NASA finally gets smart, changes paradigm. - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

billege · 08-02-2005, 09:33 AM

I can not tell you how happy this new train of thought makes me. The shuttle was never a good idea. It was a study in political expediancy after the Apollo flights.

People were tired of the massive funding...things were getting scaled back. NASA had to choose one of two options: lose man-in-space and do automated probes, or do the shuttle. The shuttle program would fund multiple contractors, in multiple states. Which one had more political capital, do you think?
They KNEW the shuttle would be expensive and complicated, they KNEW it'd be cheaper to build big dumb boosters that could fling as much weight up as possible, and then be tossed. But how sexy is that?
(Well, okay, in NASA's defense: they thought it'd be cheaper to do the shuttle. That was the advertising behind the shuttle, but I don't know they ever believed it. Then, as now, the engineering challenges to a reusable vehicle were obvious. No matter what they really believed then, it's become apparent that that the shuttle costs a fortune per launch.)

Landing on the moon was amazing, it personally pisses me off we've been jerking off in low earth orbit for 40 years after it.

We still can only get things in orbit by using a big ass rocket. Reusable rockets are expensive!! We know this. The key to success in space is $$/lb to orbit. If you can get the price per pound down, you win. It's very simple math.
The dual vehicle way is really smart. There's no reason to spend $$ to get people into orbit when you just need to fling a load of tools/food to the space staion, or MOON BASE, which would be amazing.
The cost savings in that have to be immense. Forget man-rating the rocket, you're just shooting up food and tools.

Anyway, that's my feelings, here's the article:

Original Article

Quote:

Redesign Is Seen for Next Craft, NASA Aides Say

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: August 2, 2005

For its next generation of space vehicles, NASA has decided to abandon the design principles that went into the aging space shuttle, agency officials and private experts say.

The Return to Space

With so much riding on the Discovery launching, critical changes have been made to the shuttle. Also, a look back at the history of the shuttle program.

Instead, they say, the new vehicles will rearrange the shuttle's components into a safer, more powerful family of traditional rockets.

The plan would separate the jobs of hauling people and cargo into orbit and would put the payloads on top of the rockets - as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.

By making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its price.

"The existing components offer us huge cost advantages as opposed to starting from a clean sheet of paper," the new administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin, told reporters on Friday.

The plan, whose origins go back two and a half years, is emerging at a time when it may help deflect attention from the current troubles of the shuttle fleet.

The Discovery's astronauts are to make a spacewalk tomorrow to fix a potentially hazardous problem with cloth filler on its belly.

Future missions have been indefinitely suspended while NASA tries to solve the persistent shedding of foam from the external fuel tank at liftoff.

The plan for new vehicles is to be formally unveiled this month. Its outlines were gleaned from interviews and reviews of trade reports, Congressional testimony and official statements. Some details were reported on Sunday in The Orlando Sentinel.

On Friday, Dr. Griffin emphasized the plan's safety, telling reporters that the new generation of rockets would have their payloads up high to avoid the kinds of dangers that doomed the Columbia two and a half years ago and threatened the Discovery last week when insulating foam broke off its fuel tank shortly after liftoff.

"As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."

Congress would have to approve the initiative, and many questions remain. John E. Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private Washington research group on military and space topics, said he wondered how NASA could remain within its budget while continuing to pay billions of dollars for the shuttle and building a new generation of rockets and capsules.

Alex Roland, a former historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who now teaches at Duke University and is a frequent critic of the space program, said the plan had "the aroma of a quick and dirty solution to a big problem."

But supporters say it will let astronauts move expeditiously back into the business of exploration rather than endlessly circling the home planet, and do so fairly quickly.

"The shuttle is not a lemon," Scott J. Horowitz, an aerospace engineer and former astronaut who helped develop the new plan, said in an interview. "It's just too complicated. I know from flying it four times. It's an amazing engineering feat. But there's a better way."

Dr. Horowitz was one of a small group of astronauts, shaken by the Columbia disaster, who took it upon themselves in 2003 to come up with a safer approach to exploring space. Their effort, conceived while they were in Lufkin, Tex., helping search for shuttle wreckage, became part of the NASA program to design a successor to the shuttle fleet.

The three remaining shuttles are to be retired by 2010 under the Bush administration's plan for space exploration, which is intended to return humans to the Moon and eventually Mars.

