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MoEnzyme
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Our next steps in space
« on: 2009-07-20 12:12:22 » |
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So today is the 40th anniversary of the US moon landing. I'd like to hear from the congregation about what our next goals in space ought to be, in terms of practicality, necessity, and/or vision.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #1 on: 2009-07-20 14:30:04 » |
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1a) A Space launch tower. This is easy to accomplish with existing technologies. A 100 to 200 mile high building with an electrically powered lift system could easily lift far larger payloads than a Saturn launch system (which could lift about double the payload of the shuttle into deep space) and reduce the cost per kg to orbit by one magnitude, from about $2'500/kg to about $200 - $500. The cost would be about $7.2 billion, or about half the cost of a space elevator, and will eliminate the first stage lift system as well as associated fuel and pollution.
2) An aerostatic launch platform floating at approximately 120-150 miles. This would be a quicker and relatively cheap alternative (for small quantities) to a space launch tower, usable while the tower is being built, in order to develop the required rockets and orbital systems.
3) Space Power Stations. Using a solar thermal concentrator to drive an MHD generator and beaming the power to Earth could reduce the cost of electricity for the entire planet to a point where cost becomes irrelevant - and where we eliminate much of our environmental footprint for an initial outlay of approximately 90 billion (or a fraction of the cost of the ongoing "bailout", an even smaller fraction of our annual energy bill or an even tinier fraction of what we wasted in Iraq) for 1'800 TW (vs current global energy capacity (from all sources but mainly fossil) of about 18 TW).
4) Space Condoms: 6 mile x 20 mile cylinders with water filled transparent or translucent ends and aerogell filled double walls lined with dirt. They are placed in space and spin to provide artificial gravity and tumble to provide light-dark cycles. Each cylinder provides about 400 square miles of usable interior surface for agriculture, industry or residential purposes. The same system can use nuclear powered distributed electric thrusters to travel anywhere in the Universe.
5) A Space Elevator: Rising to 72,000 km this $15 billion construction would probably not lift people and would carry much lower payloads than a space tower, but it would carry them all the way to transfer orbit, and allow slingshot launches and recoveries for a fraction of the cost and much lower risks than any other method yet identified.
6) Nuclear powered rockets, using length to protect the crew. These will be suitable for exploration and research trips, (with all voyages beyond the gas giants taking an average of about 4 years in crew elapsed time).
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Mylon
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #2 on: 2009-07-23 09:24:21 » |
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The space condom idea sounds pretty cool. Then again, I love the idea of mega-scale engineering. But we definitely need a space elevator or something similar to manage it.
Note that a fairly cost effective way to get into orbit relies not in using a giant tower or an elevator but actually piggy backing on a plane. Design a rocket-only ship that rides on a cargo plane and launches while already a few miles up. This is what SpaceX has done and what the air force planned to do. So until everyone stops laughing at the idea of a space elevator we can at least use this idea to get rockets and other relatively small payloads into space.
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Hermit
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #3 on: 2009-07-24 01:29:55 » |
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[Mylon] Then again, I love the idea of mega-scale engineering. But we definitely need a space elevator or something similar to manage it.
[Mylon] Note that a fairly cost effective way to get into orbit relies not in using a giant tower or an elevator but actually piggy backing on a plane. Design a rocket-only ship that rides on a cargo plane and launches while already a few miles up. This is what SpaceX has done and what the air force planned to do. So until everyone stops laughing at the idea of a space elevator we can at least use this idea to get rockets and other relatively small payloads into space.
[Hermit]
Never forget that the Air Force deliberately killed the Saturn by cutting up the assembly towers in order to compel Congress to fund the shuttle. Basically Congress was presented with a fait accomplis. Fund the shuttle or the US has no access to space. I kid you not. Even worse, the Air Force deliberately killed the funding for a naval program to perform dynamic launches from free balloons at 90-150 miles; which is way cheaper but wasn't an Air Force project (Interestingly this happened before when the Air Force carried out a deliberate program to eliminate airships and blimps, both of which were Naval and "threatened" funding for Air Force projects).
