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The headline on the Marssociety home page proclaims,Post Kitty Hawk Momentum Shifts to Mars , later in the editorial it states "we won".
Someone please explain to me how the fact that President Bush delayed any announcement indicates the position is shifting in our favor.
Maybe there will be no decision. My personal opinion is that he wants the maxium exposure so maybe he will do something on the anniversary of the Challenger or Columbia disasters.
Meantime , I hope our rovers make it to Mars sucessfully, I'm counting on at least the Beagle 2 getting there. Will see if that creates some public momentum.
portal.holo-spot.net
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With all the posts I've been putting out, I don't want anyone to get the impression I'm anti Mars, I'd rather see us go to Mars than the moon. However I do believe somewhere down the line the country needs to go back to the moon.
Either its going to be the moon as the offshoot of a mars program or mars as the offshoot of a lunar program. Doesn't make since to have a space program which doesn't have a means to reach your own satellite .. does it.
I'd like to thank the folks at newsMars for indirectly leading me to typepad and movabletype. I'm attempting to write a novel about moon/mars exploration and I was looking for a nice platform. I have a test site at sol3.typepad.com and secured the domain www.sol-3.org, I plan to have my own messageboard also. This kind of web activity can only help our cause I hope, anyone ever thought of starting an on-line Marssociety charter, based on a weblog that members could update. Just an idea.
portal.holo-spot.net
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"We won." might be a bit overoptimistic, but... IF the landers do ok (15% chance, duh) then hing look good.
in other news (Aviation weekly): OSP has been indefinitely postponed! GOOD! Finally people are starting to realise it would be a dead end road.
Some comments on this new development: thespacereview
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Again I fail to see the good news, postponed but not replaced by any other plan. Kind of like saying hey wer're shutting down the ISS for we can devert the funding to Iraq. I'm not going to declare victory until there's a proposal on the floor.
wgc
portal.holo-spot.net
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The thing with the OSP is (was?) that it got pushed, while no one knew if it would be really useful. Te only thing that was sure about it, was that it would cost time and money... for a glorified life-boat, not a full-fledged piece of hardware. So it's good it got virtually scrapped, means people are starting ro rhink about 'the bigger picture'
In the short run, is seems negative: "we build nothing"
but overall, WHEN something 'll be built, it won't be a simple over expensive life-boat.
There's a perfectly capable Soyuz and Progress, The European Automated cargo delivery stuff will be in use shortly, so America should focus on something else, not copy this.
But what?
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There's a perfectly capable Soyuz and Progress, The European Automated cargo delivery stuff will be in use shortly, so America should focus on something else, not copy this.
I agree, no reason to rush anything. Also, my spin on things. Good Policy evolves, it does not happen overnight. So, we should be a little more patient. I don't have a lot of Faith in Dubya, but I am willing to let him Suprise me. We need a good solid feasible goal, that is reachable within 8-10 years at a reasonable cost and without a major need for technology. Then we can branch out from there. Personnally I would settle for the moon in the short term for a chance at Mars in the Long term. With the success rate of craft going to Mars, I wouldn't send a person their till that improved dramatically.
We are only limited by our Will and our Imagination.
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Don't be so hasty to diss the OSP concept... I agree that the way that Nasa was setting about building it, telling LM/Boeing/Orbital et al to "come up with somthing right now" was a mistake but the idea of building a ship which can be done in the near-term with near-term technology soley as a people carrier is a good idea.
Why you might ask? The question begs... what else are you going to do? How else are you going to get people into space? Relying on Russia's too-small Soyuz system is a non-starter, since it isn't American and since its rough on the crew and recovery. Shuttle will hopefully be on its way out soon after ISS is finished. Putting people on a Shuttle-Derived vehicle Mars Direct style is a bad idea for a variety of reasons (man raiting mainly). And lastly, the supposed ultra-reliable hypersonic spaceplanes or "son of DC-X" are not going to happen for a long time. Private companies will hardly be getting orbital in this time frame.
Since it will be a long time before Hyper-X/NASP style planes become viable and its unlikly DC-X will be revisited or reach that reliability mark, we are stuck with the technology that we have today more-or-less of 1960's style rockets for our "next" manned ship. The very concept of putting people and cargo together is a great way to make your rocket unessesarrily heavy and expensive, like Shuttle turned out to be. Making a 20-ton-payload rocket to launch and recover one ton of human payload is rediculus, since 100% of that massive rocket should be >99% reliable and recoverable for that 5% of payload. This is probably the cheif reason, above and beyond any other, that the Shuttle design is a dismal failure. The Saturn-V system is a great way to beat Communists to the Moon, but is a horrible way to get people in and out of orbit.
So, since we do need a lifeboat/taxi on ISS in order to fully man it (unless Russia comes up with double the Soyuz flight rate), and we will need a new way in and out of orbit with reuseable Moon/Mars ships, a small and reuseable space taxi makes sense. Somthing like the HL-20 or DynaSoar that keep getting proposed and shelved in favor of quicker (Saturn) or bigger (Shuttle) systems, and hold a gun to Nasa's head to do it right. The only real reuseable alternative is to end manned space flight after Shuttle until Nasa's third-generation Hyper-X/NASP space plane becomes mature.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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But OSP was mainly a friggin' life-boat for the crew. (Oh, yeah, there was some place for a small lunchbox and a Gameboy, too...:p )
Now that'd look good for the public: A once proud space-faring nation, reduced to producing dingies, while others talk about the moon and Mars....
And ok, i see the pressing need for a life-boat (well... kinda, it's just political stubborness not to buy some perfectly capable Soyuzes, IMHO)
But it should be more, capable to refurb for other missions, use a stripped down version as a life-boat, but use fully-functional versions for other stuff...
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Ah but the OSP project, unlike all of Nasa's other recent ideas, is not an end unto itself. If we are going to be sending ships to and from the Moon or Mars soon with a reuseable ship, which I hope that they do, you are going to need some means of getting people in and out of orbit easily and safely. Plus since the Moon is so close, OSP itself could be used as the manned section of a lander.
OSP need not be a completly stripped-down life raft of a space ship; OSP could be a robust space ship, just without the school-bus sized cargo bay and "space work truck" Shuttle hardware. A real ship with a cockpit and Shuttle-grade life support, not like the X-37 winged escape pod. A winged/lifting body ship with wheels is ideal since it can glide long ranges, having a hundred times more cross-range than Apollo, the re-entry is much more gentle at 1.5G and lower average heating plus a soft airplane landing instead of the 4G hard plunge with Soyuz. And if its built like HL-20, won't have to throw away the OMS module and heat shield on every flight, and its generally easier to handle a small airplane than a oddly weighted capsule.
If we need OSP or not really depends on what Nasa is doing for the next 20 years: if we are resolving to build a Mars or Moon ship in the near term, like 2015-2020 or earlier range, then building a good OSP makes sense, if Nasa intends to go anywhere later than this, then a manned Hyper-X/NASP SSTO spaceplane might be reliable and cheap enough, so OSP would be redundant. If this is the case, then the need for OSP hinges entirely on the ISS, and what Nasa intends to do with it, will it become a "mission sucess: we learned how to build big things in space! research? it wasn't ever supposed to be for research."?
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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