Watching Fox News...

They were talking about a posible replacement for the shuttle..

There is suppose to be some sort of announcement by NASA officials this week of what direction that NASA will be going for a replacement vehicle.

Some option includes a Apollo or Gemini type vehicle instead of a Shuttle style vehicle..

The Starship Enterprise!!! Or maybe an X-wing, or Star Destroyer. One or all will do!!!

Perfect the Shuttle C for heavy lift capability.  Could prolly put a capsule on top of the cargo module.

The shuttles are obviously getting a little old.  Probably time to move on to a new system.

I tried to post a topic about this a few days ago. I got three responces.

shuttle replacement

A giant f'ing catapult!!!

Here's the lead system. I think it sucks.

link to article

We should to using booster rockets for most of the missions, cheaper and no crew necessary.

I voted for Burt, if he can send a live human into orbit successfully on a few million, then he'll at least save us some money doing the same job at NASA.

Project Orion

Damn!  Gene Roddenberry had all this crap solved in 1967!

What the hell is NASA waiting for?

Privatize NASA and then I don't care.

Quoted: Project Orion

+ eleventy million

Quoted: Damn!  Gene Roddenberry had all this crap solved in 1967! What the hell is NASA waiting for?

Prototype's done.



CW

I say scrap the concept of the shuttle's being NASA's "flagship" vehicle.

This is not new.  It is not difficult.  Shuttle flights should be routine by now, if it weren't for the damned beuracracy!

If they want to be the "putting communications birds in orbit" people, fine.  But what happened to space exploration?

Someone call W. and tell him there's oil on Mars already

Quoted: Quoted: Damn!  Gene Roddenberry had all this crap solved in 1967! What the hell is NASA waiting for? Prototype's done. CW

At least there aren't any damaged tiles on it...

Quoted: The Starship Enterprise!!! Or maybe an X-wing, or Star Destroyer. One or all will do!!!

There you go!

Millenium Falcon and Battlestar Galactica (original version) would be my choices!

We need to fix this generation of manned shuttle orbiters and work on the next generation. So I say Get Both.

I want man to be on Mars and ideally have a base on the moon in my lifetime.

Quoted: The Starship Enterprise!!! Or maybe an X-wing, or Star Destroyer. One or all will do!!!

no way in hell am I going to loan my X-wing to the .gov!!!!!  




time for a full blown subspace vehicle!!!!!

Quoted: I tried to post a topic about this a few days ago. I got three responces. shuttle replacement

Sorry if seems like I duped your thread.. Just responding to Sunday morning shows.

Nice vehicles on your thread. But I seem to remember a Larger Gemini Rocket program that was pre-Apollo. It seated seven or more astronaut. I can't find a link to it. It was to be used for the moon landing.

scrap the whole thing and use the funding to put out bids for private companies to do what they want done


seemed to work for the "x prize"

Quoted: No need to poll this one becuase these are what you are gonna get: images.spaceref.com/news/2005/inline.cev.jpg And this: images.spaceref.com/news/2005/jsc.cev.jpg Look closely Vito, this is way more than a glorified Apollo Capsule, it is frikkin' huge! www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1055 There will be a new article on the new plan up tommorow. The shuttle is old and obselete.  It is going to be decomissioned over the next few years, it will only fly a few more times and this is a good thing.  30 years is long enough, time to move beyond it.

I like that  CEV concept. Looks perfect for Rescue or as a Personal transporter to the Space Station. I don't see it used for a combined man and satelite deployment  as like the current Shuttle mission.

We could use more than one vehicle at this time. Putting all your eggs in one basket was a big mistake by NASA. The CEV would be cheaper with most missions not needing heavy lifting or retrieval of satelites. The new Shuttle should be much larger for use in heavy transporting. Burt Rutan's type vehicles would be a better concept for personal transport.

There is a lot of posibilities for a vehicle... People like Rutan should be included in the bids for these vehicles. Hell.. Maybe Rutan could design a vehical to be used by Fed-Ex or UPS for pick up or deliveries to the space station.

Can anyone here explain what the major obstacle is that needs to be overcome?

Thrust vs. capacity?

Heat/thermal?

Money?

I can't imagine materials are an issue at this point.

What happened to the spaceplane idea?  The ability to fly out of the atmosphere?

Quoted: Honestly, I'm pessimistic as can be over manned space ops.  The "throw money at it and see if we get something" approach is eerily reminiscent of the FAA's attempts to upgrade automation of the National Airspace System.  So far as I know, there have been at least three failed attempts to replace the IBM 9020 computers that drive the radar displays in the enroute centers, each one more costly than the previous one, and none resulting in a replacement for most of the centers.  The 9020's started their work lives in 1970, and when I worked at Miami Center in 1983, we had to send to an IBM museum for a replacement for a burned-out part.  Exactly that same bureaucratic mentality exists at NASA, where advancing into the final frontier is not so important, but covering managment's butts is Job #1.

