Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

- General Discussion (https://thetfp.com/tfp/general-discussion/)

- - NASA's new spaceship. (https://thetfp.com/tfp/general-discussion/95021-nasas-new-spaceship.html)

NASA's new spaceship.

Well they've been showin some pictures of what they were thinking of doing for a little while now and i guess its official since it was on the news and they have a special start page for it.
So, here's how NASA is gonna get us to the moon (at first) and then to Mars.
We're supposed to be gettin to the moon by 2018 by way of this system, and the ball is rollin.

The spaceship actually launches in 2 parts, and joins up in orbit before taking off to its destination.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...an_graphic.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...ckets_full.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...ocked_full.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...lunar_full.jpg

Here's a very kickass animation. It is about 25MB and quicktime.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/cev/CEVedit2.mov

I think its about damn time. Hurry the fuck up already. :thumbsup:

Here's an article to go with the pictures.

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/cev.html

Quote:

Before the end of the next decade, NASA astronauts will again explore the surface of the moon. And this time, we're going to stay, building outposts and paving the way for eventual journeys to Mars and beyond. There are echoes of the iconic images of the past, but it won't be your grandfather's moon shot.

This journey begins soon, with development of a new spaceship. Building on the best of Apollo and shuttle technology, NASA's creating a 21st century exploration system that will be affordable, reliable, versatile, and safe.

The centerpiece of this system is a new spacecraft designed to carry four astronauts to and from the moon, support up to six crewmembers on future missions to Mars, and deliver crew and supplies to the International Space Station.

The new crew vehicle will be shaped like an Apollo capsule, but it will be three times larger, allowing four astronauts to travel to the moon at a time.

The new spacecraft has solar panels to provide power, and both the capsule and the lunar lander use liquid methane in their engines. Why methane? NASA is thinking ahead, planning for a day when future astronauts can convert Martian atmospheric resources into methane fuel.

The new ship can be reused up to 10 times. After the craft parachutes to dry land (with a splashdown as a backup option), NASA can easily recover it, replace the heat shield and launch it again.

Coupled with the new lunar lander, the system sends twice as many astronauts to the surface as Apollo, and they can stay longer, with the initial missions lasting four to seven days. And while Apollo was limited to landings along the moon's equator, the new ship carries enough propellant to land anywhere on the moon's surface.

Once a lunar outpost is established, crews could remain on the lunar surface for up to six months. The spacecraft can also operate without a crew in lunar orbit, eliminating the need for one astronaut to stay behind while others explore the surface.

Safe and reliable

The launch system that will get the crew off the ground builds on powerful, reliable shuttle propulsion elements. Astronauts will launch on a rocket made up of a single shuttle solid rocket booster, with a second stage powered by a shuttle main engine.
A second, heavy-lift system uses a pair of longer solid rocket boosters and five shuttle main engines to put up to 125 metric tons in orbit -- about one and a half times the weight of a shuttle orbiter. This versatile system will be used to carry cargo and to put the components needed to go to the moon and Mars into orbit. The heavy-lift rocket can be modified to carry crew as well.

Best of all, these launch systems are 10 times safer than the shuttle because of an escape rocket on top of the capsule that can quickly blast the crew away if launch problems develop. There's also little chance of damage from launch vehicle debris, since the capsule sits on top of the rocket.

The Flight Plan

In just five years, the new ship will begin to ferry crew and supplies to the International Space Station. Plans call for as many as six trips to the outpost a year. In the meantime, robotic missions will lay the groundwork for lunar exploration. In 2018, humans will return to the moon. Here's how a mission would unfold:

A heavy-lift rocket blasts off, carrying a lunar lander and a "departure stage" needed to leave Earth's orbit (below left). The crew launches separately (below, center), then docks their capsule with the lander and departure stage and heads for the moon (below, right).

Three days later, the crew goes into lunar orbit (below, left). The four astronauts climb into the lander, leaving the capsule to wait for them in orbit. After landing and exploring the surface for seven days, the crew blasts off in a portion of the lander (below, center), docks with the capsule and travels back to Earth. After a de-orbit burn, the service module is jettisoned, exposing the heat shield for the first time in the mission. The parachutes deploy, the heat shield is dropped and the capsule sets down on dry land (below, right).

'Into the Cosmos'

With a minimum of two lunar missions per year, momentum will build quickly toward a permanent outpost. Crews will stay longer and learn to exploit the moon's resources, while landers make one way trips to deliver cargo. Eventually, the new system could rotate crews to and from a lunar outpost every six months.