It remains much cheaper and far less polluting to use Hydrogen balloons rather than aircraft to get to altitude. Hydrogen because, until we get cost effective fusion reactors Helium is too scarce and too valuable as an industrial gas to use it for disposable lift systems. It is possible to establish aerostatic platforms for launch too. See http://jpaerospace.com/ for compelling demonstrations (and a persuasive argument in favour of open source engineering).
But if we are going to build space power satellites - and I think if humanity is to have a future we must - then we need a way to launch large heavy material and men into orbit. And a tower (not an elevator) with a magnetically levitated linear motor propelled launch (and recovery) platform is indisputably attainable with current technology, and would effectively replace the first stage of a Saturn. The reduction in economic and environmental costs indubitably justifies the expenditure. Of course, if we are to achieve this at all, we must achieve it before we run out of cheap fossil fuels. Which means we need to begin now. Not in 20 or even 5 years time.
The reason for preferring a tower over an elevator is that with current materials we will be hard pressed to build an elevator that will carry a useful load. Most worrying, it will not have the capacity to lift much shielding as well as a useful payload, and current and projected laser technology is not capable of accelerating the elevators very fast. The combination means that a state of the art elevator will expose any living payload to excessive radiation damage. A launch tower avoids this by transitioning much larger and heavier payloads through the worst of the radiation very rapidly (like existing rockets) and allowing far more shielding (which could also be, at least partially, a water payload).
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Mylon
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #4 on: 2009-07-24 08:36:26 » |
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Wait, so why was Nasa born again?
Because the Air Force said, "If we can't have it exclusively no one can?"
I guess I also underestimated the lifting height of hydrogen. I remember seeing a video of "Highest step in the world" ( a 20 mile altitude jump ) and the platform the near-astronaut was using did not seem to have a very large balloon.
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #5 on: 2009-07-24 19:50:00 » |
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Yeah that's good, practicality is a good starting point. What can we do close to home? Starting with engineering our path out of this gravity well. Sure, the Saturn rocket still remains the most energy efficient way out. I do think that the shuttle was an interesting experiment in reusability, and any new design can teach us lessons worth remembering. However even as they become more popular, space launches are still rare enough that sheer energy requirements are much more important than the comparatively negligent issues of recycling vs. waste.
While I might feel completely different about unecessary extra shopping bags, water bottles, etc. we aren't talking about those kind of ordinary decisions at all. We should remember that barring several radical technological breakthroughts, the depth of our gravity well changes everything anytime it enters our decisons. If we had kept this more firmly in mind we might have never tried this shuttle experiment. Thank Dog its over. It doesn't seem to have kept us from fatal disaster anyways which would have been the only thing that could have justified its ridiculous expense. Obviously on that front it failed. So let's move on now.
love, Mo
PS - perhaps in its favor, we might look back on the shuttle experiment as something like the male peacock's brilliance. It was so wasteful that it proved our economic fitness at the time, even as it may have held us otherwise back. At the time, perhaps that was the more important concern . . . our later cold war PR strategy against the post Berlin-wall Commies. The point wasn't so much what we could practically achieve, but rather more a demonstration of what we could afford at the relevant moment. Perhaps the Islamists could even find some bitter gratitude in their hearts that we managed to kill the first Israeli astronaut in this boondoggle. (that was meant to be funny . . . seriously . . . not like the holocaust at all).
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #6 on: 2009-07-29 09:03:04 » |
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Panel backs NASA bid for bigger shuttle budget
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSB237881
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 28 (Reuters) - The United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020, members of a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. human space program said on Tuesday.
A subcommittee of the 10-member board also proposed adding an extra, eighth shuttle flight to help keep the station supplied and narrow an expected five- to seven-year gap between the time the shuttle fleet is retired and a new U.S. spaceship is ready to fly.
[MoEnzyme] If it were my decision to make, I'd consider funding the last seven, and say no to the eighth. As far as the third option below, my answer would be "Hell No!" That would be in essence locking us into the failed Shuttle experiment. A platform that has proven itself less efficient with no improvement in astronaut safety simply doesn't deserve that kind of favorable treatment.
A third option would keep the shuttle flying through 2014 as part of a plan to develop a new launch system based on existing shuttle rockets and components.
At the very least, NASA's budget -- $18 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2009 -- should reflect the reality that it is highly unlikely to complete seven remaining shuttle missions by Sept. 30, 2010, as planned, board members said.
