NASA To Test Rocket In The Next Step Towards Returning To The Moon (npr.org) 52
NASA is counting down to what should be the final major test of the massive rocket it is building to put the first woman and the next man on the moon. From a report: More than 700,000 gallons of supercold propellant will fill up the tanks of the 212-foot tall core stage so that it can fire its four engines without actually blasting off. The goal is to simulate what will happen during its first launch, a mission to send a capsule with no crew around the moon and back. That lunar mission is currently targeted for November, says NASA's acting administrator Steve Jurczyk, who notes that this rocket "is going to be the most powerful rocket ever developed." The window for the rocket test opens on Thursday, March 18, at 3 pm EDT, and the core stage of the rocket is set up at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. In a firing test earlier this year, one of the rocket's engines had a failure that forced an early shutdown after only 67 seconds.
"We can understand exactly what happened in the first test and what cut it short," says Jurczyk, who explains that one test parameter had been set too narrowly and that's now been fixed. "Start up on the first test went really well, and so we're reasonably confident we're going to have a good test this week." The test should last around eight minutes, to simulate the entire flight profile of this rocket stage, he explains, but the minimum of what they'd like to see is around 4 minutes. If all goes well, the rocket will move on to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rest of the launch hardware is already waiting. Under the Trump administration, the agency had been aiming to get boots on the lunar surface by 2024, which would have been in a second term if the former president had been re-elected. That deadline was a goal that most in the space community felt was unrealistic. These days, NASA admits that there's no way to get people to the moon that quickly, given the recent appropriations given by Congress.
"We can understand exactly what happened in the first test and what cut it short," says Jurczyk, who explains that one test parameter had been set too narrowly and that's now been fixed. "Start up on the first test went really well, and so we're reasonably confident we're going to have a good test this week." The test should last around eight minutes, to simulate the entire flight profile of this rocket stage, he explains, but the minimum of what they'd like to see is around 4 minutes. If all goes well, the rocket will move on to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rest of the launch hardware is already waiting. Under the Trump administration, the agency had been aiming to get boots on the lunar surface by 2024, which would have been in a second term if the former president had been re-elected. That deadline was a goal that most in the space community felt was unrealistic. These days, NASA admits that there's no way to get people to the moon that quickly, given the recent appropriations given by Congress.
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And this is NASA, not some corporate office. The woman selected will be extremely qualified for this mission. Most qualified.. can't be defined with 100% objectivity. They may have 100 great options with 95 of them being men.. all with similar attributes. No one has argued if the men previously selected were the most qualified which is why this argument is s
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It's not a worthy goal, not something that should have taxpayer money spent on. If a woman naturally rises through the ranks just like male peers then it's fine. If all women in program happen to do better then men then all woman team would be fine. The worthy goal is return to moon, the bad goal is to insist a woman has to be there.
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I think sensationalizing "firsts" can be overblown the same reason I feel random baseball "facts" are silly at times.. Player X is the first left handed batter with blue eyes to get a base hit in 5 straight games when a full moon was present since Lyndon B Johnson was President.
It's not like they'll send up some Air Force washout to the moon. The good news, we only have to w
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You should read about the Apollo selection process that narrowed 235 candidates (who had to high performance jet pilots which is immense physical hurdle right there) down to 9.
Armstrong rescued the mission with a malfunctioning computer system and averted disaster with his cool headed thinking.
Interesting to speculate which female astronauts now had the physical ability to pass the 1960s criteria with high performance jet endurance, Eileen Collins and Nicole Mann would.
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Not the Apollo program for sure, but a private funders put a number of female volunteers through the same physiological selection process for the Mercury astronauts, which resulted in the "Mercury 13" - 13 women who passed the criteria. All volunteers invited to take part were accomplished pilots with more than a thousand flight hours each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: what is newsworthy (Score:1)
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But they weren't high performance jet pilots, all were pilots of prop planes.
Modifying the parameters isntead of fixing things. (Score:1)
This is exactly the type of thing that lead to the shuttle explosions.
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I was thinking that too. Those parameters were set by people with actual engineering knowledge I would assume. So who made the decision to change the parameters rather than fix the hardware so it stays within parameters? Managers with minimal engineering knowledge? Committees of people trying to keep the cash flowing? I'd be really curious how this decision was made.
That said, I still wish them luck. More space avenues are better than less space avenues. Even if this particular route seems to be the
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it is about a decade too late for "fail early"
people need to stop looking at SLS as a rocket system and recognize that it is really a federal welfare program for the state of Alabama
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what you are suggesting is failing late, that ship called "early" has sailed
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You are just pushing a sunk cost fallacy
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Like not setting the clock? Surely an experienced organization like Boeing wouldn't let something like that happen.
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I was thinking that too. Those parameters were set by people with actual engineering knowledge I would assume.
Having done some engineering (although not at such a scale), I can say that there's a tendency to be conservative in setting test parameters when you've never ever run the hardware before.
So who made the decision to change the parameters rather than fix the hardware so it stays within parameters?
The correct aproach is look at the results, analyze whether the system going outside of parameters actually was a indication of impending failure or if it was a false alarm, and then either change the parameter, or change the system, depending on what is indicated. And, sometimes both.
You learn by testing.
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The Boeing testing scheme is very interesting. This test for example. It's the last one before the thing flies for real and they'd like to see it fire for a minimum of half the time it actually needs to.
Apparently Boeing's safety factor is 0.5.
Massive waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
The SLS is behind schedule and drastically over budget. The entire program will only be able to launch at most once a year and will cost a billion dollars each launch. And since it uses the really nice RS-25 engines from the space shuttle but uses them in an expendable fashion, every single launch dumps a whole bunch of reusable rocket engines into the sea. There's good reason this system has been derisively nicknamed the "Senate Launch System"- this was always more about jobs, and congress (especially Shelby of Alabama) dictating to NASA what this would be in minute detail to make all the old shuttle contractors happy rather than anything with a coherent goal. And now even NASA is trying to figure out how to reduce its cost https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/nasa-has-begun-a-study-of-the-sls-rockets-affordability/ [arstechnica.com].
This was a good idea at the outset. Using some of the old shuttle parts had a chance to substantially reduce cost of the new system. But it is now many years behind schedule and over budget. It really should just die. Unfortunately, too many people in too many states are getting paid for this for that to happen.
Re:Massive waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
That's really much of the point. They're trying to develop fast and cheap, so they're finding lots of problems through testing. By the time they are actually going to orbit, they should have worked out all the kinks, and at a cost vastly below anything NASA is doing.
If they weren't expecting them to blow up, they wouldn't be making more test rockets in an assembly line fashion. They're only planning on one test per rocket, so when one survives, they'll have to figure out what to do with it.
Re: Massive waste of money (Score:2)
This is a really important point about the different experimental paradigms that NASA and SpaceX operate within. It appears NASA spends a lot of effort on the design and component testing so that the larger-scale tests are very likely to succeed. SpaceX clearly views every failure as an opportunity, and has no qualms watching a rocket explode on a pad if it means they got the data to make the next one succeed. It appears that at least SpaceX is making the latter approach succeed. Is there any chance that NA
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NASA answers first and foremost to congress. And no matter how you slice it, when it comes to space exploration, even the slightest whiff of failure can be a death sentence for a program, so NASA defaults to super, uber conservative. Testing individual steps rather than full parameter flights hoping each step succeeds incrementally to show the investment is worth it. Whereas Musk has fuck you levels of money to play with so he doesn't have to worry about failing on a full parameter flight. NASA will nev
Re:Massive waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)
Musk's Starships haven't fully stuck the landing yet, but they haven't "fallen down and gone boom." The SLS isn't even attempting to land. Based on track record, my money is on SpaceX for first back to the moon.
Re:Massive waste of money (Score:4, Informative)
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This.
It's a shame that SpaceX (probably) doesn't have the money (and certainly won't get permission from NASA to try even if they did have the money) to launch a Crew Dragon plus lunar lander and send them off to the moon. Willing to bet they could make the 2024 deadline if the Feds tossed a couple billion at them to make it happen....
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Yeah, got to admit that the Boeing developed and put Starliner in operation much quicker. Starliner's been in use since waaaay before 2020. What's that you say? Starliner still hasn't finished its unmanned testing yet? Nah, couldn't be....
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Crew Dragon does not have the capability to return from the moon (the heat shield is designed for LEO; lunar return is twice the energy).
The situation is actually slightly worse than that in practice, because the heat of reentry comes in a very short time period because of the high velocity. But the PICA-X heatshield can be extended. But it actually is slightly worse than that even, because extending the heatshield means more momentum which means more total energy. Overall, you'll end up probably about needing to roughly triple the mass of the heatshield assuming on
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Musk's Starships haven't fully stuck the landing yet, but they haven't "fallen down and gone boom."
To the contrary. The last flight literally fell down and went boom.
With that said, yes, I like the learn-by-trying-and-failing approach.
Re:Massive waste of money (Score:5, Interesting)
You might have a point if some alternative system for heavy launch was working. Thus far I've been entertained watching Musk's rockets fall down and go boom, seems an alternative is a long ways off.
Falcon Heavy is a heavy-lift vehicle that lofts 2/3 the capacity of SLS block 1 into LEO. Technically, Falcon 9 in expendable mode is classified as a Heavy Lifter (22k kg just puts it in the 20k-50k kg to LEO requirement). If you mean a super heavy-lift vehicle, it seems more prudent to use existing rockets and assemble in orbit given the excessive cost and delays of clinging to SLS.
I assume SLS will launch once or twice so someone can say it was necessary, and then never again.
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NASA is NOT "counting down" FFS (Score:1)
"Count down" has a special meaning in this context.
NASA will do a count down for this test.
"The window for the rocket test opens on Thursday, March 18, at 3 pm EDT"
NASA is NOT currently "counting down" for this test.
Please stop just posting here the first nonsense you think of without first thinking again about whether it is correct or not.
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The word 'editor' has a special meaning on Slashdot. It means, "regurgitating word monkey." Thought not required.
The angry astronaut (Score:4, Informative)
Big numbers mean nothing here (Score:2)
Rockets aren't the hurdle: Radiation is. (Score:1)
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We have yet to solve the radiation shielding issue before returning to the moon.
Ah, where would we be without the irrational fear of radiation.
Oh right. Half a century ahead in important technological development.
Radiation shielding is easy. Water does it. Rock does it. The Moon is a little short of readily accessible water but there's plenty of rock. Pile up enough of it and the hourly radiation dose from living in a Lunar habitat can be lower than it is at sea level on Earth. Artemis astronauts probably won't have that much shielding, at least at first, but if there is a sustai
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And, you Sir: you grasp the difference between an X-Ray (what kind of radiation it is) and "radiation in outer space"?
Are you certain?
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We have yet to solve the radiation shielding issue before returning to the moon.
Since radiation is basically solved by living underground, perhaps it would be wise to start deploying robotic diggers. Is this really that hard to solve?
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I'm intrigued by the lunar lava tubes, some of which are kilometers in diameter and hundreds of miles long. My dream would be for the winners and high scoring competitors of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge to have their robots sent to explore the lava tubes (of course the blimp and the flying drones would have to be left behind), but that would mean military spending actually doing something useful so it will never happen.
That's today?? (Score:2)
bad tense (Score:2)
awkward.
nasa has already been to the moon.
if nasa wants to lead.
then nasa would put a permanent base on the moon.
just throwing it out there