Planners are already looking at the lunar south pole as a candidate for an outpost because of concentrations of hydrogen thought to be in the form of water ice, and an abundance of sunlight to provide power.

These plans give NASA a huge head start in getting to Mars. We will already have the heavy-lift system needed to get there, as well as a versatile crew capsule and propulsion systems that can make use of Martian resources. A lunar outpost just three days away from Earth will give us needed practice of "living off the land" away from our home planet, before making the longer trek to Mars.

Thats awesome... I've been hoping NASA would get off its laurels and actually do something soon. Here's hoping that something other than a few press conferences comes out of this...

Great! We need something to get excited about as a nation again....

I hope this is it!

I saw this on the news... bout time

i really hope this goes according to their plan

This is good news.

Safe, reliable, affordable, re-usable. My defiinitions of those four words and NASA's definitions are usually in two different hemispheres. Here's hoping they're a bit closer this time.

I'm gonna go hangout with space guys and listen to discussions about all this stuff tonight. I can't wait!

Quote:

Dear Planetary Society Members and Friends
in the Toronto area,

The Planetary Society invites you to a public evening
held in conjunction with the 2005 International Lunar Conference being held in Toronto. We hope you will join Buzz Aldrin and other leaders in lunar exploration, at "Exploring the Moon: Big Plans for the Next Decade," which will be held on

Tuesday, September 20
7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
at the
Northern Lights Ballroom of the
Renaissance Toronto Hotel Downtown
One Blue Jays Way, Toronto, Ontario

Speakers will include leaders from lunar programs
around the world. Nearly all of the world's spacefaring
nations have plans to extensively explore the Moon in
the next ten years and beyond, and this evening will be a unique opportunity for the public to learn and get excited about these upcoming missions.

Speakers will include:

* Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut, who on
July 20, 1969, along with Neil Armstrong, landed
their Lunar Module on the moon's Sea of Tranquility and
became the first two humans to walk on the moon.

* Bernard H. Foing, Chief scientist, European Space
Agency & Executive director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group

* Jim Garvin, NASA Chief Scientist, NASA Headquarters

* Narendra Bhandari, Physical Research Laboratory,
India and President of the International Lunar
Exploration Working Group.

We hope that you will join us for this fascinating
view on the past, current and future plans for
lunar exploration!

Did anyone else have a little chuckle when you first saw the first picture?

Back on topic, I can't wait to see another person on the moon. It's not very long until we get someone on Mars.

I can't wait until we actually land on the moon for the first time. it is going to be an awesome event. If it isnt staged in some hanger in the nevada desert again. how do we know what is really going on. Its hard to prove now thats whats in the movies isnt real let alone what the government tells us. Does everybody in here believe everything the government tell them 100% of the time? Just a question don't bash me too hard.

Quote:

Originally Posted by florida0214

It helps that all of the conspiracy theories are 100% full of Grade-A Pseudo-Science Bull-Shit "Evidence".

I wish you could have found bigger pictures.

Biggest waste of cash - evah!

(The above opinion is that of the poster and does not reflect the views of the Tilted Forum Project, it's staff, owners or advertisers).

Yes, people are starving in America, the schools pretty much suck and teachers can't live on their wages but hey buckeroos - let's waste all that money on the Space Program. Why?

Oh, yeah, maybe there's oil on another planet.
Let's Send Halliburton right away!

THere's plenty of money in this country to have people not starving, to fix up schools, and to send us into space. Write your senator and representative and tell them to put the money toward education and to help the starving instead of toward bombs to kill people on the other side of hte planet and maybe they will. You have any idea what ONE cruise missile costs?

Like it or not we need to go into space, for multiple reasons. Now is the time to get this shit done before its too late.

I don't dispute space exploration is important. However, I don't see a manned mission to the moon helping much. Been there, done that, let's move on - more (and lower cost) explorations by robotic landers and ships of our solar system, a better space telescope and so on, would be money better spent.

It's not just about exploration, its about survival of the human race, and as far as we know the only life in the universe. As of right now if a big enough rock comes our way we're fucked. There's also fun stuff like gamma ray bursts which can fry the planet and polar shifts (we're due for one very soon) which could lead to mass extinction. If you don't know what a polar shift is it's when the magnetic field of the plant literally flips (so your compass would point south instead of north), and this could lead to very dramatic changes in the way many things work on the planet. It happens like clockwork every once in a while and we're due for one any time now - it could happen tomorrow. Also don't forget the magntic field of the planet protects the planet from massive amounts of solar radiation, it's literally a planetary forcefield which pushes solar particles out of our way.. without it everyone on the planet would be dead.. and it would be a painful death. Then there's the issue of population.. we're rapidly approaching the point where the planet just simply will not be able to support the amount of people we keep squirting out. All human's could be gone from existance 6 hours from now.. I dunno about you but I think if we can get a few of us to another planet (or even the moon) to live to prevent our extinction we should move heaven and earth to do it.

