The Nova rocket, AKA the other lunar rocket

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

Orion is one of those ideas that looks good on paper (like space elevators or Skylon...) but would be an engineering nightmare. The logistics alone of building a supply chain for mass producing nuclear charges, with all the security and safety requirements, would be daunting. The construction facilities to build your Orion in the middle of a no-man's-land covered with graphite would have to be rebuilt from scratch for each new ship.

So yeah, it might work, but the cost in resources, real-estate, manpower, and general effort would be massive.

The benefits, in return, are even more massive. That's the idea.

We already mass produced, or at least heavily produced, nuclear weapons in the 60s. Building something in the middle of nowhere wouldn't necessarily be needed. An already existing test location could be used for the launch.

If Orion is a massive engineering nightmare, so is any massive rocket, a la the Saturn V and the SLS. Especially the SLS. It's a nightmare in NASA offices. They lower the number of engines to conserve them, but then a whole new plethora of issues showed up. Now they want extra performance. But they can't get it without 4 engines.

[Kryten]

The Michoud production plant was built after NASA decided on LOR, so was only built to be able to handle Saturn 5 stages. It'd have had to have been completely rebuilt to be able to handle Nova.

Just now, Bill Phil said:

The benefits, in return, are even more massive. That's the idea.

 

What benefits? In the 60s when they were considering this thing, they thought industry in space was just around the corner, based on pharmaceuticals, production of 'new materials' and space solar power. In the intervening 50 years of space research we haven't found a physical or biochemical process that actually works out more economical in space, and we've shown SSP to be not or barely viable.

Edited May 15, 2016 by Kryten

[Bill Phil]

9 minutes ago, cfds said:

What is a "graphite pad" supposed to be? I don't see how a slab of a very brittle variant of pure carbon can withstand even a moderate explosion. And I have no idea how it will catch the fission products of a nuclear explosion.

Graphite resists nuclear explosions. A coating of graphite over steel prevented their destruction. Uncovered steel would be heavily damaged or vaporized. Now, it would still move, but wouldn't be vaporized. A graphite covered steel reinforced structure of something.

[Bill Phil]

6 minutes ago, Kryten said:

The Michoud production plant was built after NASA decided on LOR, so was only built to be able to handle Saturn 5 stages. It'd have had to have been completely rebuilt to be able to handle Nova.

 

What benefits? In the 60s when they were considering this thing, they thought industry in space was just around the corner, based on pharmaceuticals, production of 'new materials' and space solar power. In the intervening 50 years of space research we haven't found a physical or biochemical process that actually works out more economical in space, and we've shown SSP to be not or barely viable.

Getting thousands of tonnes to Jupiter is a pretty major benefit. 

To them, if Orion had been used, that infrastructure would have occurred.

We have found one: Orion and its derivatives. The issue is this: it costs a lot to build one. But the benefits are enormous. 

Let's say that one launch costs 10billion USD with a payload of 2000 tonnes. This is doable with modern tech. 1E10 USD / 2E6 kg = 5E3 USD / kg. That's not as good as Proton, but close. Over time, though, we could increase the payload with little cost changes. That's the nature of the technology. The cost could be heavily lowered. In fact, it's possible that the cost could be a few billion per launch, as opposed to 10. We don't really know.

[Kryten]

Just now, Bill Phil said:

Getting thousands of tonnes to Jupiter is a pretty major benefit. 

How?

[Nibb31]

 

Quote

We already mass produced, or at least heavily produced, nuclear weapons in the 60s. Building something in the middle of nowhere wouldn't necessarily be needed. An already existing test location could be used for the launch.

To build something as Massive as Orion, you would need to build one of the biggest megafactories in the World. It dwarfs skyscrapers. You won't be moving it around before launch. You'll have to build the factory/assembly facility and nuke it on launch. You will be launching it in the middle of nowhere, at several hundred kilometers from the closest inhabited area, so you not only need to build the factory, but you also need to house the workers, build roads, and all sorts of one-off infrastructure that will be blasted to smithereens on the first launch.

The mass production of nuclear charges envisioned here is orders of magnitude higher that cold war production. Military grade security literally employs armies to store nuclear weapons safely. The cost of that security is enormous and uses a considerable portion of the federal budget. It's worth it when national security is at stake, but I don't see how you could justify that sort of cost for a space transportation system. Imagine just a couple of these Orion charges getting out on the black market... 

Quote

If Orion is a massive engineering nightmare, so is any massive rocket, a la the Saturn V and the SLS. Especially the SLS. It's a nightmare in NASA offices. They lower the number of engines to conserve them, but then a whole new plethora of issues showed up. Now they want extra performance. But they can't get it without 4 engines.

Saturn V or SLS could be manufactured around the country and assembled on site in a VAB. KSC cost billions to build, and you didn't have to rebuild the whole Cape facilities 100km further away after each launch. The engineering effort to build Orion is orders of magnitude more complex.

Edited May 16, 2016 by Nibb31

[Nibb31]

8 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Getting thousands of tonnes to Jupiter is a pretty major benefit. 

For who? What for? Where's the need for thousands of tonnes to Jupiter?

