NASA Moon Mission by 2018

netwhizkid

Link
Whether it is damage limitation by George W. Bush in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or not will remain to be seen but today NASA announced they are sending four astronauts to the moon by 2018, Although i watched the US election tightly and it was one thing that bush did promise was to send men back to the moon, (although some will argue whether they ever even went there) If this is true it is a massive advancement of technology for mankind, just look at everything that the space program has contributed to science, not the photo's (although they are cool too) but all the new technologies, One thing i wonder why don't they visit mars instead of the moon we know tonnes about it, we know less about mars, i think it would warrant a mission more tbh. this carries a $103Billion price tag, where they are going to fund it from is beyond me, The US currently badly needs Eddie Hobbs on their case to balance there books. Another point wouldn't $103Billion lift about a billion people out of poverty at only $103 a head, we spend that on a night out often. Ah good old dubya i knew he was good for something else than murdering the English language and choking on pretzels

Scruff

Leaving aside the debate about whether they should be spending x amount of money instead of on poverty blah blah etc, I have to say i'm not really impressed by it at all. As its being called: Apollo 2.0, looks more like Apollo 1.1 to me.
Looks like they've gone for the cheapest instead of the most innovative. Given their horrendeous budget overruns i guess its not surprising, just diasapointing.

biggest diappointment for me is that the new shuttle prelacement CEV is a capsule. I fail to see how this on its own will be able to be able to carry out complex jobs like service hubble\satalites and the iss. It will only be good for ferrying astronauts from point a to point b. Probably the safest option but hardly exciting or new at all. Its a pity we're 30 years on and have to revert to 30 year old designs.

links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4263106.stm
http://www.space.com/news/050919_nasa_moon.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050919_nasa_plans.html

Flukey

It's amazing that it is going to take so long. JFK's announcement that men would land on the moon before the end of the 1960s was achieved in a shorter period than this is planned to do. Technology has changed a lot since then, so you'd think they'd be able to do this over a much shorter period.

Wibbs

netwhizkid wrote:

One thing i wonder why don't they visit mars instead of the moon we know tonnes about it, we know less about mars,

We still know surprisingly little about the moon and in any case the moon is the best staging post for a mission to Mars.

It's amazing that it is going to take so long. JFK's announcement that men would land on the moon before the end of the 1960s was achieved in a shorter period than this is planned to do. Technology has changed a lot since then, so you'd think they'd be able to do this over a much shorter period.

If the political will was there and huge monies were made available, I'm sure they could do it in the same timeframe as Apollo. A friend of mine who had dealings with NASA in the 90's was told that if they had to go back to the moon they'd damn near have to take the Apollo stuff out of mothballs as they didn't have a better solution at the time. Seems he wasn't talking BS. That said, Apollo was a good solution and a pretty successful one, so an update is probably the best risk. The Mars mission needs a rethink though.

Capt'n Midnight

That amount of money could easily fund new technologies. We live at the bottom of a gravity well. Most of the energy and effort is in getting the first 200 miles. The rest of the journey to the moons gravity well could be done by ion drive , except for the manned missions of course.

For the moon landing/take off you need about 50% of the mass to be fuel. Not many optimisations there and if you can get fuel into orbit cheaply then you don't even need to optimise as much.

Cheaper options are getting the Russians to launch the fuel into orbit for you.
Or put ice into a container and fire it into orbit using a supergun. You then electrolyse it and store in a Shuttle Tank (the 30 tonne tank's at present are nearly in orbit by the time the main engines are turned off - so very little extra fuel needed.)

Space Tether are a long shot but worth looking at too.

nadir

bleh, yeah, is disappointing, well all I can so is ....

Go ESA & JAXA

tj-music.com

[QUOTE=netwhizkid one thing that bush did promise was to send men back to the moon[/QUOTE]

Why don't they just send Bush to the moon and make us all happy??