These manned missions are only the first step in a looooooong journey, and all we've really done so far is tie our shoes.

As for the size of the pictures, you'll have to talk to the guys at NASA about that one.. all i did was copy/paste.

I want to add some new pictures. NASA put up some absurdly huge renderings of what the new ship should look like. They're massive resolution. I mean, massive.

I mean 5610x3156 massive.

Fast image serving though.

I also have to respond to a ton of comments I read on digg, where I originally saw the link to these pics.

I thought about spewing on my blog, but then thought better of it. I want discussion.

The majority opinion of the self appointed rocket-scientist crowd is that the "old style" rockets must be a huge step backwards. One of the most commonly referenced "reasons" the crowd put forth is that the rockets are disposable, therefore both stupid and bad.

Just for the good of my own self and general awareness, I have to respond to the idea that the type of ship depicted is "bad" "dumb" "a step backwards" etc. Seriously. There are some people out there that think they know everything, and I want to help make sure there are less of them. I hope to do this by putting correct info out in the world, or at least correct points for the discussion.

For starters:
The use of disposable rockets is not automatically dumb, overly costly, etc. That’s one fact we have to get straight right off.

The space shuttle has proved that human beings do not yet have the technology level to make a space plane that operates like the shuttle workable. We just can’t build, at a reasonable cost, a plane like that. It’s too complicated, and it’s not working. This is evidenced by the very high costs, low number of flights per year, time between flights, and continued catastrophic failures.

A disposable booster design has several advantages that are not to be casually dismissed. One of my favorite authors (Steven Baxter) puts the reasons well in some of his books. One of his characters builds the “BDB” or “Big Dumb Booster.” Given the level of actual human technology, and not what we wish we had, this idea makes the most sense.

You build exactly like the description says BIG and DUMB. You build it big, because you need to shoot a ton of shit into orbit. We’re not going to the moon or anywhere else useful by sending up ten tons at a time (I have no idea what the shuttle lifts, I’m making a case for “small” where “small = ten tons.”) We will get things done by lifting a thousand tons per shot. Whatever the actual goal, it needs to be massive.
The other side of the equation here is DUMB.

Your successful booster is dumb, and in the process it’s going to be disposable. This is not bad.

It’s dumb, because it really embodies KISS. The BDB shoots as much mass into a desired orbit as possible, that’s its job; it’s a “mass lifter” not an ocean liner, or the starship Enterprise. The BDB benefits from elegance of design by not having to be reusable. Reuse, raises the level of complexity by an order of magnitude.

Example: When designing a seal to last 1 flight, you only have to do the testing to replicate conditions on one flight. You only have to model 1 flight’s worth of stress. The solution can be elegant, cheap, simple, etc. It has to work once. That’s much easier to prove and guarantee than one that must survive multiple uses.
When modeling multiple uses the testing becomes exponentially more difficult, and it’s not just a matter of more computer modeling time. If only it were…. No, you have to remember there is an organization that has to have proved to it that a part can last multiple times. Now it has to be heavier, deal with repeated loads, be certified to deal with the unknown, multiple times. This is difficult. It’s not a trivial matter of telling a computer simulation “run the tests 3 times.” And even if it WERE, that’s not to say the fix is easy. Maybe a simple light-weight part will do you for one flight. Maybe that part fails spectacularly on the 3rd flight. If it’s reusable, you have to replace it every flight to maintain a man-rating factor. Then the processes have to be in place to monitor that part, to validate it was changed, to test the replacement was done right, to validate the parts around it that were moved, disturbed or changed, during the replacement were not harmed.

All that validation is where the shuttle becomes too complex for us. If you have a part that you KNOW will survive 3 flights, and your minimum safety ratings maintain a 1 to 3 relationship, which means every part must be at least 3 times safer than an absolute minimum, you have to replace all those parts every flight. The record keeping is a nightmare in and of itself. The processes to make sure flawed humans did all the work right is ALSO a nightmare in and of itself.

A disposable rocket saves you time and money by chucking all that. You don’t HAVE to make parts that last multiple missions; you just have to make it work once. If a part you put in is good for 3 shots, you have a 3x safety factor, and you’re good to go. Install it and forget it. The part isn’t going to return for its “next” flight, and it’s not going to have to be X-rayed, and tested, and validated to see if it has to be changed or modified for a “next” flight. All that goes with a reusable craft is what makes it hard for us humans to do.