The new vehicles would sidestep the foam threat altogether, and its supporters say they would have other advantages as well. The larger of the vehicles, for lifting heavy cargoes but not people, would be some 350 feet tall, rivaling the Saturn 5 rockets that sent astronauts to the Moon.

The smaller one, for carrying people, would still dwarf the shuttle, which stands 184 feet high with its attached rockets and fuel tank.

The spaceships would no longer look like airplanes. Their payloads, whether humans or cargo, would ride in capsules at the top rather than alongside the fuel tank - standard practice until the shuttle era. Rather than gliding back to Earth, they would deploy parachutes and land on the ground in the Western United States.

"The goal is not how good the stuff looks," said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "It's results. The goal is to get people back to the Moon and eventually onto Mars. And this system, given the budget constraints, is a reasonable way to go."

With so much riding on the Discovery launching, critical changes have been made to the shuttle. Also, a look back at the history of the shuttle program.

A main advantage, supporters say, is that the big rocket could lift five or six times as much cargo as the shuttle (roughly 100 tons versus 20 tons), making it the world's most powerful space vehicle. In theory, it would be strong enough to haul into orbit whole spaceships destined for the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Just as important, officials and private experts say, the small rocket for astronauts would be at least 10 times as safe as the shuttle, whose odds of disaster are estimated at roughly 1 in 100. The crew capsule atop the rocket would rendezvous in orbit with gear and spaceships that the bigger rocket ferried aloft, or with the International Space Station.

"It's safe, simple and soon," said Dr. Horowitz, an industry executive since he left the astronaut corps in October. "And it should cost less money" than the shuttles. Their reusability over 100 missions was originally meant to slash expenses but the cost per flight ended up being roughly $1 billion.

"We need to get this as simple and affordable as possible," Dr. Horowitz said, "because there's a lot of other things we need to spend our money on when it comes to exploration."

Asked whether the new designs meant NASA was going back to the future, he replied, "You can say, 'Hey, that looks pretty retro,' " but he drew an analogy to passenger jets from decades ago and those of today. "They look the same," he said, "but are completely different."

By drawing on existing technology, the plan is meant to speed President Bush's goal of revitalizing human space exploration. At the same time, it would upend the strategy of NASA's previous administrator, Sean O'Keefe, who wanted to discard the shuttle in favor of military rockets, which would have required costly upgrades to make them safe for humans. And their payloads would have been relatively small, requiring strings of multiple rocket launchings.

Dr. Horowitz said he and two fellow astronauts ended up endorsing the traditional idea of putting payloads atop the rocket instead of on its side, as far as possible from the dangers below. They also envisioned an escape system that would lift the crew capsule out of harm's way if serious trouble arose.

After January 2004, when Mr. Bush announced a national effort to "extend a human presence across our solar system," Dr. Horowitz hit on the idea of using the shuttle's booster rocket as a first stage. He did the math and found it ideal. Moreover, the booster rocket was already approved for human flight and - despite its role in the 1986 Challenger disaster - had earned an excellent safety record.

The second stage of the crew rocket would feature a updated version of the J-2 engine, which in the 1960's and 1970's helped propel the astronauts to the Moon.

Dr. Horowitz said industry studies put the risk of catastrophic failure for the newly envisioned crew rocket at 1 in 1,000 to 3,000. "It's never going to be like driving your car," he said. "But it's a huge step in the right direction."

After leaving the astronaut corps, he went to work for the booster maker, ATK Thiokol, where he now leads the company's effort to develop the new family of rockets. An ATK Web site, www.safesimplesoon.com, discusses the shuttle-derived vehicles. The giant cargo rocket would feature a large fuel tank atop throwaway shuttle engines and, hanging on its side, a pair of shuttle booster rockets.

Several analysts said that retaining the shuttle contractors would probably help the effort not only financially, but also politically. In Florida alone, a state with blood ties to the White House, the shuttle program employs some 14,000 technicians and engineers, managers and contractors.

tecoyah · 08-02-2005, 10:02 AM

Two Words:

Space Elevator

j8ear · 08-02-2005, 12:09 PM

I've heard of the space elevator theory. Something about a huge cable being suspended in space by only a station in orbit confuses my feeble physics/space theoryless mind.

I think about Nasa and their huge budgets in dispair, but heard a NASA beaurocrats on Meet the Press with Tim Russert talk about something very interesting. Specifically, he spoke of a perecentage of the defense budget that is allocated to NASA, which is around 5%. In those terms, it doesn't sound so bad. Whatever the money spent...it is always best to spend it wisely.

