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That's true. We just need to abandon Rube Goldberg schemes in favor of CaLV and perhaps larger launcher developments of the future. HLLV needs more friends.
NSWR. Heat is the only real problem with that system--fuel injection tech is about all that is needed. NTRs will probably come first, since we know more about that than any other system. NSWRs may come next--with other more advanced systems coming later, perhaps.
He flew suborbital (higher than SS1) but I think we should be past suborbital jaunts.
Let Bezos do something worthy, and use Falcon 1 cores as Redstones for a Saturn IB revival--or let him invest in Falcon V/IX.
I want a REAL rocket. If he wants Alan Shepard--put a Mercury atop a Falcon and be done with it.
If Bezos is just going to putter around like a duffer he needs to get out of the business.
I'm just worried we we get so bogged down with CEV/Stick that HLLV will have no chance--and we go from 100 ton orbiters in LEO to Capsules in LEO and never get out of Earth Moon.
Whether the SSME pod is a good idea or a bad idea is a matter of context, since the sole purpose of the pod is to save money by reusing engines, then the merit of the pod depends on how much you save versus expendable options.
A pod is something we really don't need. And it would just waste time. Zubrin's concept came before the advent of RS-68s.
Use RS-68s and be done with it.
I will praise Zubrin and Gaetano for supporting CaLV, and we need more pro-HLLV voices out there, regardless.
Those 13 years will include flying Shuttle...
no, but, build one rocket (instead of two) is a GIANT saving of time and money
A good point. Eliminating the Stick would save a great deal design money. But this leaves us without a way to service the ISS post shuttle. While I agree whole heartedly that doing away with the ISS would be a good thing, it is not aparently politicaly acceptable to the powers that be.
Thats why we give it to the Russians. We have a way to service ISS right now. CLV/CEV is just duplication of effort. Do HLLV first, get the hardest thing out of the way first, then fool with CLV down the road. Let the Air Force actually support its hybrid, (with no cuts to NASA funds) then use that down the road.
Yes we use Soyuz a bit longer than we really want to, but we will be paving a way towards real space access: Heavy Lift for exploration, manned moon-mission, Europa landers Mars Sample returns, JIMO) and hybrids for LEO, with that craft using the orbiter processing plant.
The HLV/HLLV plan would thus be very similar to a scenario called for in the book SPACEFLIGHT IN THE ERA OF AEROSPACEPLANES where stations are HLLV launched and HLV serviced.
Soyuz is good enough for now--and you cannot get cheaper than something that already exists. Nix the stick and get CaLV done NOW. Then Soyuz can be your orbiter and all you need is a lander. The first return to the moon will be spartan, yes--but with the CaLV finished the worst part of it is done, and Apollo style capsules can be built later, at leisure. Soyuz was a dedicated moon ship first, after all. With an extensive lander insertion stage, the Soyuz just needs an androgynous dock on the headlight/capsule, with the lander being the spherical living compartment. You just ride a Zond back.
Otherwise I doubt any of us will ever live to see a return to the moon.
CaLV/Soyuz to the MOON now--then CEV later.
Thoughts?
STS tried to do too many things. A big re-usable first stage will have an aft boat-tail every bit as complicated as STS, but won't have the need for a heat shield.
On the other hand, Buran had the latter, but no expensive SSMEs and was just a payload.
STS orbiters had both issues to deal with--and while the orbiters were re-usable--they weren't very servicable.
The fighter jocks who run the Air Farce (who blindly support Iraq wars and $200 billion JSF nonsense) will kill this program as they have all the others.
"But we just spent money on EELV--back to your closet, private Heinlein--you forget yourself--and the DoD motto towards space advocates in the military in general."
"Don't ask, don't tell."
If it works. I think I'd settle for one more Hubble re-furbish, and call it quits. LVs should come first for a change.
We got enough cops on the streets. They raise their own revenue with radar guns in one hand and a doughnuts in the other. Maybe if they would just stick to crimes against people and property instead of prohibitionary nonsense we could save even more money.
There is no 'murder of science--that is a lie the pointy heads want us to believe. In the past 25 years--how many probes have we sent to the planets? Plenty. How many shuttle replacements? Zero.
If we keep giving the self-important academics everything they want--that is in effect a perpetual cut on real hardware like what Griffin is (at last) having NASA build.
How many folks in the science community cried when X-34, X-33, SLI or OSP bit the dust?
