China, shooting for the moon
Discussion
Eric Mc said:
That's where the US went wrong. They failed to consolidate the achievement of Apollo and essentially threw the whole effort away.
Arguably the way the Apollo programme ended up serving the purely political goal of ‘landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and returning him safely to the earth” skewed the entire lunar landing effort. Without this artificially set time target, it is likely that NASA would have ended up with an infrastructure more geared to the long term. By adopting the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mode, using a single Saturn V launch per mission to put a lightweight short duration lander on the lunar surface they met the political deadline, but hadn’t created a system which could be used for much else without major modification. If instead they had continued with the previous plan of first establishing a space station in Earth orbit, where a lunar landing craft would be assembled, they may not have landed on the moon before 1970 but would have created the basis of an infrastructure to eventually carry out repeat lunar landing missions at reduced cost. Initial lunar landings would have involved multiple launches of Saturn C-2 or C-3 boosters carrying the spacecraft into orbit where it would be mated with refuelled S-IV/S-IVB stages from earlier launches which would send them off to the moon. Eventually these upper stages could be developed to be reuseable, spending their lives shuttling between earth and Lunar orbit.
Of course the orbital infrastructure built up to service these missions could be used for other purposes too, such as refuelling and reusing upper stages to launch unmanned probes to the planets, as well as all the tasks undertaken by the various manned stations such as Skylab and the ISS.
As for what use the moon would be, there are a large number of things which would benefit from the lunar environment – for example the farside of the moon would be an excellent location for a radio telescope, shielded by the moon from the radio emissions of earth. The fact that the moon has a gravity field could actually be preferable to carrying out the same jobs in orbit, as the physiological effects on astronauts would be lessened ( a LOT easier to take a crap in 1/6 G than in zero G for instance :-) ).
Bedazzled said:
If they fritter the budget away on spy satellites and moonwalks then yes it's a waste of money, but if they learn to deflect a rogue asteroid it could save the lives of millions; if they find a habitable planet it could create a whole new civilisation; and I think understanding where we come from gives us a sense of purpose.
Learning to live on the moon can also have benefits here and when the next rock hits us. But deflecting anything is not going to happen a lot as its not high on anyone's agenda. Yet.Max_Torque said:
Eric Mc said:
Time is not an issue. For most of our history, long voyages took a long time.
They did, but i don't think you can really relate the 4 years or so Captain Cook spent exploring Australia and the South Pacific with the ~75 thousand year long trip that it would currently take for our fastest ever made made object (Voyager 1 at 38400mph) to reach our nearest star (Proxima Centauri 4.3 light years away).........
As for the rest of space, we don't have the technology to get to 'Earth's Twin' even if we found one. So if we found, for example, that the world was going to end in 10 years, all we could do is set up some kind of colony on the Moon or Mars. Whether it could be made sustainable is another matter; it might end up like the Franklin expedition.
Bedazzled said:
When the guy chomping on his pizza in the observatory plots the asteroid's course and falls off his chair, don't put me in charge; if my snooker skills are anything to go by it would go 'in-off' and send a fragment spinning straight for us. 
Always thought snooker should be played with different bats.It could be argued that the shuttle was the first "politically designed" US spacecraft in that it was the budget, rather than what was technically possible, that drove the design process. Until the shuttle, despite the fact that a lot of the negotiations and contract awards were rather closed to public scrutiny, there is a compelling case to suggest that technical considerations were the key drivers to contract awards; giving the Lunar Module contract to Grumman was a good example of this.
The original NASA proposals for a shuttle were based around a two stage system, both stages of which would be manned, fully re-usable and both would be fuelled by chemical rockets - no Fourth of July solid fuel fireworks. Additionally, Maxime Faget's original orbiter design had a much smaller wing.
The Nixon administration would not give NASA administrator James Fletcher the money for the fully re-usable shuttle, despite the dubiously low costs to operate the system that Fletcher had provided, so there then began a process of negotiation (both technical and financial) to provide a cheaper shuttle system. It was the desire for a lower initial build cost that gave the shuttle its solid rocket boosters; they were cheaper to design than a fly-back manned first stage.
Fletcher also sought to bring the Air Force on board as a partner. It was the Air Force's requirements for cross range landings that gave the shuttle its big and heavy (and vulnerable) delta wing - NASA didn't need it. The Air Force also brought the requirement for launches from Vandenburg, so a full launch facility was built there, but the Challenger accident meant that it was never used. There are some pics of Enterprise on the pad there (it was sent for a systems check out test) but an operational shuttle was never sent or launched from SLC-6.