Something lacking from ALL GOVERNMENTS at just about every expenditure.

As far as this article goes, I like the proposals. Purpose built vehicles. Makes alot of sense.

-bear

Charlatan · 08-02-2005, 12:17 PM

Space elevators *are* cool and will likely work in the future... in the meantime...

They should launch the big freight via big booster rockets and launch the human components in something like SpaceShipOne... smaller, cheaper, etc. With some additional work it could be strong enough to act as a taxi for the ISS. I bet they could also build some sort freighter that never needs to leave orbit... it could link up with freight shot up by the boosters and ferry it to the ISS.

Seems to me it would be a lot cheaper.

politicophile · 08-02-2005, 12:21 PM

Mmmm, the "Red Mars" trilogy....

A space elevator would make it very cost efficient, indeed, to venture much further from earth.

ObieX · 08-02-2005, 12:30 PM

They've gotta do something. The shuttle wont get us anywhere. If they're really serious about "moon mars and beyond" we need more powerful ships, gotta get them into space and gotta get started on all this 5 years ago.

Ustwo · 08-02-2005, 01:56 PM

I'd love to see a space elevator, but I'd love to see a lot of things we might not quite have the technology for yet.

kramus · 08-02-2005, 02:50 PM

It will be the most amazing feat humanity accomplishes when there is a functioning space elevator. But while we wait for industrial grade production of the new materials they are developing to carry the tremendous dynamic load, and other concerns such as how to operate the elevator craft (is it 25,000 miles long? been quite a while since I read any real figures) and take care of drift, leo objects and solar storms, we can get the LeGrange points settled/industrialized using the traditional heavy boosters and parachute drops. (wouldn't it be cool to have a fleet of uber-blimps hauling the boosters around and handling the goods manufactured in space!). Earth orbit gets industrialized, the moon gets a magnetic launch facility built, and we are on the way to Mars and beyond. The first step is to get those boosters going.

I find the whole thing really exciting.

Bagezio2 · 08-02-2005, 04:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Charlatan

Space elevators *are* cool and will likely work in the future... in the meantime...

well then be prepared to listen to a lot of elevator music! Geez, how long would that ride take!

kramus · 08-02-2005, 04:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bagezio2

well then be prepared to listen to a lot of elevator music! Geez, how long would that ride take!

Days, probably. There would be major hotels and such along the elevator. The culture of the thing will be fascinating too - the different levels, what goes on there, yadda yadda yadda

Charlatan · 08-02-2005, 04:42 PM

I would think the trip would take around 5 or 6 hours.

And yes, that's a lot of elevator music.

Elphaba · 08-02-2005, 05:09 PM

I've been facinated about the prospect of a space elevator since I first read about it in an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The carbon material is being worked on locally. One question I have had is how will collisions with the elevator be prevented?

sailor · 08-02-2005, 06:16 PM

Yeah, it does sorta strike me as a quick fix rather than a comprehensive overhaul, but the point is that they are doing something, and that's better than NASA has done for the past 20 years. I'm thrilled to see them actually thinking about doing something more than spending a billion dollars to examine frogs in space--we could get to the moon 30 years ago, but not now?

And I must say, while I havent agreed with much else Bush has done, I applaud his efforts to get NASA moving again. It's needed a swift kick in the ass for a quarter of a century now.

shakran · 08-02-2005, 07:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by j8ear

I've heard of the space elevator theory. Something about a huge cable being suspended in space by only a station in orbit confuses my feeble physics/space theoryless mind.

Easy explanation:

Ever take a bucket of water and swing it around really fast? The water stayed in the bucket even when it was upside down because of centrifugal force. The theory behind the space elevator is the swinging bucket on a massive scale. run a rope from the earth way out in space. The rotation of the earth swings whatever's on the end of the rope really freakin' fast. The centrifugal force makes your end-of-rope object pull tightly on the rope, which allows you to run an elevator car up and down the rope.

As for the space vehicle program, I think going back to the capsule days for manned space exploration is a mistake. The problem with the non-reuseable stuff is that every single time you go in to space you have to build an entirely new space ship. The theory behind the space shuttle is sound. After all, if you had to buy a new car every morning, you'd end up spending a fortune. But because you can use the same car tomorrow that you used today, you save a lot of money. Not only that, you figure out the individual quirks of your car - you get used to it in other words. If you replaced it every day you'd always be driving a new vehicle.

