"...kids today can now dream of one day walking on Mars."
Hell, I dreamed of walking on Mars when I worked on the Apollo Project. I never dreamed that 2011 would come and we would never have even gone back to the moon. It makes me regret even more that I never made the trek to Florida to see a Saturn V launch.
I was a toddler when Armstrong walked on the moon. While I was too young to remember the live broadcast (my mother says I did watch it with interest), growing up with it certainly had an impact on my decision to become an engineer.
Thank you for being part of something that inspired and continues to inspire so many of us.
I worked at the MIT Instrumentation Lab on a compiler for the Apollo Guidance computer. The language was rather bizarre. Each line was encoded on 3 punched cards. One for the main expression, one for subscripts, and one for superscripts. I was pretty junior so my task was really at the front end processing compiler options and reading the input.
The Lab was a really interesting place. Lots of high end 360's, which couldnt even power a phone these days. We had our own command module mockup, but I was an employee of a contractor, so no-one would let me play around on the inside, but I did get to peek.
In the grand scheme of things, my role was miniscule, but I am still very proud that I was able to contribute to one of the greatest adventures of the last century.
> my role was miniscule, but I am still very proud
Most individual roles tend to be minuscule, specially in such a huge endeavor. But you should be proud nevertheless - you and others like you made some of our greatest voyages of exploration possible.
It will be very tragic if Mercury, Gemini and Apollo continue to be the best examples of space exploration done right. We need to do better and we need your shoulders to stand on.
Not really a problem. All the software was rigorously tested using emulators running on mainframes. The Guidance computers were truly bizarre things. They used core memories for program storage, but to save weight only the 1 bits were expressed with cores. The 0 bits had none. If you recompiled a program and even one bit changed, the memory had to be re-manufactured. Therefore, lots of testing.
The Chinese explored the Middle East and Africa almost 100 years before the Europeans. Every expedition consisted of 300 ships, some as long as 400 feet with 9 mast and an armada crew totaling 28,000 men. After 30 years of doing it they realized that they were spending too much money on these grand expeditions. The succeeding emperor ended the program. The Europeans on the other hand would send out just a few ships and try to find ways for the expeditions to be profitable (Slaves, gold, land, colonies) in ways the Chinese never thought. These smaller European expeditions could not be stopped by one emperor because Europe was not a unified empire like China. The smaller European kingdoms also competed against each other. This not only made the expeditions sustainable but thrive for the next 500 years. Right now I think we are in China's situation 600 years ago. We stopped the moon landings for the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa. Unless we find a way for these space programs to be profitable I don't see humans colonizing space anytime soon.
it can be turned the other way as well - Chinese fell into stagnation and lost the technological, power and all other races during last 2-3 centuries because they stopped the exploration and closeted themselves inside their kingdom.
>We stopped the moon landings for the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa.
and we don't go to Mars and beyond for the same reason Chinese didn't venture deep into and across the Pacific to America - too technically challenging, unknown and dangerous
I agree. The emperor who replaced Zhu Di was more conservative and thought that China should close its doors. He famously said that "The outside world had nothing to offer China, it is too primitive and backwards, leave it alone." This inward looking mentality, fueled by the belief in your own superiority, is the disease of great powers. I am afraid that in some ways the United States has become one, maybe it's a good indicator of a power in decline.
The eventual decline and stagnation was the effect of the decision to close China's doors. But the cause of the end of the expeditions was largely financial. Culture also has an important role to play. The Chinese were not looking for new lands or have any interest in converting people to their religion. They were looking for respect and recognition. They want to prove to the world that China is the undisputed power on Earth and that they are the pinnacle of civilization. They could not have imagined that the world is about to enter into a period of tremendous change so they felt no reason to change their imperial system. How can you change perfection? ...LOL
>Culture also has an important role to play. The Chinese were not looking for new lands or have any interest in converting people to their religion.
Bingo. Gene Roddenberry's genius is replacing the classical humans' violence fueled drivers of "new lands or ... interest in converting people to their religion" with "to explore new worlds, to seek out a new life, and new civilizations" :) I hope that he will eventually be proven right.
The primary design objective for this system, as well as the cancelled programs NASA wasted billions on over the last four years, is to:
Spend the same money in all the congressional districts that the Shuttle program spent money in.
$18B is 50 times what NASA has paid out to SpaceX so far, and SpaceX already has already developed a working rocket. Congress could fund 50 SpaceX-like firms for that same amount.
Instead, Congress is attempting to cut the money NASA has requested for commercial crew transport.
My favorite part is that the first quote in the article is "This launch system will create good-paying American jobs". When an election isn't coming up they at least put that below the nationalistic/visionary stuff.
Ah, yes, the Senate Launch System. Looks rather like the more sensible DIRECT; I haven't looked closely at it yet, but from glancing at the Wikipedia entry the Feb 11 design shows it's already a boondoggle (as reported by people I trust) by using 5 segment SRBs, one of the fatal flaws of the Ares I (going from 4 to 5 segments results in thrust oscillations severe enough to kill the crew). And from what they're not saying it sounds like they're sticking with the Ares program's wider SRBs, which fantastically drove up the cost of it.
Well, since NASA has been more public works program than anything else since Apollo (and even then, helping the South was an explicit goal of Apollo), I suppose it's fitting. But can we really afford this sort of thing as opposed to building up a commercial launch sector in any one of a number of ways?
I know a few people who know more than me about astro engineering who approve of these jumbo SRBs... but I still just don't buy that they're a good idea for human-rated launch systems. U.S. astronauts who are used to flying on the Space Shuttle and then ride a Soyuz up to orbit can't believe how incredibly smooth and peaceful liftoff is - because the propulsion system is just liquid kerosene - liquid oxygen. Launch stacks with SRBs have to have so much extra weight in structural support just to deal with the immense acoustic load - and even then, it's hard to accept that they can reach the level of inherent safety of a straight liquid fuel stack.
Note my other comment on why liquid fueled rockets are preferred for manned flight because you can turn them off. Once you light off a SRB you're 100% committed until it burns out (at best, although at least the fuel in the Space Shuttle ones has a proper pressure and burn rate feedback: as pressure increases burn rate goes down, addressing some of the worst issues, e.g. a sudden increase in propellant surface area due to a crack).
To my now somewhat hazy memory, except for the first few Mercury suborbital missions (which were done in a real hurry) the only manned space flight system to use SRBs is the Shuttle.
If SpaceX and friends can reliably launch cargo and eventually humans into LEO, why can't NASA focus on what to put into space, rather than how to get there? I'm sure I don't understand the mechanics of it, but wouldn't it be possible to put up a few smaller cargo carriers containing fuel and pieces of a trans-mars ship and assemble it in orbit?
The proposed payload for the NASA SLS is 64,000kg-120,000kg while the Falcon 9 is 10,450 kg. The proposed payload for the Falcon Heavy is 53,000 kg.
So to match 1 SLS launch you are looking at 6-12 Falcon 9s (which have flown) or 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches (which have not flown).
I don't think it's a stretch to say that using Space X would be significantly cheaper to get the same weight up there because the design work is already done. You probably would want to use the Falcon Heavy because you don't want to piece together 10 different things, but that is just 3 Falcon 9s strapped together which I can't imagine is as expensive as designing a new launch vehicle from scratch.
You are absolutely right that at this point NASA needs to get out of the launching game. Use the tax money for payloads whether that is a manned mission or robots.
Exactly. Is this not very similar to the program that was recently cancelled?
Reading this actually made me quite angry, and I'm someone who is a fan of new technology, especially new space technology. What new ground is being covered here? "President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that's exactly what we are doing at NASA". I have to disagree. This looks a lot like NASA is about to reinvent the Saturn V.
Surely it's best for NASA to completely draw a line and vow to never develop any more (conventional) launch vehicles. In orbit assembly presumably is exactly the kind of thing they should be investigating. Unless of course they plan to do all their deep space exploration via a single rocket launch?