So, politics and money ran the design for the shuttle.
The original NASA proposals for a shuttle were based around a two stage system, both stages of which would be manned, fully re-usable and both would be fuelled by chemical rockets - no Fourth of July solid fuel fireworks. Additionally, Maxime Faget's original orbiter design had a much smaller wing.
The Nixon administration would not give NASA administrator James Fletcher the money for the fully re-usable shuttle, despite the dubiously low costs to operate the system that Fletcher had provided, so there then began a process of negotiation (both technical and financial) to provide a cheaper shuttle system. It was the desire for a lower initial build cost that gave the shuttle its solid rocket boosters; they were cheaper to design than a fly-back manned first stage.
Fletcher also sought to bring the Air Force on board as a partner. It was the Air Force's requirements for cross range landings that gave the shuttle its big and heavy (and vulnerable) delta wing - NASA didn't need it. The Air Force also brought the requirement for launches from Vandenburg, so a full launch facility was built there, but the Challenger accident meant that it was never used. There are some pics of Enterprise on the pad there (it was sent for a systems check out test) but an operational shuttle was never sent or launched from SLC-6.
So, politics and money ran the design for the shuttle.
jingars post explains succinctly the reasons why the Shuttle end up the way it did.
With Apollo, the spacecraft that were designed were the simplest that could be designed given the complexity of the mission.
With the Shuttle, we ended up with an extremely complex spacecraft performing essentially simple missions (putting payloads in low earth orbit).
With Apollo, the spacecraft that were designed were the simplest that could be designed given the complexity of the mission.
With the Shuttle, we ended up with an extremely complex spacecraft performing essentially simple missions (putting payloads in low earth orbit).
jingars said:
So, politics and money ran the design for the shuttle.
But, isn't this how the world works for everything?Sure, we would all love to be able to design the best technological solution to any given requirement, but so far, in 20 odd years of engineering, that's never happened to me yet............
Max_Torque said:
But, isn't this how the world works for everything?
Sure, we would all love to be able to design the best technological solution to any given requirement, but so far, in 20 odd years of engineering, that's never happened to me yet............
unless you happen to run chinaSure, we would all love to be able to design the best technological solution to any given requirement, but so far, in 20 odd years of engineering, that's never happened to me yet............
Max_Torque said:
But, isn't this how the world works for everything?
Sure, we would all love to be able to design the best technological solution to any given requirement, but so far, in 20 odd years of engineering, that's never happened to me yet............
To a large extent, Apollo was NOT run like this. Because it was seen as a crucial national goal, it was run far more like an essential wartime industry - with resources being placed at the disposal of whichever manufacturer offered the best TECHNICAL solution to the mission requirements. Cost and politics came further down the list of priorities.Sure, we would all love to be able to design the best technological solution to any given requirement, but so far, in 20 odd years of engineering, that's never happened to me yet............
The Shutlle was trying to be a jack of all trades for too many competing requirements. In the end, most of what it was designed to do was largely never done.
Bedazzled said:
Could the Shuttle have been used to retrieve the Russian Grunt probe, if it had still been in service?
I'm sure it could have been used - given enough advance notice. The orbital inclination of the probe was typical of a spacecraft launched from Russia which is well within the capabilities of the Shuttle.
Whether such a mission would ever have ben contemplated is highly unlikely though as the launch window for Mars was quite short and a Shuttle would really need to have been waiting and ready on the pad to get off the ground, rendesvous with the satellite, diagnose what was wrong with it, fix it and then get out of the way before another attempt was made to fire the probe's engines top send it on a Mars bound trajectory.
So, in theory yes, in reality, no.
Caruso said:
When the last American troops left Iraq, they said on the news that the whole campaign had cost an estimated $1trillion. They could have had a manned Mars mission for that sort of money, so the money is there if the political will is.
Absolutely.We can afford to do lots of things we don't do.
There always seems to be plenty of money for war.
I think the problem is that the engineering really hasn't moved on a great deal since the 1960/70s. Asides from the electronic equipment a 'modern' lunar vehicle would be the same as the Apollo one I.e. a big f
koff expensive hydrogen powered rocket like Saturn V, if not bigger still...
Where's the atomic powered stuff we saw in Thunderbirds etc?!!?
koff expensive hydrogen powered rocket like Saturn V, if not bigger still...Where's the atomic powered stuff we saw in Thunderbirds etc?!!?
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