Oh yeah, go after the enginners and the LV/spacecraft advocates, but don't touch us, we can't wait for--say--larger LVs for even better science payloads--we want our Delta II sounding rockets now!
Or better yet--no real space missions--just give us white coats your tax dollars so's we can do in lab tests for self-promoting papers with our names on them--to go dusty on some shelf or other because no one reads them.
Is this the NASA we want? I say NO!
That is just more Goldin era nonsense--and that is why NASA is in the fix it is in, with engineers lacking, and Alt.spacers bashing.
Time to either support Griffin, or shut the f**k up.
Sadly, Griffin has had to adopt the old Goldin era tactic of "hand them a sucker and the brats will shut up for awhile."
Give them just enough to keep them busy, and out of our hair.
That kind of nickel and diming (where everybody got a little piece of the pie, but no one program really got what it needed) was what caused the Goldin era stagnation we are still recovering from.
I miss the old Griffin. (VSE first and damn everything else). He is reduced to bribes now. I wonder if the t/Space frauds will continue to bash NASA even with their mouths full.
Probably--they and the rest are ingrates no different than that old fossil Mikulski in D.C. Griffin rescued her Hubble, and now she undermines him with her and Boehlert's bashing.
Too bad they can't join Proxmire and go Tango Uniform.
Say, didn't Burt at T/Space propose a rocket based loosely off an overgrown sounding rocket, an engine copied from the V-2 except burning Methane, and a manned capsule modeld on the antique Corona spy sat film return capsule? What was that about "new technology" again?
ME-163 KOMET on steroids, meet Corona on steroids.
There is nothing new under the sun.
From another post:
It all comes down to money, again. To steal a quote from James Fallows, author of FREE FLIGHT (From pages 154-156):
"All entrepreneurs have a class grudge against all financiers...I once thought Klapmeier (from Cirrus) was going to kill me...when I told him about a friend of mine who received tens of millions in venture capital for an Internet-based company with no obvious 'revenue model.' ...The niche occupied by Dell Computers--a huge-volume, commodity producer--is not immediately available to Cirrus...Venture Capitalists keep offering them deals, but in return they want a large equity share in the company...The Klapmeiers faced the classic dilemma of entrepreneurs. Their stiffness, self-reliance, and refusal to listen to conventional opinions had allowed them to survive...(but)..there is a point when original virtues become liabilities..."
And that was for a small but otherwise conventional type of light aircraft.
The only thing for it would be to pass laws and "assign" worthy products to venture capitalists. For every hundred dollars of EXXON stock, an investor must place 10 dollars (per share) into some aviation/technology start up.
The carrot won't work. I think its time for some nice union-wielded baseball-bat style negotiations with the venture vultures--and make them fork it over.
It worked for Korolev. And it is working for Kliper. Oil money from Yukos/Gazprom is helping fund their space program. Now howabout we renew the call a windfall tax--to go to ours?
Who's with me?
That is why I keep hoping for a Saudi Sea Dragon or Nexxus class vehicle.
It all comes down to money, again. To steal a quote from James Fallows, author of FREE FLIGHT:
(From pages 154-156)
"All entrepreneurs have a class grudge against all financiers...I once thought Klapmeier (from Cirrus) was going to kill me...when I told him about a friend of mine who received tens of millions in venture capital for an Internet-based company with no obvious 'revenue model.' ...The niche occupied by Dell Computers--a huge-volume, commodity producer--is not immediately available to Cirrus...Venture Capitalists keep offering them deals, but in return they want a large equity share in the company...The Klapmeiers faced the classic dilemma of entrepreneurs. Their stiffness, self-reliance, and refusal to listen to conventional opinions had allowed them to survive...(but)..there is a point when original virtues become liabilities..."
And that was for a small but otherwise conventional type of light aircraft.
The only thing for it would be to pass laws and "assign" worthy products to venture capitalists. For every hundred dollars of EXXON stock, an investor must place 10 dollars (per share) into some aviation/technology start up.
The carrot won't work. I think its time for some nice union-wielded baseball-bat style negotiations with the venture vultures--and make them fork it over.
It worked for Korolev.
Not me.
And what kind of lame name is "New Shepard" anyway? They need to give their money to SpaceDev or Interorbital or some other pressure-fed backer.
But MIT did not take Hundreds of Billions just to build the place and years and years of doing nothing.
Well, in a way you did--you had to come to the continent--spend money on infrastructure on a little thing called the "United States," build roads, etc.
Then you worked on MIT. So you wound up with a lot of money spent on that too if you take in the costs of the initial beachhead on through actual construction.
ISS is just one of the things the pointy heads and the white coats use to attack VSE. What a lot of scientists--the ones who won't help you bake the LV development cake (Atlas V for NRO, NH) but will help you eat it--don't understand is that they are the equivalents of folks asking for an oceanographic ship when we are still building longboats, as it were.
Spaceflight is a new field--and the engineering has got to come first--the science can wait.
What?
Good links.
Just as long as it is CaLV that lifts Liftport--I'm happy.
Its P&W now--with Rocketdyne gone.
It's official
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … 466#M37466
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20593
Heavy CaLV
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … 1&start=76
CaLV measurements
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … =5&start=1
CaLV uses
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … =9&start=1
Good news:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0 … esday.html
CLV with Centaur
http://simcosmos.planetaclix.pt/06_mult … VEPics.htm
In other news:
Kliper
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … =2&start=1
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … =5&start=1
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz3_lv.html
Modest Moon
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006 … 593317.htm
Lawsuit
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=65822
Boeing got hit with a half-billion in fines. They need to cede that to VSE
Good for switching and time-sharing--but don't get your FTL hopes up.
That spacesuit looks lame. Apollo suits had an antagonizing look to them--such that people jump when what looked to be a statue moved and scared tourists.
I think suits don't need to be photographed unless they have a good look to avoid the giggle factor.
Then again you have the Nasa bashers out there writing...
NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space
Have never heard of the Denarius IV spacecraft or of its unmanned monetary-ejection program to study the effect of a hard-vacuum, zero-gravity environment on $50 and $100 bills.
Whoever wrote that deserves a Buzz Aldrin punch to the jaw.
A happy medium, big relativly simple turbopump engines and huge dumb solid rocket boosters... viola', NASA's CaLV.
Sea Dragon or other vehicles its scale is too big to handle/fuel/etc efficiently, and puts too many eggs in one basket if it fails.
I agree with you on CaLV. It MUST be supported.
Sea Dragon can come later for bulk payloads, and is simple in using shipyard techiniques. Compared to the Troll platform it is a lightweight.
Here is my concept. CaLV with engine out lofts important payloads, or Mars Ships. Large Sea Dragon LVs orbit only propellant into any CaLV launched Mars-ships, with the empty 'Dragon upper-stage /container remaining in orbit as a thick hulled space station module--wet stage style.
This way, with each Mars trip, you get a free station to be donated to business so long as they sign up to maintain its orbit. Unlike shuttle ET', the Sea Dragon upper stage should remain in orbit longer. It has greater mass and resistance to meteors and radiation.
Sea Dragon would be used for low value steel loads and what not. High value articles go atop CaLV. If Sea Dragon fails, you only lose low value articles. The Mars ship launched by CaLV remains empty and there is no boil off.
Sea Dragon II then fills up the Mars ship in one go--with absolutely no boil off. You have plenty left over to vent As soon as you fill up, you are ready to go.
Mars 1.5
EELV launches only weathersats and comsats.
And have the Air Force fund it by accident thinking its an RLV. That suits me just fine!
Here is a nice link:
http://www.ilr.tu-berlin.de/koelle/ILR- … ILR351.pdf
This blurb I found on the web thanks to the good people over at http://www.nasaspaceflight.com
"The www.avia.ru english newsbrief had the following news on the RD-171M:"
Russian liquid-propellant engine ZhRD-171M has been given a special designation allowing it to be serially produced including its production by state-tailored order, according to information obtained by an ARMS-TASS correspondent at NPO Energomash, a Russia's leading enterprise specializing in production of liquid-propellant engines. By a decision taken by the Defense Ministry and Roscosmos the engines RD-171D has been designated with 01 giving green light to the engine to be serially produced in the framework of state order, said Energomash press secretary Yuri Korotkov. At present the RD-171M engine developed for Energiya-Buran system is mounted on rocket carriers Zenit which are used to launch space vehicles under a Morskoi Start project. At Baikonur efforts are currently being made, as well, under the Nazemny Start project providing for commercial launches with the help of Zenit boosters.
Misc:
New Threat!
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_18 … ddiscovery
Space spiders for SPS:
http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/news_furoshiki.htm
Kliper news:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums … 10&posts=2