NASA picks rocket for return to Moon

[Emperor_Norton_II]

http://www.flightinternational.com/Articles/2005/08/23/201125/+NASA+picks+rocket+for+return+to+Moon++.html

NASA has decided to develop a 100t to low-Earth orbit (LEO) in-line heavylift booster using a highly modified external tank and new five segment solid-rocket boosters (SRB), Christopher Shank, special assistant to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, has revealed to Flight International.

Shank says the agency will also develop a crew exploration vehicle (CEV) launcher that will be an in-line SRB with a cryogenic second stage.

These will become the launch vehicles to take the USA back to the Moon from 2015 and beyond. Previously NASA administrator Michael Griffin had only expressed his personal preference for Shuttle derived launch vehicles. The 100t launcher will place lunar mission boosters and other heavy hardware into LEO.

“A lot of this has to do with launch loads and safety aspects. It is better to do it with in-line,” says Shank.

And here's the winner of the competition:

http://www.flightinternational.com/assets/getAsset.aspx?ItemID=9569

[SledDriver]

1. I'd actaully like to see the Saturn V resurrected. n/t

[punpirate]

2. Probably too expensive...

... all the tooling was destroyed a couple of decades ago.

This is also going to be a way to hide new defense development projects inside the NASA budget--rods from god are going to be very heavy payloads....

Cheers.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

4. Yes, because all government projects are secretly MILITARY!

:eyes:

[punpirate]

5. Well, maybe not all...

... but, it's a lot higher than people think. There's a very little-known agency of the government called the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) which does budget analysis. One of the things they do is a line by line analysis of the budget, marking each line item as military or non-military. They produced a report recently that puts military spending as 56% of the discretionary budget. And, that doesn't include the portion of the debt interest payment devoted to military spending, which puts the actual figure at about 68%.

So, there's a lot of military spending tucked away in the budget that doesn't appear in defense authorization bills.

Cheers.

[yanggers]

27. they are big unarmed missiles, but hey whatever works

I hope the reuability of components that space shuttles achieved will not be ommited in future rocket developments.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

3. Well, the new booster should have about the same lift capability as the S5

Saturn could do around 100 tons to orbit, and the SDLV intends to do the same.

[punpirate]

6. Was about to ask what kind of...

... sled driver you meant, but the avatar tells me.

Are you really a driver or a fan?

[Xithras]

8. We can't

Mostly because we don't know how. The original blueprints still exist, but the engineers who built them found and redesigned a number of systems in order to make the machine fly. The documentation for these design changes is poor or non-existant, the toolings were recycled long ago, and most of the design engineers have passed or are too old to remember.

We could try to rebuild it again and hope we figure out everything they changed, but we'd be working with unfamiliar plans and if we missed something...boom.

Besides, modern rocket engines are more powerful, more efficient, and cost less to build. Rebuilding a 40 year old rocket design would be interesting, but it certainly wouldn't be cost effective or smart.

[ThoughtCriminal]

10. There were a couple of mothballed S-V's

Too old to fly, but not reverse engineer.

[benburch]

25. The human factor has been lost.

The people who really understood the S-V are all gone now. It would be best to engineer a new booster where your architects are still around to understand any failure or problem. But we certainly can learn from the Saturn program and let that inform our current efforts.

[Tesha]

11. S5? We could just hire the Indians to do it; they're doing the rest of...

Resurrect the Saturn 5?

We could just hire the Indians to do it; they're doing the rest of
the engineering that used to be done stateside....

Tesha

[Ready4Change]

7. Is it just me?

What are the two systems that caused the most devestating problems in the entire Space Shuttle program?

1. Segmented solid rocket boosters (burnt through O-seals, allowing gas to escape and burn through the external tank, resulting in an explosion.)

2. The same external tank, which had ice and foam fly off during launch, which damaged the Shuttles wing, resulting in a burn through and in flight breakup of the Shuttle during re-entry.

NOW, what are the two components carried through to this "new" rocket?

1. Segmented solid rocket boosters
2. The Shuttles External Tank

Is it just me, or is this a plan that only a penny-pincher moron could love?

[Emperor_Norton_II]

13. Well

1. The redesigned SRBs, in use since post-Challenger, have worked flawlessly. No burnthroughs.

2. The ET tank foam problem is only a problem if you've got an expensive reentry vehicle coated in ceramic heat shield hanging off the side of the tank. If your payload or crew vehicle or whatever's sitting on top of the tank, this ceases to be a significant problem.

So yeah, it's just you.