"We have come to believe very firmly that it's important to have a realistic view of what the existing program as it will realistically unfold most likely will cost and not put any smoke and mirrors to the budget to make it look like it will fit under the budget profile," Sally Ride, a committee member and former astronaut, told her colleagues during a public meeting in Houston televised by NASA.
With NASA averaging about 115 days between shuttle missions over the past five years, the more likely time frame for completion of the space station and the retirement of the fleet is March 2011, panel members said.
"But, of course, there is no funding for that possibility," Ride said. "That's setting you up right away for a budget problem."
NASA has estimated it would need $1.5 billion to accommodate the delay. Adding an eighth flight would require an additional $2.7 billion over that.
The panel, headed by former Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) Chief Executive Norm Augustine, was convened by President Barack Obama to come up with options for the U.S. human space program. It is expected to issue a report in August.
NASA's current plan, ordered by former President George Bush after the Columbia accident, is to complete the space station, retire the shuttles and build new spaceships. In addition to traveling to the space station, which orbits 225 miles (360 km) above Earth, those new ships would ferry crews to the moon and other destinations.
Funding for the $108 billion program would come from funds previously used for the shuttle and the space station, which under the plan would be dumped into the ocean in 2015, five years after becoming fully operational.
Michael Coats, a former astronaut who oversees the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told panel members that abandoning the station then was "inexcusable."
The United States' partners in the $100 billion program -- Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada -- unanimously support maintaining the station beyond 2015, said panel member Lester Lyles, a former Air Force vice chief of staff.
"The politicians are looking for a return on investment," he said.
Also on Tuesday, the visiting shuttle Endeavour crew wrapped up its 11-day stay at the station, leaving behind a new platform to hold telescopes and other science experiments, and a cache of spare parts to keep the station operational after the shuttle fleet's retirement.
"We're sad to leave you but hopefully happy that we left the station in pretty good shape," Endeavour commander Mark Polansky told the station crew in a brief farewell ceremony.
Left aboard the outpost was NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, who takes over the flight engineer's job previously held by Japan's Koichi Wakata. Wakata, who has been in orbit for 4 and 1/2 months, returns home with the Endeavour crew on Friday.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #7 on: 2009-08-14 12:23:29 » |
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Per the last line of the story . . . I think just flying around and not landing (except with robotic probes) with the cost savings would be just fine. Especially if it allows us to set up the infrastructure for future landings. And by infrastructure, I mean figuring out ways to produce fuel elsewhere than on planet earth. That way we don't need to expend the extra energy to self-contain and lift ALL of a mission's fuel requirements out the Earth's gravity well. -Mo
NASA's Trajectory Unrealistic, Panel Says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009
NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it may be the wrong place to go anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human spaceflight program.
Although it is just an advisory panel, the Human Space Flight Plans Committee could turn the entire space program upside down. Appointed by President Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, the 10-person panel has held a series of marathon meetings in recent weeks to try to Velcro together some kind of plausible strategy for NASA. The agency's trajectory over the next two decades, as well as the fate of thousands of civil servants and private contractors, could be affected by the group's report, due at the end of this month.
The committee members will meet with administration officials Friday and are likely to say that under current funding, there's no realistic way to get Americans back on the moon by 2020, which has been the goal since President George W. Bush signed off on the "Vision for Space Exploration" in 2004. The current NASA plan makes a moon landing in 2020 possible under the budget only if the agency de-orbits the international space station -- crashing it into the South Pacific -- in 2016.
Moreover, the current strategy involves retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and replacing it with the new Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule, which NASA hopes would be ready to take astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2016. During the long gap in NASA's human spaceflight ability, American astronauts would have to hitch rides into space on Russian rockets. The awkward plan has been seen as a budgetary necessity, with shuttle program money flowing into the new Constellation program that features the new space hardware that could eventually put astronauts on the lunar surface.
The committee has chewed over a basic paradox in the plan, which is that, even if everything went smoothly, the new rocket would not be able to get astronauts to low Earth orbit until just about the time that the space station would be fireballing its way back to Earth.
