforts on building America’s next generation space exploration system to reach destinations for discovery in deep space. Delivery of the first space-bound Orion, coupled with recent successes in commercial spaceflight, is proof this national strategy is working.'"
Isn't that a splash-down pod from the 60's? (Score:3)
When I read the summary, I was expecting something a little more impressive than the picture in the article.
Okay, they did add some more windows. That's nice...I guess. But I'm pretty sure going to an asteroid or Mars is going to take something a little more substantial.
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I'm pretty sure going to an asteroid or Mars is going to take something a little more substantial.
Its OK to be kind of minimal, because by the time the .gov guys get a ship out there, the .com guys will already have a hotel, resort, convention center, pr0n studio, condos complete with HGTV "flip that martian condo" TV show, etc.
Kind of like worrying about carrying everything you need to go camping in the wilderness on the back of a little honda scooter, well don't worry about where to keep the tent and the MREs if by the time you get to your destination, your destination looks like Vegas.
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It won't be the current path that China is taking for getting into space that will make them pass private businesses.
The Chinese Space Agency, while certainly getting funding now in a big way because China has it, is more of a throwback to how the Soviet Union approached spaceflight. It is a very top-down approach with little if any room for innovation or thinking outside of the box.
China could become competitive, and I bet that eventually China (or chinese businessmen) will begin to form joint-partnership
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Right. Because there is such a great incentive for the ".com guys" to be out there. Right, it's gonna look like Vegas.
No one is going out there except for the ".gov guys", because there is no immediate profit motive. Once the .gov guys have got it figured out (at public expense), the .com guys will go out there and extract the profit (for themselves). This is called "private enterprise". T'was ever thus. It's a big joke.
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No one is going out there except for the ".gov guys", because there is no immediate profit motive. Once the .gov guys have got it figured out (at public expense), the .com guys will go out there and extract the profit (for themselves). This is called "private enterprise". T'was ever thus. It's a big joke.
I think it makes sense the government building some of the highly specialised equipment like the crew module because NASA has the expertise in this area. The aviation giants pretty much have the rest of the market anyway, they will be the ones that fly humans beyond LEO.
It maybe an opportunity for smaller players to do supply missions that don't need to be human rated.
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I wouldn't say nobody in .com land is going out there...
Don't forget about these guys [cbsnews.com].
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I think you misunderstood what he said. He said substantial, not more Silver Falcon-like.
Judging from the comparison between this cg concept [wikipedia.org] and the picture in the article, the current status of the Orion space craft is far from being any substantial for its purpose.
Re:Isn't that a splash-down pod from the 60's? (Score:5, Informative)
Deep space travel is fairy tale for the foreseeable future.
Orion is either:
(1) a joke
(2) somebody is fleecing the treasury for funding for as long as nobody raises any alarm.
I'm incline to believe it is #2.
We needed the biggest rocket ever built even to this day (Saturn V) just to get to the moon.
Mars is at least 200x farther away.
While Mars is 200x farther away, in terms of energy costs needed to get there it isn't nearly so bad. By far and away the most "expensive" thing to do in terms of spaceflight is simply getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO), as the Earth's gravity well is nasty, as is trying to fly out of the atmosphere with as little drag as possible.
If you look at the Delta-v budget [wikipedia.org] for getting to Mars compared to the Moon, in theory Mars is "cheaper" (assuming bulk goods and robots moving in Hohmann transfer orbits and other energy saving ways to travel between planets). There are also other propulsion systems like Ion propulsion and VASMR that can make the trip much, much faster and don't require a huge gas tank in order to function (both can operate off of solar cells, RTGs or even nuclear reactors as an energy source, and the thrust going at a measurable fraction of the speed of light thus giving insane looking ISP values). Stuff like that doesn't work in terms of getting people into LEO, but it works just fine in interplanetary space.
The Moon is close enough that such exotic propulsion systems are not really economical for manned spaceflight, thus you need the monster disintegrating pyramid like the Saturn V.
The physical distance may be huge, but it isn't as bad as it would seem, particularly since spacecraft enroute to Mars don't experience drag unlike spacecraft in Star Wars or a motor vehicle traveling cross-country.
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Construction aside, the gas you used driving to work caused more pollution than say apollo 11, hydrogen + oxygen fuel = water output
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The Saturn V first stage used rocket-grade kerosene, not Hydrogen. Kerosene is much easier to work with than Hydrogen as you don't need to store it in an insulated tank and has nearly the same ISP as Liquid Hydrogen when other factors are taken into consideration.