As I said the theory behind the shuttle is very sound, but the shuttle itself is too expensive and complicated, and most of it's not reuseable anyway. The tank dies right away. The SRB's (big rockets on the side of the tank) sometimes don't survive the return to earth, and even when they do they're only good for a few launches anyway. The shuttle has to be overhauled after EVERY SINGLE flight. It's insane. If commercial airlines ran like that they'd have to rebuild their 747's after one transatlantic crossing. They'd go under in less than a week.

The real answer is to design a new shuttle. Don't launch it vertically. It takes a crapload more fuel to launch vertically than it does to take off horizontally. In fact it takes so much fuel that a good portion of the fuel the shuttle uses is just used to lift the fuel. Again, insane.

Launch the thing like an airplane. Give it 2 sets of engines. Simple, PROVEN jet engines for atmospheric flight. Rocket engines that take over when the air gets too thin for the jets. You could get it to mach 3 (and probably faster -- mach 3 is just the official speed record for an airforce bird) on jets, then let the rockets take over for the final push. Bring it back to earth by slowing it down with rockets, then let jets take over once the atmosphere is thick enough and you're going slow enough again.

Redesign the heat shielding system. The tile system is great and the tiles are really cool - ever seen the demo where they glue a tile to your hand, fire a blowtorch at the other side, and your hand stays totally cool? But the problem is that the tiles just love to fall off and get damaged. A ton of tiles have to be replaced every time the shuttle comes back to earth. Figure out another way to do this. Use an ablative heat shield if you must, but preferably figure out a permanent solution - and by permanent I mean one that doesn't require major overhaul every time you make one trip.

Sure the development costs would probably be high, but it makes the most sense.

ObieX · 08-02-2005, 08:00 PM

The parachute returns don't sit well with me. There's just too many ways for them to fail. The charge won't go off.. or isnt enough.. cords snap/tangle.. chutes don't always fill with air correctly.. etc. I mean look at what happened to that craft they sent to study the sun recently.. i got to watch it splat into the desert live on NASA TV. Sure it was entertaining, but a huge waste of cash. And of course the capsules would contain people which don't stand up as well to high speed impacts.

tecoyah · 08-03-2005, 11:01 AM

A bit more info.....if you are so inclined:

The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
27 March 2002

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO -- Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction "imagineering", researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality.

Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space ideawell, you can't be weak of mind.

Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.

Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids and beyond - they are routinely accessible via the space elevator. And for all its promise and grandeur, this mega-project is made practical by the tiniest of technologies - carbon nanotubes.

Seen as an engineering undertaking for the opening decades of the 21st century, the space elevator proposal was highlighted here during the 2002 Space and Robotics Conferences, held March 17-21, and sponsored by the Aerospace Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Thought experiment

Science fiction writers have been deploying space elevators for years.

Space visionary, Arthur Clarke, centered his novel of the late 1970s, The Fountains of Paradise, on the notion. Also, among other writers, Kim Stanley-Robinson's Red Mars noted the soaring splendor of an elevator to space. Furthermore, the scheme has bounced around technical journals for decades. Some call it a "thought experiment", but others point out that space exploration B.C. -- "Before Cable" -- will pale contrasted to what's possible within ten to fifteen years.

"Even though the challenges to bring the space elevator to reality are substantial, there are no physical or economic reasons why it can't be built in our lifetime." That's the matter-of-fact feeling of physicist, Bradley Edwards of Eureka Scientific in Berkeley, California, but carrying out heavy lifting design work in Seattle, Washington.

Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said.

"In 15 years we could have a dozen cables running full steam putting 50 tons in space every day for even less, including upper middle class individuals wanting a joyride into space. Now I just need the $5 billion, Edwards added.

And so it grows

For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth's surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge.

The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable's far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets.

Putting physics aside the toughest challenge has been finding a super-strong cable material. "That's what has kept this idea in science fiction for 40 years," Edwards said. But the right stuff in terms of cable material is no longer thought of as "unobtainium", he said.

The answer is carbon-nanotube-composite ribbon. Small fibers of the material are set down side-by-side, then interconnected to form a growing ribbon.

Stronger than steel

The hurdle to date, Edwards said, has been the commercial fabrication of carbon nanotubes. Both U.S. and Japanese firms, among others, are ramping up production of carbon nanotubes, with tons of this now exotic matter soon to be available. "That quantity of material is going to be around well before five years time. It's not going to take long," he said.

Given the far stronger-than-steel ribbon of carbon nanotubes, a space elevator could be up within a decade. "There's no real serious stumbling block to this," Edwards explained.

"The making of carbon nanotubes is moving very quick," said Hayam Benaroya, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. "We're moving from the scientific stage of just developing them to actual commercial entities producing them in ton-like quantities," he said.

"Perhaps within our lifetimes we might actually see real designs of skyhooks and space tethers, these kinds of things. They may be feasible at reasonable cost," Benaroya said.

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020327-1.html
someone is taking this relatively...seriously
http://www.liftport.com/

j8ear · 08-03-2005, 01:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

Easy explanation:

Ever take a bucket of water and swing it around really fast? The water stayed in the bucket even when it was upside down because of centrifugal force. The theory behind the space elevator is the swinging bucket on a massive scale. run a rope from the earth way out in space. The rotation of the earth swings whatever's on the end of the rope really freakin' fast. The centrifugal force makes your end-of-rope object pull tightly on the rope, which allows you to run an elevator car up and down the rope.

Wow that was an easy explanation.

Makes perfect sense.

Tecoyah...that was a great article. I'm seriously thinking of getting into the carbon nanotube manufacturing business now. Time to put out the funding feelers.

-bear

08-02-2005, 10:02 AM	#2 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	Two Words: Space Elevator __________________ Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

08-02-2005, 12:09 PM	#3 (permalink)
j8ear Gentlemen Farmer Location: Middle of nowhere, Jersey	I've heard of the space elevator theory. Something about a huge cable being suspended in space by only a station in orbit confuses my feeble physics/space theoryless mind. I think about Nasa and their huge budgets in dispair, but heard a NASA beaurocrats on Meet the Press with Tim Russert talk about something very interesting. Specifically, he spoke of a perecentage of the defense budget that is allocated to NASA, which is around 5%. In those terms, it doesn't sound so bad. Whatever the money spent...it is always best to spend it wisely. Something lacking from ALL GOVERNMENTS at just about every expenditure. As far as this article goes, I like the proposals. Purpose built vehicles. Makes alot of sense. -bear __________________ It's alot easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to ask for permission.

08-02-2005, 12:17 PM	#4 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	Space elevators are cool and will likely work in the future... in the meantime... They should launch the big freight via big booster rockets and launch the human components in something like SpaceShipOne... smaller, cheaper, etc. With some additional work it could be strong enough to act as a taxi for the ISS. I bet they could also build some sort freighter that never needs to leave orbit... it could link up with freight shot up by the boosters and ferry it to the ISS. Seems to me it would be a lot cheaper. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

08-02-2005, 12:21 PM	#5 (permalink)
politicophile Addict	Mmmm, the "Red Mars" trilogy.... A space elevator would make it very cost efficient, indeed, to venture much further from earth. __________________ The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

08-02-2005, 12:30 PM	#6 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	They've gotta do something. The shuttle wont get us anywhere. If they're really serious about "moon mars and beyond" we need more powerful ships, gotta get them into space and gotta get started on all this 5 years ago. __________________ We Must Dissent.

08-02-2005, 01:56 PM	#7 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	I'd love to see a space elevator, but I'd love to see a lot of things we might not quite have the technology for yet. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

08-02-2005, 02:50 PM	#8 (permalink)
kramus loving the curves Location: my Lady's manor	It will be the most amazing feat humanity accomplishes when there is a functioning space elevator. But while we wait for industrial grade production of the new materials they are developing to carry the tremendous dynamic load, and other concerns such as how to operate the elevator craft (is it 25,000 miles long? been quite a while since I read any real figures) and take care of drift, leo objects and solar storms, we can get the LeGrange points settled/industrialized using the traditional heavy boosters and parachute drops. (wouldn't it be cool to have a fleet of uber-blimps hauling the boosters around and handling the goods manufactured in space!). Earth orbit gets industrialized, the moon gets a magnetic launch facility built, and we are on the way to Mars and beyond. The first step is to get those boosters going. I find the whole thing really exciting. __________________ And now to disengage the clutch of the forebrain ... I'm going with this - if you like artwork visit http://markfineart.ca