It's still much cheaper and easier in the long run to build one launcher big enough to do a straight shot from Earth to Mars or other target. You have all the assembly done on Earth and put all the lift capability into a single hyperbolic trajectory straight to the target, instead of doing on-orbit assembly (which we know how to do but is still outrageously harder) and devoting a lot of launch capability into putting mass in a circular orbit in an orbital plane around the Earth that's constrained by the launch site latitude, only to have to counteract a lot of that Delta V to put that mass onto a new hyperbolic escape trajectory along a plane defined between Earth and the target once it's put together.
I believe SpaceX is planning on developing a still more powerful heavy launch rocket that could shoot human crewed missions straight to Mars in a single shot. The Falcon Heavy could send a substantial payload to the Mars surface.
Another benefit of larger rockets is the width of the components they can carry. I'm no expert, but larger spacecraft modules seem like a big win for long duration missions.
I think the problem is that the things NASA wants to send into orbit are much larger than what the commercial space industry is planning to send into orbit. That's why NASA is taking the lead and building a vehicle specifically designed for large loads rather than people or satellites.
I disagree. Commercial launch systems are just beginning to unfold and for example SpaceX has already announced plans for heavy lift versions in the very near future. Contrast this with the SLS, which is the umpteenth attempt at rediscovering how the mysterious and ancient Saturn V worked, and which will probably be cancelled within three years without ever producing something that can actually get off the launch pad.
Programs like these are completely superfluous and most people involved know it. NASA is not even hiding what this project is for: it's a job program, says so right there in the article. And when they say "jobs", they don't refer to real companies like SpaceX or even themselves, they mean huge defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Sure, but something that can assemble things in space (as well as raw materials) is going to be heavy and if its heavy its going to need a heavy launcher. Fuel is heavy too. At the end of the day, you need a powerful rocket to do the heavy lifting. NASA doesn't want to turn into an agency that just gives seed money to SpaceX and wants its own heavy human-rated lifter and capsule.
Not to mention, there's political will for NASA to continue being in the launch business and for good reason. SpaceX could land a monopoly on heavy launches and could raise its prices, get bought by a foreign power, go bankrupt, use shoddy designs, or who knows what else.
edit: really -2 moderation? Downvoting for disgreeing now? Wow HN.
It's not seed money, it's buying from a private contracter. The Air Force doesn't build planes, it buys planes. The Navy doesn't build ships, it buys ships. The Army doesn't make tanks, it buys tanks.
Now part of that process involves a lot of military oversight and specification to make sure things are up to their standards. I know that the military is involved in the design of systems from Day 1. But all of those things are made by private corporations and they have no commercial equivalent. NASA operates this way already to a large extent. Boeing, Lockheed, etc are primary contractors that design & build a lot of this stuff.
What NASA is going through right now is a switch from that model to using straight Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) stuff. The government buys plenty of things off the shelf with no motification or input if it meets their needs. Space X just happens to provide lift capability instead of laptops, but in the end it really is no different as long as they're not launching people.
Nope, long before it first launched we knew the Shuttle was a shoddy design:
The SRBs saved money on development but are very bad for human flight, you want engines you can turn off.
The insane fragile tile and leading edge heat protection, all to satisfy a "requirement" the Air Force didn't care about, a Vandenburg single orbit polar mission (to return to the same spot on Earth while it's rotated under you requires serious maneuvering using your initial high energy state).
No crew escape system after the first few test flights with only pilot and co-pilot, who had SR-71 class ejection seats (the best available). The state of the art of "rocket science" simply isn't good enough to forgo this.
Since then we've learned from the two fatal missions:
The SRB joints were grossly misdesigned, forcing their O-rings to seal on expansion (any of us who've worked with a faucet or shower head know how terribly wrong this is).
Especially after it was made in a more "green" fashion, the fuel tank sheds ice and insulation chucks with sufficient momentum to destroy the above mentioned fragile heat protection systems.
That's all that immediately comes to mind, and I've already pointed out one Ares I inherited potentially fatal design flaw in the Senate Launch System. How many obvious design flaws can you or anyone else point out in SpaceX's systems? (I don't know, I haven't been closely following them.)
I'm aware of the shuttles limitations and the politics behind them, but the Soyuz system isn't any safer. I'm just skeptical of this sudden "ZOMG DRAGONX SAFETY WILL BE AWESOME" assumption that so many pro-privatization types seem to have. Considering how many times their rockets have blown up already perhaps its best to be not drawing any conclusions thus far.
Not by much. Seems like we've hit a limit of human engineering at least for the technology at that time. The idea that you can do loads better than NASA or the Russian program, safety wise, is a pretty big claim, especially considering that the Falcon series has blown up more than it hasn't.
Whoops, I thought it was 5 out of 7. So wait, you're applauding 4 out of 7 successes? Really?
Look, its obvious that its too early to decide one way or another but thats a fucking rocky start to anyone who isn't a fanboy blinded by whatever allure SpaceX has.
Also the disagree downvotes make you look bad. HN is turning into reddit/digg. What a shame.
Your ad hominem attacks are tiring, and in light of your apparent hatred of reddit/digg, reveal a nasty case of projection. So I'll just leave you with some early US and Soviet launch records.
If you still feel like debating the matter, I suggest searching YouTube for launch failures first. There are some rather spectacular videos of rockets that actually did explode, sometimes right on the pad.
The US has rather strict rules regarding transfers of rocket/missile technology. The only way SpaceX could get "bought by a foreign power" is with the express approval of the federal government.
Fine, how about they just become unprofitable after some accident or other event. Now the US has lost all its launch capabilities. Here comes the big bailouts. Why not just have NASA make its own rockets with private companies for certain tasks. I don't understand the rabid pro-privatization crowd's insistence that its one or the other.
The military works the EXACT SAME WAY. They bring design specs and ideas to contractors, do x amount of engineering themselves, and let the contractors do the dirty work. I don't understand why the military gets to design their own stuff but suddenly our civillian space program should just be a check writing machine to Elon Musk and friends.
Characterizing people who disagree with you as "rabid" is not going to help your case, especially when one of those disagreeing with you is borderline-socialist and not generally a big fan of mass privatization.
Nor is using the bloated, corrupt, horrifically inefficient military-industrial complex as your model for how spaceflight should be carried out.
For once, a government agency is handling this right. They're transparently paying set, commercially-appropriate amounts of money to contractors that have a good chance of success, in exchange for meeting specific, objectively-judged goals.
If something goes wrong, there are obvious fallbacks. Boeing/Lockheed and the ULA aren't going anywhere, the ESA has a good track record, and Soyuz is at least as reliable as the Shuttle ever was (and a hell of a lot cheaper).
If SpaceX fizzles out, it's not the end of the world, or even manned space travel, any more than NASA's twice-over criminal negligence with the Shuttle was.
Not really, at least not lately. Since the end of Apollo the manned space program has been first a jobs program and then everything else. So if we've "fallen" it happened in the early '70s.
NASA funding is just a perk you get as a Congressman when you amass enough clout.
It's a symptom of the times. People don't care about science today, they care about jobs, and NASA is trying to play that tune to keep themselves afloat.
When joblessness is 3% and you can (not easily) find a job if you get fired from another, landing to the moon is quite interesting for you, and for anyone else.
When you are struggeling to pay the bills, finding a job, or securing your current job, landing to the moon is a quite stupid thing the USA gov. is spending the money on.
Although it won't cost the US economy only a little (few billions) comparing to its size, people won't be easy with it. They are in trouble living in earth, and are not looking for the moon or massively expensive explorations.
It's a pattern of the last 3 decades of NASA manned spaceflight. It hasn't always been a jobs program, but it's been mismanaged for so long that being a jobs program keeps it afloat.
Imagine trying to run a company that has 535 people on the board of directors, none of whom has equity in the company, but many of whom have de facto equity in your suppliers.
Nice to see that the most common reaction to this article, even among space geeks, is that this is a waste of NASA's focus and everyones tax dollars. I think that bodes well for progress.
Kind of reminds me of a rocket used for the Apollo missions (although it's not) with some Space Shuttle SRBs attached to the side. The first version shown in the video actually looks kind of cool -- like something SpaceX would have built. It's a good thing progress in the space industry move at a snail's pace. Our aim is to remain the go-to country for space flight yet the first mission is slated for 2017.
It looks like they're trying to save some money by using advancements from the Space Shuttle and Constellation programs. Always a good thing because NASA projects are notorious for going over their budgets (with good reason).
>>It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system
A consequence of using previous propulsion tech is that we're still using dangerous, highly explosive liquid hydrogen and oxygen rockets. I'm still hoping we're able to get higher ISP from hybrid rockets in the near future. Much safer and easier to turn off if there is a catastrophic systems failure on the way up.
Why are space ships always white? If the designers are not going to use cool colors, they could at least give the rocket racing stripes or "go Nascar" with tons of advertisements. :)
The image you see is an artist's rendering, of course.
The Shuttle main engines used to be painted white (this is the big central tank supplying liquid hydrogen and oxygen to the engine).
But it turned out to save about 600lb to leave it unpainted, so that's what they did for all later launches. The tank already has an insulator. You can see both versions in Shuttle launch imagery.
"The original ET is informally known as the Standard Weight Tank (SWT) and is fabricated from 2219 - a high strength aluminium-copper alloy used for many aerospace applications. The first two, used for STS-1 and STS-2, were painted white to protect the tanks from ultraviolet light during the extended time that the shuttle spends on the launch pad prior to launch.[4] Because this did not turn out to be a problem and in order to reduce weight, Lockheed Martin ceased painting the external tanks beginning with STS-3, leaving the rust-colored spray-on insulation bare, saving approximately 272 kg (600 lb) of weight."
White reflects the most heat, which is important during re-entry and in regulating internal temperature while being directly irradiated by the sun.
As an added bonus, white is the easiest color to see against the backdrop of Space. Photos of spacewalks would be pretty boring if the Shuttle and the astronauts were all wearing black.
I know it's not logical but I was disappointed that the new "deep space exploration system" didn't look like something out of Star Trek. Instead they made another fucking rocket.
I have a sophisticated layman's understanding of stuff like orbital mechanics, launch energies, etc., but one thing I've never been entirely sure of: Why are rockets always round?
I'm guessing it's the least-questions-asked shape as far as aerodynamics goes, and gives good weight efficiency assuming you can build what you need into a round shape. Is there anything more fundamental than that?
A rocket is a series of pressure vessels, pressurized fuel tanks, pressurized crew compartment, etc.. Round shapes spread the pressure around the entire structure. The ideal shape for pressurized vessel is spherical, however for aerodynamic reasons cylinders with rounded ends are used.
I would guess that it's a whole lot of reasons including the reasons you stated. I would also add a couple (and there's probably more):
Round is structurally strong (which, when it comes to aerospace engineering, is really just the opposite side of the "light weight" coin).
Symmetry of shape and mass makes the stability and control equations a hell of a lot simpler to deal with, and a round shape makes it easier to be (nearly) symmetrical in more ways than with other shapes..
I suspect weight and aerodynamics play the most important part in determining shape. What I've always wondered is why we've never effectively used wings on our spacecraft to get part of the way there. Spaceship one used something like this with its "stage 1" vehicle.
I haven't done the math, but I always assumed it would be less expensive (as in fuel and weight) to start the orbital boosters from 50,000ft after climbing via traditional wings, as opposed to the brute force option of simply producing as much thrust as possible and climbing straight up.
Granted for extremely large payloads the structural requirements for building wings that can support the weight might be impractical, but wouldn't it have been easier for the space shuttle to "launch" from 50,000ft?
My educated guess: it's because a cylinder is the easiest shape to form sheet metal into. It also avoids multiple seams which are failure points. As a side effect, the stress concentrations at sharp corners are avoided.
The roundness is mostly due to the fact that propellant almost always requires being stored in a pressure vessel, more so for cryogenic propellants. It's far, far easier to make a pressure vessel that's at least axisymmetric. Thus, the fuel tanks tend to be spheres or cylinders. And since the fuel tanks are by far the largest components of launch vehicles the rocket itself tends to be cylindrical.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro space exploration and love science, but I just don't see how we can justify spending money on this kind of project with the economy as it is.
Hell, I dreamed of walking on Mars when I worked on the Apollo Project. I never dreamed that 2011 would come and we would never have even gone back to the moon. It makes me regret even more that I never made the trek to Florida to see a Saturn V launch.