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.optipoint.com/far/gbhome.htm- cheapo rockets
http://www.optipoint.com/far/far8.htm

In the 60ies and 70ies there were a number of US firms, for ex. TRW, which had build the lunar descend engine on the basis of a true low tech approach (pressure feeding system, no turbo pumps, near 100 % reliablility, high tolerance), experimented with low cost designs. TRW build an 80 ton thruster using kerosine and LOX. This engine was supposedly build by a local boiler company for an estimated 30.000 US-$, welded together as any ordinary piece of hardware would be. The engine worked great. Other companies including names like Boeing have also experimented. But when it became evident that the Shuttle would get all payloads there was all of a sudden no market for a cheap carrier and all work was abandoned. Truely a missed chance. All pledges to reduce launch cost have since then been nothing but lip service. For us space enthusiasts, a real dream killer.

Plankmonkey

Is there oil on the moon? Seriously though it's all part of a much needed reform of the space programme which alot of Americans feel has gone stale. It gives them justification for building a new rocket and will be a new milestone in the history of the human race. The Apollo missions were supposed to be the start of a wonderful period in manned space exploration that should have resulted in men on mars, it's time to get back to grass roots and continue that mission where Apollo left off. The technology will trickle down into everyday life and will benefit us all, including technology to battle global warming based on the life support equipment needed to sustain life in outer space.

Capt'n Midnight

Plankmonkey wrote:

it's time to get back to grass roots and continue that mission where Apollo left off. The technology will trickle down into everyday life and will benefit us all, including technology to battle global warming based on the life support equipment needed to sustain life in outer space.

No that was the wrong thing to do. Look at the DynaSoar program which got shelved by Apollo. It was due to start flight testing in 1966

Apollo was what happens if you solve a specific problem with emphasis on speed. DynaSoar was a generic solution to several problems. It's so similar to Hermes isn't it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-20_DynaSoar
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm

If Dyna-Soar and the Space Launching System had been completed, the United States would have had by 1965 a modern modular launch vehicle launching a reusable manned spaceplane -- something it now hopes to accomplish with the Delta IV / OSP by 2010. The nation could have been spared the false premise of the shuttle program and had a space station ferry in being by the beginning of the 1970's. It might even have been flying well into the 21st Century, while the Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle were consigned to the trash heaps of history.

Though in fairness to Apollo the Saturn 5 was one of the few launch systems to have no failures. And it could have put the ISS up in just a few launches.

From left, pilot compartment, equipment compartment, secondary power bay, and transition section with the abort motor.
Cutaway of
X-20A Operational Variants - X-20 Rescue version. Below, alternate equipment bay packages for satellite retrieval, research, high-resolution optical reconnaissance, side-looking radar reconnaissance

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/25/space_elevator - elevator still needs work

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/hubble_seeks_fresh_air/ - Oxygen rich rocks on moon

pukey

look at orion. if it hadn't been shelved by the international test ban treaty (and the fact that detonating alot of nuclear weapons is never popular) the US could've put a 5000ton ship in orbit in the sixties, gone to the moon, mars and the outer solar system in one mission. think how far along we'd be now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion

Capt'n Midnight

yeah but orion would have increased the background radiation a tad.

pukey

freeman dyson reckoned statistically 1 person on earth would have died from the radiation. the nukes would've been low yield, and modern advances in weaponry would actuall allow for a chemical explosives launch, so that the nukes would be airbursts, creating less fallout. also it called for a remote lauch site(nevada or even at sea). i'm not saying it's the way forward, or the best idea ever, i just think if it'd been done back in the day, well, it'd be great to have a huge spacestation to work from, moonbases established, and to have already been to the outer solar system, instead of wondering how nasa lost the plans for saturn 5 and are now buying soyuz from the russians to limit the number of shuttle launches before they retire it, with the cev just a drawing on board at the minute

Capt'n Midnight

They didn't loose the plans for Saturn 5, but like the TRS2 the brits cancelled it would cost too much to retool.

Overall you could reduce the amount you need to get into orbit by shipping the humans separately from the hardware. Send the humans up/down in Soyez. The cargo can be deployed from LEO to the moon using Ion drive (saves 50% of the mass) and you can use a tether (saves 50% of the mass at that point) So you would only need 1/4 of the rocketry to launch. By using superguns / ramps as the first stage you might even get a 50% saving on the takeoff weight too !

Oddly no one has tried ducted vents on rocket motors to try to get more mass flow that way yet.