08-02-2005, 04:42 PM	#11 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	I would think the trip would take around 5 or 6 hours. And yes, that's a lot of elevator music. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

08-02-2005, 05:09 PM	#12 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	I've been facinated about the prospect of a space elevator since I first read about it in an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The carbon material is being worked on locally. One question I have had is how will collisions with the elevator be prevented? __________________ "You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." Molly Ivins - 1944-2007

08-02-2005, 06:16 PM	#13 (permalink)
sailor beauty in the breakdown Location: Chapel Hill, NC	Yeah, it does sorta strike me as a quick fix rather than a comprehensive overhaul, but the point is that they are doing something, and that's better than NASA has done for the past 20 years. I'm thrilled to see them actually thinking about doing something more than spending a billion dollars to examine frogs in space--we could get to the moon 30 years ago, but not now? And I must say, while I havent agreed with much else Bush has done, I applaud his efforts to get NASA moving again. It's needed a swift kick in the ass for a quarter of a century now. __________________ "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." --Plato

08-02-2005, 08:00 PM	#15 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	The parachute returns don't sit well with me. There's just too many ways for them to fail. The charge won't go off.. or isnt enough.. cords snap/tangle.. chutes don't always fill with air correctly.. etc. I mean look at what happened to that craft they sent to study the sun recently.. i got to watch it splat into the desert live on NASA TV. Sure it was entertaining, but a huge waste of cash. And of course the capsules would contain people which don't stand up as well to high speed impacts. __________________ We Must Dissent.

08-03-2005, 11:01 AM	#16 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	A bit more info.....if you are so inclined: The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 27 March 2002 ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO -- Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction "imagineering", researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality. Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space ideawell, you can't be weak of mind. Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum. Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids and beyond - they are routinely accessible via the space elevator. And for all its promise and grandeur, this mega-project is made practical by the tiniest of technologies - carbon nanotubes. Seen as an engineering undertaking for the opening decades of the 21st century, the space elevator proposal was highlighted here during the 2002 Space and Robotics Conferences, held March 17-21, and sponsored by the Aerospace Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Thought experiment Science fiction writers have been deploying space elevators for years. Space visionary, Arthur Clarke, centered his novel of the late 1970s, The Fountains of Paradise, on the notion. Also, among other writers, Kim Stanley-Robinson's Red Mars noted the soaring splendor of an elevator to space. Furthermore, the scheme has bounced around technical journals for decades. Some call it a "thought experiment", but others point out that space exploration B.C. -- "Before Cable" -- will pale contrasted to what's possible within ten to fifteen years. "Even though the challenges to bring the space elevator to reality are substantial, there are no physical or economic reasons why it can't be built in our lifetime." That's the matter-of-fact feeling of physicist, Bradley Edwards of Eureka Scientific in Berkeley, California, but carrying out heavy lifting design work in Seattle, Washington. Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said. "In 15 years we could have a dozen cables running full steam putting 50 tons in space every day for even less, including upper middle class individuals wanting a joyride into space. Now I just need the $5 billion, Edwards added. And so it grows For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth's surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge. The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable's far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets. Putting physics aside the toughest challenge has been finding a super-strong cable material. "That's what has kept this idea in science fiction for 40 years," Edwards said. But the right stuff in terms of cable material is no longer thought of as "unobtainium", he said. The answer is carbon-nanotube-composite ribbon. Small fibers of the material are set down side-by-side, then interconnected to form a growing ribbon. Stronger than steel The hurdle to date, Edwards said, has been the commercial fabrication of carbon nanotubes. Both U.S. and Japanese firms, among others, are ramping up production of carbon nanotubes, with tons of this now exotic matter soon to be available. "That quantity of material is going to be around well before five years time. It's not going to take long," he said. Given the far stronger-than-steel ribbon of carbon nanotubes, a space elevator could be up within a decade. "There's no real serious stumbling block to this," Edwards explained. "The making of carbon nanotubes is moving very quick," said Hayam Benaroya, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. "We're moving from the scientific stage of just developing them to actual commercial entities producing them in ton-like quantities," he said. "Perhaps within our lifetimes we might actually see real designs of skyhooks and space tethers, these kinds of things. They may be feasible at reasonable cost," Benaroya said. http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020327-1.html someone is taking this relatively...seriously http://www.liftport.com/ __________________ Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha Last edited by tecoyah; 08-03-2005 at 11:06 AM..