[SledDriver]

14. Not just you...

I agree and would make the same argument.

Both catastrophic failures of the Space Shuttle were due to failures by the two components proposed for use on this new system.

The Saturn V took a lightning strike (Apollo 12) with no major failures, while a piece of rubber and a piece of styrofoam were enough to doom two shuttles.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

16. Well, it's not like the orbiter's much use for heavy-lift, now is it?

Let's not quibble. If you want a HLV without having to spend n+1 years reinventing the wheel, the Shuttle launch stack is the way to go. We know it works, we have the necessary components, and it will lift crazy amounts of payload into LEO.

More to the point, the problems with the SRBs have been fixed, and the inline stack configuration means that foam could peel off the ET in sheets and do precisely nothing to the vehicle. Hell, they might just do away with the foam on the SDLV altogether and let ice build up like they did on the Saturn.

[benburch]

19. But this is not to be man-rated, right?

My understand was that this lifted only upper stages and etc.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

21. The article's a little fuzzy on the concept.

The SDLV is supposed to be the main booster for the Crew Exploraton Vehicle, which is the planned generic modular orbit-only spacecraft that will be the backbone of lunar or Mars missions. So it's likely that the booster will be man-rated.

OTOH, they're also putting together a man-rated booster based of the SRB, but that one is intended for simple jobs like crew transfer to ISS. It can't carry a full CEV or any significant payload apart from a crew module.

[benburch]

22. The russian lunar program used a non-man-rated booster.

Which, given the reliability of the beast (all exploded) was a good idea.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

23. Well, the SDV is starting out using man-rated components, anyway.

As for the N-1, well... given enough time, they probably would've gotten it to work right, but just as they started to the whole moon race thing became moot. Ah well...

[benburch]

24. I agree they would have made it work!

But still their plans called for EOR (Earth Orbit Rendezvous) and using the reliable Soyuz launcher for hoisting the crew.

Given that we have that technology down cold, we should always use non-man-rated heavy lift boosters (much cheaper) and launch human beings on smaller, very reliable vehicles.

Human beings complicate every part of a booster launch.

[ThoughtCriminal]

9. CEV with an in-line SRB and cryo 2nd stage?

Having trouble visualizing that, but it should be an "Interesting" ride.

I suspect that keeping existing contractors happy was the primary design consideration.

My marginally semi-qualified opinion would be for a SSTO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) design for a manned vehicle.

-----------

[Tesha]

12. It would also help if...

> My marginally semi-qualified opinion would be for a SSTO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) design for a manned vehicle.

It would also help if the design goals (total lift payload, etc.)
aren't changed after the basic SSTO vehicle is designed. *THAT* was
a big factor in forcing the segmented SRBs onto the Space Shuttle
(and then the military pretty-much bailed out as a customer anyway,
even after they forced the "lift" in lift payload in an already-
mostly-completed design).

Tesha

[ThoughtCriminal]

15. True - especially with SSTO designs

I don't think much margin for payload there to begin with. Staging buys you extra payload (at a cost). If the SSTO vehicle is designed as a crew ferry system rather than a cargo lifter, maybe that can be avoided.

Unfortunately, I think we're more likely to see an SSTO vehicle developed outside of NASA and outside of the USA first.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

17. It's going to be a while...

One of the problems with SSTOs is they have to have pretty crazy dry weights in order to work. I haven't crunched the numbers in a long while, but IIRC an SSTO capable of carrying a ten ton payload would have to weigh just a bit less than your average Ford sedan.

[NNadir]

18. Ain't gonna happen. The US is bankrupt, Kenny Boy style.

[mainegreen]

20. Huh?

:eyes:

[LunaSea]

26. There may yet be a few surprises

in the coming months-

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,68528,00.html

"In the last year, with $6 million in NASA funding, Transformational Space, or tSpace, surged ahead with a design for an orbital spaceship called the Crew Transfer Vehicle, or CXV. The company built a full-scale mockup of its four-seat space capsule, successfully demonstrated a novel method for launching spaceships from airplanes, and, this month, dropped another full-scale capsule from a helicopter off the California coast to test parachute deployment and capsule recovery.

That's grabbing attention at NASA, where millions are normally expended just to create project proposals dressed up with charts in pretty binders. "It's very rewarding to see tSpace actually do this," said Michael Lembeck, tSpace's contracting manager at NASA. "I know how easy it is to throw out a set of viewgraph presentations and claim you're going to save the world as opposed to actually building something and making it work."

they built stuff with study money?
they can't do that, can they?