If we HAD nifty tech that let us build incredible materials that held up forever, we’d be set, THEN a reusable rocket makes sense.

For now, you build something cheap, simple, strong, and you shoot the damn thing up at the sky. When you’re up there, you can get clever. Now you can make a craft that goes to Mars, and does all sorts of cool stuff.

As to rockets with the capsule on top being a step backwards, I say “not hardly.”

The shuttle showed over and over, especially recently how damn dumb it is to put your crew vehicle under a stack of explosives, where shit falls on it. It’s common sense.

Problems usually dictate simple solutions. The Apollo guys hit on it in the 60’s and it’s as good now as it was then. You put your crew above everything. If the rocket blows up, you light the escape rocket and pull the whole damn crew module away from the explosion. Obviously, that doesn’t work with the shuttle.

The shuttle was obviously a bad idea when it was conceived, and it’s a bad idea now. We don’t have Star Trek tech, and we won’t for a long time.

If we want our species to survive, we need to get into space, and we need to be there in a big, permanent way. We’re not going to get there dicking around in LEO. We’ll get there by throwing as many people and supplies into space as we can. We’ll shoot them up as fast and cheaply as we can.

The first ones up win; it’s pretty obvious. I’m not able to see the future, but the first country that makes it into space and starts exploiting the resources up there wins. This is a long term game humanity is playing, and we don’t win by dicking around with extremely complicated gliders that keep blowing up. The Chinese will take our lead in space away. They’re a lot hungrier than we are, and I think, they are willing to blow people up (in failed flights) for the good of the other 5 billion of them. We Americans, are not. Honestly, it’s going to happen. People will die, and they will die trying to get into space. Keep it to a minium, because blowing up experts in anything is an econmically expensive proposion, but damnit, keep on going.

Whoever wants it worst wins. Whoever opens up the consumables loop, by exploiting space’s resources, has a huge lead in surviving.

We need to get there now, and the best way to do that is with cheap rockets, that work. When they get up there, and we KEEP people up there, we provide dreams. We make the space race something worth trying for. We open up the new world again. That’s a dream worth dying for, and I hope it’s one we take our shot at.

Quote:

Originally Posted by florida0214

Does everybody in here believe everything the government tell them 100% of the time? Just a question don't bash me too hard.

Do you believe everything the conspiracy whack-jobs tell you 100% of the time?

"Continued catastrophic failures"...

That's two failures in over 20 years of flying? I don't know the exact dates for how long the Shuttle has been flying, but it's somewhere around there. Also, when you're dealing with any kind of space-flight technology, especially on reentry, the only type of failures you can have are fatal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pragma

Didn't Apollo 13 prove that wrong? ;)

http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Oct/46878.htm

Quote:

China to Land on the Moon by 2010

The people in charge of China’s moon exploration program recently disclosed that if all goes according to plan, China will realize its first exploration of the moon before 2010. The country hopes to successfully send astronauts into space within the next few years.

According to a recently published article in the weekly journal Outlook, China will take three steps in carrying out its moon landing program: the first step is to launch space laboratories and flying machines into orbit to search for valuable resources; the second step is to send space robots to moon; the third step is to realize a manned moon landing. Although a specific date for the moon landing is yet to be determined, space scientists are confident that the time required for China’s first manned moon landing will be significantly less than for the US.

Moon exploration has become an important symbol for a nation's degree of technological development and a prime target for countries in the never ending search for business opportunities.

A White Paper on China’s Space Activities, issued by Chinese government on November 11, 2000, initially set the goal for moon exploration and clearly planned to carry out preliminary deep space research. At the same time, the white paper also suggested that China should stress its own characteristics when choosing targets for moon exploration. These targets will hopefully fill gaps in China’s moon exploration knowledge and contribute to scientific data for humans setting up base stations on the moon in the future. They also want to avoid reinventing the proverbial wheel by repeating the work of other countries.

The first research organization specializing in space robotics, the National Aerospace High Technology Space Robotic Engineering Research Center, has been established for the moon landing program. According to space robotics specialists at the center, space robots will take on key lunar exploration task before Chinese astronauts first set foot on the moon, playing an important role in China's space activities including the servicing of satellites and the carrying out of scientific experiments in space. China hopes to make a contribution to the setting up of an international moon base station in the future. The space robots used for moon surface exploration are small and agile. They can move nimbly, climb slopes, get around obstacles, cope with the moon's rough terrain, withstand huge temperature differences, and survive radiation.