I can understand the sentiment, but I have to disagree whole heartedly. NASA during the 80s and 90s was completely hamstrung three things, shrinking budgets, lack of mandates and the shuttle/space station complex.

First off let me make this clear: There is no science being done, going to be done on the ISS that is worth the astronomical cost. The science that is needed for long duration human space flight has been done by the Russians since the 70s. Most of the material science experiments have been done on the Space Shuttle could be done much, much, cheaper by unmanned or periodically manned facilities.

Then again, the space station might have proven a valuable tool if it could have been built cheaper and quicker. This is where it becomes a travesty to all space geeks. Let me tell for you the little known story of the 'Space Station Architecture Study'. Shortly after President Reagan directed NASA to build a new space station called Freedom. (The ISS original name meant as a big technological middle finger to the then USSR) The study considered many options, but what they eventually boiled down to was NASA using existing shuttle hardware and facilities and replace the orbiter in the shuttle stack with a cargo pod. Dev cost for this would only have been on the order of $500-800 million since it wouldn't have to be man rated. This would have been able to put 80-90 tones in orbit in one throw. Using this 'Shuttle C' NASA was going to build the space station, (bigger then the current ISS by the way in terms of pressurized volume) in 3 or 4 launches, I don't remember the specifics and then use orbiter shuttle launches to send the crew up and down. A problem came up, if the shuttle was going to be nothing more then a crew taxi and only fly to cargo missions, NASA couldn't justify the flight pace they wanted and the hugely expensive and protracted Space Shuttle would be an even more glaring albatross then it is. Thus the Lego work space station as we know it was designed essentially as make work for the shuttle fleet, to make sure the 100,000 personnel (The Shuttle Army) need to maintain that money pit keeps getting pay checks. I'm not even going to go into the Clinton era redesign to turn the ISS into a charity for out of work Russian Aerospace Engineers.

I'm going to gloss over the times NASA has courted AltSpace (or at least Commercial Space) start up and then cut their legs out from under them.

Example 1; the Industrial Space Facility corporation, they were going to build and launch a private 'occasionally' manned orbiting lab, that soon threatened the justification for NASA's big white space station, NASA killed their shuttle launch contract and then testified against them in congress, also their was some goings on with the FAA but I don't want to go into it.

Example 2; The X-33/Venturestar (there will be some dissention on this one, there certainly is on the space boards I frequent) but essentially Lockheed invested a huge amount of company funds in what was essentially a co venture with NASA to develop a demonstrator for a larger SSTO. After one malfunction in a composite fuel tank due to a fabrication error the reactionist entity that is NASA killed the program and left LockMart holding the bag. There could be an interesting postscript to this particular tale as one of the nearly complete airframes has disappeared and there was latent USAF/DARPA interaction in the program but, who knows....

Point being that NASA during the 80s and 90s was the perfect example of how not to do space, driven by politics, lacking a mission, and fearing what they saw as competition from the private sector.

Fast forward to today and you'll see the reason why I have hope. The first glimmers of light came with Dan Goldin, who had many faults, but with the reforms of the robotics science program (so Called Faster Better Cheaper) got NASA away from the cost plus leviathan programs that NASA had become known for. Now Griffin is seriously finally, putting the shuttle in it's grave and courting many private firms for true commercial contracts for Space Station supply so we can get out of that particular mistake as soon as politically feasible. We're adopting direct launch architectures for the Moon/Mars initive, planning for using indigenous recourses, creating a long term strategy for a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars. We're pursuing low costs launchers such as a Shuttle Derived heavy lifter (/cough/ the Shuttle C?) for cargo and a cheap expendable or mostly expendable medium launcher for disposable crew taxi operations. NASA is finally going about space the right way, without cost plus and embracing private development.

Meet the Launchers of the future:

The heavy lifter that will throw Moon and Mars ships and base components into orbit. That picture depicts and inline configuration, but an axial or side pod configuration are also being discuessed. Also we will be using the newer five segment SRBs either in pairs as with the shuttle stack, or with four SRBs which would require modifying the thurst ring on the ET.


The Stick, essentially and SRB with an RL10 upper stage with an expendable crew capsule. Easy and cheap to develop since all the components save for the simple capsule already exist and are man rated.

Sorry for writing a book on this but this is something I feel is vitally important for the long term national interests of this country, the future is out there, and like I said in the Native America thread, the first rule of civilization is expand or die. Write your congress critters and tell them to support the space program and national labs.


recycled from what I had to say in the previous thread

Quoted: The Stick, essentially and SRB with an RL10 upper stage with an expendable crew capsule. Easy and cheap to develop since all the components save for the simple capsule already exist and are man rated. J2S, not RL-10.

I have some serious doubts wether the J2S is a viable option, the tooling for the origional J2 has long since disapeared and it would be a significant investment to reopen them. I suppose it has the fact that it's all ready man rated is something it has going for it, but I think using an engine that's in current production makes more sense. Both the SSME and RS68 were also being looked at but both are heavy, and both would have to be modified for air start.

Quoted: I hear they have like a dozen J2S's mothballed and they claim they can restart production within 2 years.

Really, that's a development I hand't heard, in fact, I never thought that the J2s ever made it into the testing phase like the rest of the hardware for the uprated Saturn. I wonder if there are any F1As in a hanger somewhere....

I know it would be completely infeasable but I wonder what a revived Saturn using F1as and modern cryogenic upperstage engines combined with SRBs could lift. To make the H2M happen on a truncated time table we're going to need heavy lift and even the largest SDV on the drawing board now (Inline config, single SSME/RS-68r upper stage + 4 x 5 segement SRBs + 5 x SSMEs/RS-68rs) only lifts 125 tons, IIRC the uprated Saturn was supposed to be gunning for 200 tons to LEO.

Quoted: Can anyone here explain what the major obstacle is that needs to be overcome? Thrust vs. capacity?   Should be Thrust vs. Weight Ratio...  Limited by the fuel needed to get the ship to orbit. The CEV design allows for a larger payload size in volume using light weight materials and expanding the size of the payload shape. It also doesnt have to be a manned mision to get the payload to orbit. Heat/thermal?   The enviromentalist forced NASA to use a Freon Free Adhesives an Sprays that doomed Columbia and almost Discovery on this mission Money? Cutbacks for use on the Space Program for use on the Welfare Money Pit. I can't imagine materials are an issue at this point. Like above. Enviromental freaks will whine about the chemicals used or burned. What happened to the spaceplane idea?  The ability to fly out of the atmosphere? Canned by Al Gore

Quoted: Watching Fox News... They were talking about a posible replacement for the shuttle.. There is suppose to be some sort of announcement by NASA officials this week of what direction that NASA will be going for a replacement vehicle. Some option includes a Apollo or Gemini type vehicle instead of a Shuttle style vehicle..

I got my money on a modified Super Hornet.  Why not?  It's replacing everything else.

Quoted: Quoted: Watching Fox News... They were talking about a posible replacement for the shuttle.. There is suppose to be some sort of announcement by NASA officials this week of what direction that NASA will be going for a replacement vehicle. Some option includes a Apollo or Gemini type vehicle instead of a Shuttle style vehicle.. I got my money on a modified Super Hornet.  Why not?  It's replacing everything else.

I think they need to fix the brake problem first..

I think we need to stop thinking about all-purpose machines and start thinking of different levels of transportation.

You walk to your car, drive to the airport, and fly to your destination.  You don't sit around trying to figure out how to get your car to drive you to India from Chicago.

The Apollo/Gemini/Soyuz style capsules are seemingly ideal for atmospheric re-entry.  Sure, they can't fly, but the shuttle flies like a brick strapped to a paper airplane.  Deal with it.  Symmetric, robust, dependable, great track record.  With that idea as a base, let's design our atmospheric ascent/re-entry vehicles with that in mind.  You want re-usable?  No reason we can't have replaceable ablative heat shields on the capsules.

Need payload capacity?  Send the payload before the astronauts on an unmanned cargo ship, or stick a payload container behind the capsule on the way up.  Design it so you can park it at the space station and it becomes a storage closet, shield, or even send the This Old House team up to remodel it into an apartment.

Want to get out of Earth orbit?  Park your vehicle at the space station.  Send up fuel in unmanned ships.  Send astronauts up in a capsule, they can fuel up and be on their way from the station.

Etc. etc.

Jim

I found it...

Big Gemini.


Link

Up to 12 Astronauts.....

I think I speak for all of us when I say all we need to so is add more door gunners.

I remember reading a book called Silver Tower by Dale Brown.  In it, they had an aircraft which was launched on a 5 or 10 mile rail.  The rail got the plane up to hypersonic speed and then the scramjets took over.  

I vote for that.  

Will this be the fate of our Shuttle program?


This Space Shuttle Buran was converted into a ride in Gorky park. Now it is a cafee.


Buran #2 rotting away in Sidney Australia.

F nasa, go with the Imperial Space Program