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| Re: Intrepid Museum Gets Shuttle Enterprise (764078) | |||
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Re: Intrepid Museum Gets Shuttle Enterprise |
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Posted by WillD on Tue Apr 12 16:41:11 2011, in response to Re: Intrepid Museum Gets Shuttle Enterprise, posted by Mitch45 on Tue Apr 12 16:03:57 2011. Obama axed nothing. The FY2011 budget as proposed included an *increase* in allocations for NASA. What the FY2011 budget proposal removed were the needlessly wasteful Ares I and V crew and cargo launch vehicles, which we would have been lucky to have operational by the 2020s. In place of these we'd have developed the technology to do space exploration in a more sustainable manner using existing launch vehicle assets and developing a large domestic kerolox engine to allow a lower cost heavy lift vehicle to be developed, while also eliminating the Russian RD-180 engines on the Atlas V medium launch vehicle.Bush's Apollo-on-steroids approach was never going to get anyone anywhere beyond LEO. The Shuttle SRB based Ares I was wholly inadequate to the task of boosting the heavy Orion Crew Exploration Capsule into orbit. It's inadequacy resulted in a sort of reverse requirements creep in the Orion, the Altair LEM, and the Ares V cargo launcher. As the Ares I was found to be more and more inadequate as a launcher, the Orion's engineers continually had to shift things to make it lighter and less capable. Those capabilities were shifted to the Altair lander and its Ares V launcher, both of which grew to prodigious, yet extremely wasteful proportions. The Ares V, a prerequisite to doing any sort of exploration beyond LEO, was delayed over and over again until the earliest estimate of its initial operating capability was pegged sometime in the mid 2020s. Incidentally we will still get a manned space capsule. The Orion capsule has been retitled the Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, but it's essentially the same thing. With the prospect of a more capable launcher than the Ares I (either a Delta IVH, Atlas VH, Falcon 9H, or the proposed Space Launch System MLV [the heaviest of the four]), some elements are being reintroduced to make it more habitable on long duration spaceflight. At the moment NASA's management of the Space Launch System leaves a lot to be desired and I am not overly optimistic that even if the studies are completed they'll result in an effective replacement for the Shuttle. This isn't all that big a deal because of the commercial spaceflight contracts which the Bush administration nearly zeroed out we'll now be getting another three to five vehicles in addition to the NASA/LockMart Orion. SpaceX's Orion is probably the best known of the field, but there's also Orbital Science Corp's Cygnus, another Commercial Resupply vehicle to the ISS (and it will launch from Wallops Island, VA). NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation, and Commercial Crew contracts are still up in the air, but all indications are that offerings from SpaceX (a manned Dragon), and a shuttle-like spaceplane from Orbital will be frontrunners. Also in the running will be Boeing's CST-100 capsule, Sierra Nevada's Dreamchaser spaceplane, and Blue Origin's as-yet-unrevealed spacecraft. I was a big proponent of the Jupiter launcher which the Direct team offered as a directly Shuttle derived heavy lifter as an alternative to the Ares I and V. As a result I was quite pleased to see Congress direct NASA to develop a vehicle which appeared to be a reasonable facsimile for the proposed rocket. Unfortunately since the NASA authorization was passed the space agency appears to have everything possible to bloat the rocket back up to the gargantuan, expensive proportions of the Ares V they were directed to stop building. IMHO if we're going to get anywhere then we'd do best to get NASA out of the business of building and launching rockets, and turn it over to ULA, SpaceX, and whatever other domestic builder wants to do it. ULA's Propellant Depot based lunar exploration plan really only hinges on the development of their Advanced Common Evolved Stage (or ACES) which they likely need to develop anyway. An ACES/PD based exploration system would be launcher neutral and by increasing flight rate the cost to build each individual rocket would decrease. A similar paper has been authored which focuses on SpaceX's recently reannounced Falcon 9 Heavy booster. These concepts can be undertaken without developing any new rockets, which results in an enormous savings. It is possible we could explore the moon and send astronauts to a near Earth Asteroid while remaining under even the most conservative budget assessment for NASA in the coming years. With any luck as we continued operating this nearly lunar base concept we'd rapidly fall into the sort of economics which would make reusability a viable option. |
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