Scientists predict that one of China’s most significant achievements in 21st century will be to set up a “moon city” using solar energy. The surplus energy will then be transmitted to storage centers back on earth.

Once China successfully implements a manned moon landing, the country will become a founding member of the international moon colonization club. Scientists also predict Mars will be China’s next goal.

(china.org.cn by Wang Qian, October 26, 2002)

I hope our astronauts like Kung Pao.

Quote:

Originally Posted by zVp

Did anyone else have a little chuckle when you first saw the first picture?

I would chuckle if it didn't hit me so damn close to home. When we're driving somewhere together, my wife is always making fun of my "shortcuts" and this proves I'm right ...again ;) Thank you NASA for another good reason that the shortest line to a place isn't necessarily the best.

To boldly go where we've been before!

Quote:

Originally Posted by BadNick

Somehow I think you missed the point he was trying to make. Look at the picture again. Try rotating it 90 degrees.

He's trying to say it looks like a giant cock and balls. Woot!

Anyway, we explore space for discovery. That's just human nature. I don't disagree with the folks who say the money could be better spent. The poor and starving will be taken better care of when someone figures out how to make money from doing it.

It just happens that we want to know whats out there and huge sums of money are being made to come up with the technology to take us there.

If it's reusable - great. if its safe - just as great. Is it affordable? oh what the hell am i saying....

but like so many things, ill be a skeptic until i see it. then ill believe it.

I think this idea is total crap.
We as a nation need to be focusing on how things are being run here on earth, not trying to waste money we don't have on something we don't really need.

We already have penty of people that are paid to fix problems here on earth (police, elected officials, tc). Talk to them about no doing thir jo if you think they arean't. The Space agency helps thousands of people in this country by giving them jobs. Every single last little tiny piece of the ship has to be constructed someplace, and you need people to do that.

We need a space elevator......whoever makes the first one, will own space .

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...challenge.html

Quote:

Originally Posted by waxmax

Don't we already know what's one the moon. Rocks, craters, coupla old golf balls ...?

So cool, I hope they have a moon base before I die.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tecoyah

We need a space elevator......whoever makes the first one, will own space .

http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...challenge.html

There has been some serious talk recently about getting a space elevator up and running within the next 20 years. It may very well happen some time soon.
:thumbsup:

A space elevator? What exactly do we need an elevator to space for? You planning on meeting someone on the top floor? Or is it so we can cheaply exploit the natural resources of the solar system? launch satelties maybe? Neither of these things are particularly good ideas IMO.
Provides jobs??!!!
Thats the best rationalization you can come up with for WASTING MILLIONS of dollars every year?! That is pretty weak. (Give me all of that money, and i gaurentee i could employ EVERY person in the country. Not just egg-heads w/ a bunch of degrees, who could have gone into other fields.)

A space elevator would actually be a very, very good thing for us. Raw material comes down, people and cargo go up. And cheaply too.

Maybe you had't noticed, but the earth is kinda overcrowded. Employing every person in the country would only exacerbate the problem whereas taking steps towards colonizing other worlds would go a great deal towards alleviating said problem. Not to mention the jobs that will be created when such a feat is achieved.

"Teach a man to fish..." and all that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SERPENT7

A space elevator would be great for that ability to launch satellites alone. Even if it was very expensive to build it might easily pay for itself by reducing the need for launches. It would also help make economical some technologies like solar power generation in space that, needless to say, would be incredibly useful.

Regarding the jobs I tend to agree, but space research is not a wholly pointless endeavour otherwise.

This is all abunch of crap!
If we as a species cannot solve our problems, (Namely allocation of resources, and population management) we will only be putting off the inevitable by colonizing space. Cheap resources got us into this mess, that is not going to get us out of it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by SERPENT7

Who's to say that colonizing space won't solve our problems? It sounds to me like it'd be a great way to solve resource allocation and population management. There would be much more room for people to inhabit, as well as a lot of resources (such as the asteroid belt) that we could harvest.

I would love to see any kind of manned spaceflight actually happen -- I kind of wish they would skip the BS and go straight to Mars, risky though it may be. Science and humanity in general could use the morale boost that comes with such a great achievement, and there is so much that could be learned from the trip.

Okay, crazy and (improbable?) scenario -- imagine China were to announce, right now, a solid, well designed plan to send a manned flight to Mars by, say, 2020. Would this spark another space race like the 1960s? A small part of me kind of hopes so...

Edit: ignore this lol :crazy: