Future of Our Space Program

[Pyrotex]

Thanks Boerseun, Freeztar and Jay-qu.

 

We at SAIC just got the official word this morning, straight from Michael Coats, JSC Director, that the Constellation Program has been axed. A lot of contractors are going to be out of jobs within the next 10 months. I might be one of them. But I have to say this:

 

It could not have happened to a more deserving project!

 

Constellation, as it is defined now, would never have been finished. It could not be paid for. It would not have worked as advertised. It would have destroyed our space program anyway, and it would have wiped out any trust that NASA enjoys in America and in Congress today.

 

Yes, we wasted 9 B$. Well, not all of it. Much went to research on stuff that will be needed by whatever project comes along next. Stuff like: more efficient life support systems, safer electrical supply systems, smarter and more reliable computer systems, better space suits, etcetera.

 

The ARES 1-X (the "stick") was an abomination of stupid engineering. It seemed like a good idea at the time (1990's) while we were researching how to build a bigger Solid Rocket Booster. Well, that research has been over a long time ago, and now we know that bigger SRBs cost too damn much and are too dangerous. But hey! Somebody will make a lot of money developing it!

 

What we need now is not some super-duper, high-performance, even more expensive, and less capable alternative to the Shuttle. What we need is a cheap, reliable, robust launch system that can easily be enhanced without fighting the physical limits of materials. The ARES 1-X ain't that, and never would have been.

 

The tragedy is NOT that the Space Program is gonna lose 10,000 jobs and be set back 5 years.

 

The tragedy is that 20 years ago and 15 years ago and 10 years ago, nobody in NASA lifted a finger to start preparing for the day when the Shuttle would have to be retired.

[HydrogenBond]

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. With a huge budget we tend to go for form over function, because form sells better. With less budget function will be more important but form won't be as pretty, but it will still get the job done. If we have plenty of money to build a bridge, we may want a new design to will make that bridge a landmark for the city. If we cut the budget, we may need to settle for another bridge that is not so pretty but can still move as much traffic.

 

Government never does anything for a profit. Leaders can not benefit by profit, but can benefit by money which means power. It typically costs more than originally projected and always ends up taking longer than projected. That is why health care had the breaks put on it. We all know the future from previous experience.

 

With NASA's budget smaller, it will need to think more like the private sector, instead of public sector, making limited money work better. It may even need to figure out ways to generate revenue beyond what uncle sam provides. This might means private investment. The investors may want to have more input, beyond being just a contractor to the stars of space monuments and bridges. I am sure some of the contractors would have gone another way, but you can't bite the hand that feeds you. Cost plus 10% is still a good deal, so you need to tread lightly on their vision.

 

For example, NASA does a lot of satellite work with the weather. How about pay per view to everyone who benefits by their data, based on what one can afford. Or we can have sort of like a PBS telethon but with NASA at the phones. This is a good way to make their case known and get private support. I am sure they often help DOD, which can funnel them some projects which overlap. I am sure there is a sheik that has a few billion to kick in, if he gets the rocket with his name and maybe the first ride. There are no problems, just solutions that are in the works.

 

I remember years ago, someone in Canada invented a cannon that could shoot a projectile into space. It was made taboo when Saddam Hussein was looking into it as a way to hit Israel. But it is still the cheapest way to send space rocket platform structural components into space at a fast clip. Then the shuttle collects the pieces and builds the a launch assembly in a few weeks. Old tech can be cheap. Then we have an orbital launch site for a much smaller rocket to the moon. Upon return, it only has to regain an earth orbit and we can intercept it. This get rid of a lot of complexity, since smaller boosters and no special reentry tech needs. The return navigation can be simple; look out the window and head for the blue ball over there.

[Moontanman]

One question HB, what huge budget are you referring to?

[Buffy]

Uh, do you have any idea what G-force a projectile that is shot from a cannon undergoes?

 

Yes, Jules Verne thought of it first, but since then we know that doing so would kill a human almost instantaneously (something the Mythbusters have covered several times):

A space gun with a "gun barrel" of length , and the needed velocity ... enough to escape the Earth's gravity... would theoretically be more than 1000 m/s2, which is more than 100 g-force which is about 3 times the human tolerance to g-forces of maximum 20 to 35 g during the ~10 seconds such a firing would take.

 

But you know what? Mechanical parts don't handle that much G-Force well either.

 

So using a cannon as the next American Launch Vehicle is pretty preposterous....

 

Fig Newton: The force required to accelerate a fig 39.37 inches per sec,

Buffy

[CraigD]

I remember years ago, someone in Canada invented a cannon that could shoot a projectile into space. It was made taboo when Saddam Hussein was looking into it as a way to hit Israel. But it is still the cheapest way to send space rocket platform structural components into space at a fast clip.

Alas, HydrogenBond, your memory is incorrect.

 

You’re almost certainly remembering the work of Gerald Bull, in particular the HARP project. In the 1960s, Using a surplus US Navy 16" (406 mm) battleship gun re-bored to a smooth 16.4" (417 mm) installed on the island of Barbados, and larger and smaller cannons at this and other sites, such as Highwater, Quebec, Canada, Aberdeen MD and Yuma AZ, USA, this project launched about 1000 rocket-less projectiles of up to 160 kg to altitudes up to 180 km, rocket-propelled projectiles (Martlet 3s) up to 249 km.

 

As the speed of these projectiles are only about half as high as needed to reach a minimal orbit, and because entering a stable orbit requires a change in velocity at its top (apogee), Bull and other space cannon engineers realized that a cannon-launched satellite must have at least one rocket motor. Bull’s most ambitious design, the Martlet 4, had 3 stages, each with a solid fuel rocket motor. It was intended to orbit a payload of about 25 kg.

 

I’ve noticed a tendency among spaceflight enthusiasts to describe Bull’s work as a failure, because it never achieved its intended goal of putting a payload in orbit, and because it was ultimately dismantled, and successor projects canceled. I think this is inaccurate, though, as HARP gathered a lot of data about the upper atmosphere and high-altitude aerodynamics, by some estimations, about half of all our recorded data.

 

The astronautics.com “Martlet” page has lots of details about the different HARP projectiles.

It was made taboo when Saddam Hussein was looking into it as a way to hit Israel.

Deplorably IMHO, Bull’s work and Bull himself suffer a worse fate than being made taboo. He was murdered in 1990, almost certainly by an Israeli operative because of his design work on conventional missles for Iraq, which he is reported to have agreed to in exchange for funding and support for a 1000 mm, 150 m long “supergun” that he hoped to use in a system capable of orbiting a 2000 kg payload (about 1/12th the STS’s payload).

Uh, do you have any idea what G-force a projectile that is shot from a cannon undergoes?

The Martlet gun-launched orbital vehicles were subjected to significant duration forces due to about 12000 to 14000 gs acceleration.

 

Surprisingly, these vehicles flew many payloads containing fairly sensitive electronic sensing and timing equipment, protecting them by encasing them in epoxy resin-sand mixture.

 

A more difficult challenge was protecting the solid fuel motors in the Martlet 3s. The first of these vehicles had their fuel so badly damaged that their normally reliable motors failed. Eventually, the HARP engineers solved the problem by filling the motors’ hollow interiors with a liquid of about the same density as the solid fuel.

 

The HARP Martlets that were never built and flown were, IMHO, interesting and promising vehicles. I wish they’d been flown. HARPs latest successor, SHARP, which was built around a multi-stage compressed gas cannon, was canceled in 1995 before that start of open-air test firings, and after only its first, smaller cannon had been built and tested. I wish it hadn’t been canceled.

 

That HARP was, if less than Bull and it supporters hoped, successful, while SHARP literally never got off the ground, is mostly due to cost. HARP’s war-surplus battleship gun was reported to have cost 1958 US $2000 – less than the cost of the high-quality cordite charge used for each firing, about $8000. SHARP’s next cannon, a 3500 m-long one intended to be capable of launching a satellite, had an estimated cost of $1,000,000,000.

[belovelife]

i had an idea to help , similar to my idea for the health industry

where the university for the health industry would be universal health care system based on school, where

a student would have an "earn while you learn" sort of situation while at school, where pre med students would work at a urgent care clinic ran by a phd, where the phd would be the instructor at the class,

and so on and so forth,

well if this idea was integrated into the international space university, then each university that had ties to the ISU would be part of the space industry, whereas a dance phd, would work with education and media, to influence space concepts (music art entertainment), and each area would therefore work for its major in the direction of space, this would decrease the cost of the space programs by being a duel process, learn and work, so as one achieves there phd, then they define the direction that their job takes in the space industry, and or get another phd to define their concept of direction. then the space industry would be working with minds all the way, and it would be a unified concept,

[Pyrotex]

Okay. Back on topic: The Future of our Space Program

 

I got a link here that indicates that there may be a Manned Space Program Compromise reached on April 15 this year down at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). President Obama will be one of the attendees.

 

And while you're at it, take a look at this conversation from Neil DeGrasse Tyson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o&feature=player_embedded

[Buffy]

Oh! Oh! ...and Neil was talking about it on Stephen Colbert last night too! (not on youtube yet, so just click the link to see the clip on Stephen's site....)

 

We do forgive him for what he did to Pluto....sorta.... :shrug:

 

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm, :)

Buffy

[erKa]

The electro-magnetic rail-gun idea of replacing the massive first stage with a reusable ground facility, goes back a long way. Robert Heinlein championed the use of rail-guns in some of his novels, including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and in his short stories. The problems of using rail-guns have been sumarized above. Add to that the fact that such a huge ground facility (likely to be tens of kilometers long) will require an ARMY of people to maintain and repair it.

STS was the expansion of a nazi project born in 3rd Reich with Me 163 and V-2, electro-magnetic railgun too. Now no new nazi engineers in USA = no new NASA space projects? :shrug: I cannot believe this... anyway Space Shuttles are part of an obsolete program born during '50s and 60 years are too many. Shuttle now is too expensive, too complex, too dangerous. It's time to find new solutions... Ares aren't so bad on chart...

any way thre are many other options to evaluate just before the rail-gun. For example a "doppel system" using a conventional airplane as virtual first stage and a rocket as 2nd stage to be launched just over atmoshere could be the right solution and instead of the usual converted B-747 (obsolete too) it is possible to produce a new robotic unmanned hydrogen fueled big drone...

But there is no reason to cry. The economic crisis of NASA could be solved only thru better collaboration and integration with the effort of thrusted allied agencies:

 

IL CACCIATORE DI ANTIMATERIA PARTE PER LO SPAZIO

 

Translation from Google:

 

The hunter of antimatter to be launched in space

 

The AMS will start the journey to the U.S., where it then reaches the International Space Station. A project funded by Italy for fourth.

 

[ZEUS News - www.zeusnews.com - 26/08/2010]

AMS hunter Cern antimatter

Roberto Battiston

 

 

 

The AMS is loaded on the freighter's USAF.

 

"Never before have we been so aware of how little we know of our universe antimatter seems to have disappeared and 95% of the budget of energy and matter in the universe is due to a mysterious source" is how Roberto Battiston, a scientist 's Italian Space Agency, explains the importance of the last instrument created at CERN in Geneva, the Alpha Magnetic Spectromer, otherwise known as "the hunter of antimatter."

 

At the beginning of life universe - assumed - matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts. Today, however, live in a universe made only of matter: what happened to the antimatter believed to have existed billions of years ago?

 

To answer this question and also to understand more about the so-called "dark matter" (which does not emit at any wavelength and thus is "invisible") a team of more than 500 scientists from 16 countries has created at CERN, with a job that lasted 16 years, the Alpha Magnetic Spectromer (AMS-02), which today began its journey to the workplace: the International Space Station.

 

The first stage includes the arrival in America, the Kennedy Space Center. The transportation of the immense tool - which weighs only about 7 tons and travels along with 40 tons of technical materials - began this morning at 7 thanks to a cargo C-5M SupeGalaxy U.S. Air Force, the only aircraft big enough to contain it.

 

The next February, the AMS will be the last space shuttle mission (which will also participate in the Italian Roberto Vittori, his third trip to the ISS) before retirement: so reach the ISS, where you can start looking for clues to the fate that has touched antimatter, and its presence in the universe, hunting of antiprotons, antideutoni and anti-helium nuclei with the largest superconducting magnet ever used in orbit.

 

The AMS, whose construction was led by Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting, would start a few years ago, then the Columbia disaster has prompted NASA to review flight plans and other problems have marred the launch time delay, including a substantial change in the unit that led to the dismantling and reassembling the entire AMS.

 

The U.S. space agency has, however, expected that the hunter of antimatter was ready, before closing definitively the Shuttle program, and Samuel Ting explained why: "NASA was interested to expect. AMS will be the heart of the scientific program of the station, which cost $ 100 billion but has been criticized for not giving the results of astrophysics. "

 

Once in position, the AMS will work for at least 10 years, but the CERN provides its service life can reach up to 18, making the precious instrument should remain in service until 2029.

 

Professor Battiston that as Italian manager for AMS, is accompanying the instrument in America, is enthusiastic about the project: "We live in an extremely interesting" - stated that aggiungedo "AMS is an important step in seeking answers to fundamental questions "antimatter and dark matter and that" the Italian researchers, thanks INFN and ASI, play a key role in this project. "

 

Italy is the country that has contributed most to the project (cost 1.2 billion euro) shedding 25% of funding by the Italian Space Agency and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics.