New Mars Forums

Operating the Shuttle side by side with the Shuttle-C could very well be prohibtively expensive. You'd definately have to suspend Shuttle ops for the duration of the of developement.

Now if I understand your manifest your launching two Shuttle-C's per orbiter flight. Thats quite taxing on the pad and recovery teams. Thats 6 SRBs, three ETs, and a very quick scrub down of one pad. I'd spread that out more, maybe one ripple fire every 6 months. Also, are you planning on putting anything in the Orbiter bay?

I saw this, and said "Dear God tell he made that head line up".

No such luck. 

IF, and this is a big if, they were to halt STS ops at the end of the year, keeping Endeavour prepped as much as possible (to keep the senators who demand manned flight capability happy) then we might have the funds to develop the shuttle-c and a CEV, maybe without that special expenditure, which would go over Congress like a lead balloon.

Now if started today it would take at least two years to get operational. And there are other issues. Among them is the fact that the Station was designed to be built from the Shuttle. Pieces would be lifted out of the bay by the CanadArm, crews would work from them, ect. At least one Shuttle-C would have to have its own arm. And that’s assuming that there’s a way save it. Plus we’re going to have to develop a way to control it, preferably from the station. If not, we’ll have to have put some sort of cockpit on the first one. Hopefully in that case we can save the cockpit, and dock later cargo pods with it.

Another issue is crew launch. Without the Shuttle, the only thing we have is Soyuz. And that’s only 3 people. I don't know how many people it takes to do the construction ops. So you have to launch 2 Soyuz. Which were going to have to pay for. And somehow launch very quickly. Which means Congress will have to clear up that thing with Iran. Unless of course Russia can pull a Kliper out of its butt. Come to think of it, the Ruskies would be pretty pissed at having to continue to launch crews all by themselves over the course of Shuttle-C development. Perhaps in the spirit of international cooperation NASA and the ESA can help the Russians jumpstart the Kliper.  God knows the Russians can light a fire under its engineers. Literally. Of course for all I know the combination of the 2 man Station crew and a single 3 man Soyuz crew would be enough.

In any event, it would be preferable to spend all this money were spending on the Shuttle on something that hasn't already been earmarked for the Smithsonian. The Shuttle-C a great start as far heavy lift in concerned, and developing it now gives us a jumpstart for the VSE. The Inline option is better, but we won't be starting that until after 2010 anyway. And who's to say we'll want to use the inline option every time anyway.

China won't be going to Mars anytime soon for too reasons...

1) Its a hell of a lot of money to spend for no forseeable financial gain
2) Its a surefire way to get the place swarming with Americans

The moon could be an issue if China continues on its current rate of economic growth. But I think just about everyone agrees its unsustainable for any number of reasons.

Quite frankly China wants Tiawan more than it wants the Moon or Mars. And its not going to get it under the current regime.

On Wednesday while they were booting up the 4 redundant main computers, the NASA TV people were saying that each computer did its own calculation and then compared notes. The majority could vote out a bad result.

Why can't we do this with sensors? We know darn well when the tank gets empty. When the one gives a bad reading, the others should be able to tell it the shut up.

Not fast enough. Someone can do a lot of damage before the stuff circulates through the blood stream.

Hey, anytime we can get the people who control the pursestrings interested in space seems worth it to me.

I really don't think Griffen will limit himself like that.

With a EELV, we could in theory do a "quick and dirty" Capsule CEV with legs that would do a direct shot, short duration mission that would be perform pure local science, and allow us to cover a couple dozen sites in a few years.

Mixing and matching is the key.

If its just one faulty gauge out of 4, in theory they probably just need to swap out that gauge.

Of course that could mean removing and reinstalling loads of equipment, requiring hundreds of checkouts...........

Out of curiousity is there any reason why they couldn't have countinued all the way up the checklist before aborting. Then they could have caught any other issues that may be lurking.

They can't finish the ISS with two shuttles.

Next launch window is tommorrow at 3:24pm ET.

Yeah, I can just picture everyone in mission control smacking their foreheads all at once.