Although the station has never been terribly popular with scientists, its $100 billion price tag and role in international aerospace cooperation makes its early demise politically unpalatable. The Augustine panel assumes the station's life will be extended to 2020. But under that budgetary scenario, according to the panel's just-completed analysis, the current NASA budget would not permit the launch of a new heavy-boost moon rocket, the Ares V, until 2028 -- even without any funding for key lunar-base components.
"If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy-lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift," said committee member Sally Ride, the former astronaut, in Washington on Wednesday at the final public meeting of the committee. "You cannot do this program on this budget."
Committee member Jeff Greason, an aerospace executive, derided the NASA strategy, noting that the fixed costs of the current Constellation program are sure to bust the budget in the decades ahead: "If Santa Claus brought us this system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn't change, our next action would have to be to cancel it."
NASA spokesman David Steitz said it would be premature for the agency to comment on the committee's work.
John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, observed the panel's session Wednesday and said NASA faces a problem that has been years in the making.
"This is a heritage of one of the many failed promises of the Bush administration -- to set out a very good policy and then not provide the resources that come anywhere near funding it," Logsdon said.
The panel will give the administration a menu of options that includes some that require a boost in funding for human spaceflight, which currently costs a little less than $10 billion a year, including the shuttle, the station and the Constellation program. Those options will include variations of a lunar program -- the committee appears to prefer to see astronauts making sorties to various locations on the moon rather than concentrating on a single outpost at the moon's pole, which is the current plan.
The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the "Deep Space" option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds. Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth's protective magnetosphere.
Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn't land so much as rendezvous, in the same way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But the Deep Space option steers clear of "gravity wells," which is to say the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently beyond NASA's reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario, the committee has determined.
But Augustine said at the Wednesday gathering that Mars is still the most interesting target for exploration, and all options have to be framed as part of a longer-term effort to send people to the Red Planet.
The panel is also pushing hard for greater commercialization of space, including using private companies to taxi astronauts to low Earth orbit.
Some options include pulling the plug on the Ares I rocket that NASA has been building for four years. The Ares I is supposed to replace the space shuttle, the final flight of which is slated for late 2010 or possibly early 2011. About $3 billion has already been spent on the rocket, a version of which is scheduled for an inaugural test flight later this month.
The administration's overall attitude toward human spaceflight remains unclear. The president, both as a candidate and in the White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his predecessor, is not long for this Earth.
Any strategy going forward must cope with the obvious problem that the United States has already visited the moon, and the solar system offers earthlings few other appealing places to go that are anywhere close at hand. Logsdon said he wasn't sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on "flybys" rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public.
"I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive," he said.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Our next steps in space
« Reply #8 on: 2009-10-22 16:06:53 » |
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Panel says NASA should skip moon, fly elsewhere
By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP) – 45 minutes ago
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iHs5vWk9IO7UiUQ4ub9wCv7fpeFQD9BGAVB81
WASHINGTON — NASA needs to make a major detour on its grand plans to return astronauts to the moon, a special independent panel is telling the White House.
NASA has picked the wrong destination with the wrong rocket, the panel's chairman said Thursday. A test-flight version of the new rocket, Ares, is on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, awaiting liftoff later this month. NASA should be concentrating on bigger rockets, the panel members said.
Norman Augustine, chairman of the White House-appointed panel reviewing the agency's spaceflight plans, said it makes more sense to land on a nearby asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. He said that could be done sooner than returning to the moon in 15 years as NASA has outlined.
The exploration plans now under fire were pushed by then-President George W. Bush after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. The moon-Mars plan lacks enough money, thanks to budget diversions, the panel said in a 155-page report. Starting in 2014, NASA needs an extra $3 billion a year if astronauts are going to travel beyond Earth's orbit, the panel said.
The key is where to explore space. In a report, the panel outlines eight options and leaves the choice to President Barack Obama. Three options are part of what the panel calls a "flexible path" to explore someplace other than the moon, eventually heading to a Mars landing far in the future. Augustine said the flexible path option, which includes no-landing flights around the moon and Mars, makes more sense from both a physics and finance standpoint.
Landing on the moon and then launching back to Earth takes a lot of fuel because of the moon's gravity. Hauling fuel from Earth to the moon and then back costs money.
It would take less fuel to land and return from asteroids or comets that swing by Earth or even the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, Augustine said.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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