Not that fuel costs for those big rockets is much of a concern anyway.
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When I read the summary, I was expecting something a little more impressive than the picture in the article.
Okay, they did add some more windows. That's nice...I guess. But I'm pretty sure going to an asteroid or Mars is going to take something a little more substantial.
You do know that there are a limited number of geometries that are optimal for re-entry, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Entry_vehicle_shapes [wikipedia.org]
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You do know that there are a limited number of geometries that are optimal for re-entry, right?
Yes, I understand that. But the summary was full of laughable hyperbole, making it sound like this was some amazing accomplishment. In reality, NASA just spent $3 billion reinventing spam-in-a-can from the Mercury era.
So, I agree that "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But I would supplement this with "If it ain't broke, don't give Lockheed Martin $3 billion to reinvent it."
Re:Isn't that a splash-down pod from the 60's? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Russians have been using designs like this for over 50 years and their manned space program is TONS cheaper than ours, and you cant say that they cut safety corners to save money since their record over the last 20 years is FAR better.
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Almost never did?
There's probably more, but it's late and I'm tired. These 61 flights (out of 135) will have to do for showing just how wrong you are.
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It's telling that you limit it to the last twenty years - thus neatly hiding Soyuz's two fatal accidents
Soyuz hasn't had a fatal accident since 1971. That's over *40* years, not 20.
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No shit Sherlock.
I'm confused... (Score:2)
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It's since been un-de-funded (at least until congress decides to anti-un-de-fund it).
Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Informative)
For those keeping score at home:
The Constellation Program [wikipedia.org] developing next-gen human spaceflight was investigated in the early 2000s, and reinvigorated in revised form in 2004, when President Bush endorsed significant spending on manned space exploration.
NASA began developing, as part of that project, a Crew Exploration Vehicle [wikipedia.org], working on it roughly 2004-2005, somewhat into 2006.
The head of NASA changed in early 2005, and the new head ordered a new study [wikipedia.org] reevaluating NASA's human spaceflight programs.
As part of that study's outcome, the Orion spacecraft was contracted out to Lockheed, starting from 2006.
In 2009, President Obama ordered a new study [wikipedia.org] reevaluating NASA's human spaceflight programs.
As part of that study's outcome, Constellation got the axe in the proposed 2011 budget (released early 2010).
The final version of the budget (late 2010) salvaged some parts of Constellation, spinning much of it off into a cheaper, scaled-down program, of which Orion is a major part, the other major part being the new launch vehicle [wikipedia.org]. All that got going again in 2011.
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No The Constellation program was cancelled. The Orion capsule and the SLS portuons were kept.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Informative)
No The Constellation program was cancelled. The Orion capsule and the SLS portions were kept.
SLS wasn't necessarily kept, but rather transformed into a make-work project, hence the title of the program commonly called the "Senate Launch System" after the engineers who designed the spacecraft in the upper house of the national legislature in America. I had no idea that Orrin Hatch and Richard Shelby had advanced degrees in aerospace engineering, but they certainly laid down enough requirements that they sure demonstrated that capability.
That rocket sure has all of the hallmarks of being designed by a congressional committee too, where pesky things like physics and mechanical strength are perceived to be as mutable as the U.S. Constitution.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Informative)
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It was, then the congresscritters of US decided that their districts are not getting enough pork so they resurrected it. It's a zombie project, not going to achieve anything but cost billions and feed the military industrial complex. While the Orion builders lobbying (or should I say it aloud, bribing), the others got their designs from scratch, launched multiple test flights and moving fast into the success column of the history books. Of course it won't be too long until the US politicians will create a l
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... despite "CloudFlare" it would seem.
Re:Mars? Forget about going to Mars... (Score:5, Insightful)
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We could rename it to "Bucksnort" in honor of Bucksnort Tennessee.
Or maybe name it Mianus after a river in New York.
Alternate Source (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Alternate Source (Score:5, Informative)
More details and actual pictures of capsule (Score:5, Informative)
...at a non-slashdotted link, no less:
http://www.space.com/16395-orion-space-capsule-nasa-unveiled.html [space.com]
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Is the continued commitment to solid fuel rockets. I feel it is very dangerous to put humans on anything that has solid rocket(s), even if they're boosters.
Your comment is strong evidence that everything is relative. The original Orion design called for a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft. Now, what were you saying about solid rocket fuel?
Re:My concern.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the continued commitment to solid fuel rockets. I feel it is very dangerous to put humans on anything that has solid rocket(s), even if they're boosters.
Your comment is strong evidence that everything is relative. The original Orion design called for a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft. Now, what were you saying about solid rocket fuel?
I always thought the name of the Orion capsule was odd given the name history. I can only presume the name was either completely coincidental by a clueless bureaucrat who never studied space history, or it was a deliberate naming choice knowing full well about the earlier program... either to bury that earlier program for good or hint at some future propulsion method.
I'd like to hope it was a clueless suit that never took an aerospace engineering course in their life and got their job as a patronage perk from helping with an election campaign.
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Ask any space cadet born after about 1980 what their opinion of the Orion spacecraft is and nuclear thrust will never enter the conversation.
I don't know what you consider to be a space cadet other than somebody studying aerospace engineering at the U.S. military academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado (those are some genuine space cadets who will even be getting commissions in the military and in a few cases have even gone into space after graduation).
That aside, anybody who has done even the most rudimentary study of aerospace engineering would have heard about this program, and in fact when the name "Orion" was first mentioned as a vehicle the c
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haha i was going to make a sputnik comment...
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm spacex is a company and orion is a capsule.
Spacex could make a deep space capsule, but they probably are not at this time.
As for taking a NEO capsule and flinging it unmodified into deep space, there's some pretty significant thermal issues that get bolted into the design pretty early, for example a NEO capsule assumes it can radiate (or adsorb) heat facing the earth in almost one complete hemisphere. This doesn't mean its impossible for a "decent NEO capsule" to also be a "decent deep space capsule". There are other inherent issues in some bolted on equipment like commo and navigation. In general life is harder and heavier when you don't have the earth filling one hemisphere. You can always make a NEO-only capsule slightly lighter than a deep space capsule.
There are also certain mission trajectory issues. One whacked out Apollo emergency return trajectory had the capsule entering pretty steep at damn near escape velocity which is an immensely higher thermal load than merely controlled descent from low earth orbit. You could baby the trajectory of a deep space capsule and just declare some "survivable with a massive shield" abort orbits to be unsurvivable. But generally a deep space heat shield is going to be much heavier and higher speed rated than a NEO heat shield.
Another interesting topic is electrical, longer missions trend toward solar until you need potable water at which time the fuel cell "waste" of distilled H2O comes in handy. Obviously (?) deep space capsule means longer mission means more O2 storage so you need to build into the design of the NEO capsule space to store more O2 that a NEO could ever require which takes excess weight.
Re:SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:5, Interesting)
The alternative is to carry enough fuel to brake into LEO before rendezvous with the reentry capsule.
Oddly enough, the fuel required to go from Mars-Earth transition orbit to LEO is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH heavier than the capsule capable of reentry directly from that same mars-earth transition orbit.
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You really need atomic rockets to do otherwise on a manned mission. Light sail might be fine for anything unmanned.
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I'm sure
Cycling Orbits (Score:2)
Actually, astronaut Buzz Aldrin has considered it:
http://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-mars-cycler/ [buzzaldrin.com]
There are scientific papers on possible orbits, and I am putting the idea of transfer habitats in the book I am writing:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/Interplanetary [wikibooks.org]
The tricky part is dealing with the Earth, Transfer Habitat, and Mars all having different orbit periods that are not simple multiples of each other. That makes it hard to line up for trans
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Re:SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:4, Informative)
One thing you don't have to worry about is the heat shield.
It's made of PICA-X [wikipedia.org], a highly-advanced abrative heat shield material developed by SpaceX based on PICA, a heat shield material developed by NASA in the '90s for the Stardust [wikipedia.org] return capsule, "the fastest man-made object ever to reenter Earth's atmosphere (12.4 km/s or 28,000 mph at 135 km altitude)."
According to Elon Musk:
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Yeah but that doesn't really mean anything. You misspelled "ablative"... what that means is its essentially burned off as it does its thing.
So... Compared to Chinese made oak (not kidding, supposedly they've used wood) PICA-X will be thinner and lighter. But again, a NEO shield is going to be a lot thinner and lighter than a deep space shield. Both will be lighter than if they used wood...
Standard /. car analogy is an aluminum block is lighter than a steel block. That does not mean that a aluminum 5 lit
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Not really. The Dragon capsule (and heat shield) is designed to be reusable.
It's thicker and stronger so they only have to replace the heat shield every 5, 10, 20 or whatever number of flights.
Re:SpaceX will fly circles aroudn them (Score:5, Insightful)
Utah Pork? (Score:2)
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Old Man Time (Score:2)
send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s
It's a really sad thing to run the numbers on how old I'll be by then. Life is short—and not terribly interesting.
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It's a really sad thing to run the numbers on how old I'll be by then. Life is short—and not terribly interesting.
There is plenty to do here on Earth that is terribly interesting. The sad thing is that there are plenty of people with First World Problems and Internet connections who are apparently incapable of going outside and finding the cool stuff.
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China will fly first beyond the Moon (Score:1)
They have a NASA of the 60's with a can do attitude, instead of a 'can I do more paperwork' attitude. The private companies won't be able to keep up.
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Stop re-using project names! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm looking at you, Microsoft and NASA.
Unless this thing rides nuclear explosions, it should have its own name.
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Uh, last time I checked it was a scaled DOWN version of Ares. In any case though, it's substantially the same design and comes from a long heritage of shuttle derived rockets intended to be called Ares... I really don't understand the obsession with not, at any cost, calling it Ares.
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Sorry, there's only a limited amount of cool deity / constellation names..
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I thought Orion was the name of a concept ship powered by nuclear fission explosions.
See Footfall by Niven and Pournelle
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I'm looking at you, Microsoft and NASA.
Unless this thing rides nuclear explosions, it should have its own name.
Technically, Orion (the nuke one) was a DARPA (military research) project and this Orion (SLS-MPCV) is a NASA (civilian) project. NASA isn't totally off the hook, though, the original Orion was the Constallation CEV, but this one is really mostly the same thing (and CEV never launched and is dead). I've heard whispers they revivified the name in part present the illusion that everyone was working on the same program all along and possibly to take advantage of a loophole to allow the MPCV to use any earmark
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You're a fucking moron. Are you saying that we shouldn't have any rocket scientists in America, or are you saying you think our rocket scientists should redesign our economy or hand-feed long lines of kids? Because either one is just weird.
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Blame yourself for making up weird strawmen.
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Yeah... because NASA's budget, all .5% of national budget, is the reason this country's in such bad shape... You hit the nail on the head. The dumbass head. Rocket scientists aren't economists... people aren't machines that can be re-wired because rocket scientists should be feeding the hungry. People are rocket scientists because they are smart with science. People are economists because they are smart with ... economics. You are one of the most absurdly retarded people I have ever "met".
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Aaaaand.. another strawman. Nice going, brainiacs.
Pro tip: The post you're foaming at the mouth over isn't bitching over rocket scientists or science budgets, it's bitching about all the dumb fucks who are NOT rocket scientists, yet still use this stuff to distract themselves from the stuff they actually ARE responsible for.
Thanks for the demonstration.
Upgraded Soyuz? (Score:3, Insightful)
So... It takes billions of dollars to essentially make what amounts an upgraded Apollo Command Module or Soyuz Reentry Module?
What's wrong with just using a Soyuz then?
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Bummer (Score:2)
Screw Orion (Score:3)
At the moment, there are only two real players in the commercial space game, a tourism business (which is pretty damn cool) and SpaceX who is just getting off the ground now. But in the limited time and with limited budgets they've worked with, they have accomplished substantially more in the past 10 years than the contractors involved with Orion had in the previous 30. These guys will think smarter and move things into space and then they or someone else will build long range transport craft from LEO to elsewhere as opposed to this ridiculous model where we feel we have to create a single craft which has to fly directly from earth's surface with everything it needs in one step. We already have a space station and it seems to me that we need to have another or extend the one we currently have to start storing what we need for deep space travel.Then we can work on for example a space station orbiting the moon and/or mars where we can transport what we need to build surface launch facilities for getting to and from the surface. For what Orion cost, NASA could have bough 10 Falcon 9 Heavy rockets and launched them probably 100 times.
Lockheed, Boeing and all those guys are slow, overpriced, sleazy and generally just obsolete. If they can't compete with companies like SpaceX, they should simply get out of that business altogether. If you don't want to hop on the private space wagon, well there's always hitchhiking with the Chinese.
That's Not A Spacecraft (Score:2)
That is not a spacecraft in the same sense that this is not a car:
http://www.mehr-khodro.com/images/601_02_WELDING_ROBOTS.jpg [mehr-khodro.com]
It's an empty structural shell that will *become* a spacecraft in about two years when they finish it. As of now it is nothing more than bare metal. I helped build the Space Station modules when I worked at Boeing, and doing the shell is about 5% of the work.