Quote

Let's say that one launch costs 10billion USD with a payload of 2000 tonnes.

That's totally unrealistic. It would cost many times that. We're talking something several times the complexity and size of a nuclear supercarrier, which costs around $10 billion, and it doesn't blow away its shipyard when it launches. With Orion, you have space-rated material, a whole new industry to develop, new construction techniques to invent, and facilities to build, etc... Besides, nuclear fuel isn't exactly cheap either.

Edited May 16, 2016 by Nibb31

[TiktaalikDreaming]

On 3/10/2016 at 6:05 PM, Hannu2 said:

I do not understand what you actually ask. Do you think some kind of scenario in which I am NASAs leader in 50's and make a decision between Saturn and Nova? It is practically impossible to answer because I do not know all things which was known then. Probably Saturn was technically and economically much more feasible and significantly faster to develop. It was a space race then and if Soviets would have been first on Moon because my decision, probably my career in NASA had been over.

If you ask should Nasa develop modernized versions of old rockets now, I would say absolute no to both. They relied on old material and manufacturing technology and careless economy. It would be much cheaper to develop and use as powerful rockets with current technologies, if somebody really wanted or needed them.

Yeah, the real question is Nova or Space Shuttle.  Realistically, the Nova was a post-Saturn design.  Yes, originally they thought they needed the Nova to get to the moon, but switched to "just" the Saturn for time related issues (I doubt I'll ever use the term "just" and "Saturn" in a sentence again).  But, once NASA had got to the moon, the next decision was "What next?".  And, at the time, NASA chose to investigate reusable space planes.  And while we all now know that's not as efficient as even throw away boosters, that wasn't known until someone tried.  The experiment lasted some decades.  excrements happens.  There's only so much budget to go around (unless the USA stops spending 1.5T$/y on defense, the crazy freaks) so only one major direction at a time. 

They're about ready to take off with the SLS, which rather daftly re-uses the shuttle's SME, but it's still a pretty good craft.  And I'm not picking on the SME for the usual reasons.  Basically, NASA, JPL, etc put a serious truck load of work into those suckers.  It would have been nice to take the lessons learned, and redesign from scratch for the new use case.  But instead NASA is adjusting the existing design.  That always smells bad to me.  Still, apart from the OMG scale of the things, they're better in just about every way to the F-1, as much as I love that huge beast.  ISP, restarts, loveing huge gimbal, is all hugely better.  It falls down a bit on TWR, but only because LH+LOX is never going to match K+LOX for thrust.  But it trashes it solidly on efficiency.   But really, the process of taking the lessons learned through development and practical use of the F-1 and J-2, and then start with a fresh drawing board, is what got the awesomeness of the SME.  And it would have been great to see that happen again.  But, America's industrialized corruption isn't going to see that happen.

But, going back to Nova or Shuttle.  The number of ideas that popped up for the next step are immense.  The Nova was well down the path of design, which sets it apart a bit.  But there was a host of options provided by every company even remotely involved.  In waves as well.  Before the decision to go with a "shuttle-like" craft, there was a vast array of rockets, re-usable or otherwise, and then after NASA announced they were looking for submissions into a space plane, there were still a heap of options, but now they all vaguely looked space-plane like.  You might as well ask Onion or Phoenix.

 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

12 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

 

To build something as Massive as Orion, you would need to build one of the biggest megafactories in the World. It dwarfs skyscrapers. You won't be moving it around before launch. You'll have to build the factory/assembly facility and nuke it on launch. You will be launching it in the middle of nowhere, at several hundred kilometers from the closest inhabited area, so you not only need to build the factory, but you also need to house the workers, build roads, and all sorts of one-off infrastructure that will be blasted to smithereens on the first launch.

The mass production of nuclear charges envisioned here is orders of magnitude higher that cold war production. Military grade security literally employs armies to store nuclear weapons safely. The cost of that security is enormous and uses a considerable portion of the federal budget. It's worth it when national security is at stake, but I don't see how you could justify that sort of cost for a space transportation system. Imagine just a couple of these Orion charges getting out on the black market... 

Saturn V or SLS could be manufactured around the country and assembled on site in a VAB. KSC cost billions to build, and you didn't have to rebuild the whole Cape facilities 100km further away after each launch. The engineering effort to build Orion is orders of magnitude more complex.

Actually, GenAtomics came up with a perfectly workable 10m diameter version for NASA and USAF that could be launched (lofted, wouldn't quite make orbit, but above about 100km, orion use would be safe for people on the ground.) on a Saturn V 1st stage.  In fact the readily available paper by General Atomics for NASA focuses strongly on the 10m design for this very reason.  Not only would it significantly alleviate concerns about safety, it (and sadly, this is probably more important) would have allowed them to not obsolete the Saturn over-night.  And the larger 86foot diameter "Medium" sized Orion could have been lofted by some of the post-Saturn ludicrously large boosters.

On risk: It's VERY apparent when looking at people's reactions to various causes of death, that actual risk has nothing to do with perceived risk.  Nuclear related risk is rated extremely highly in the human consciousness.  Unlike road fatalities and heart disease.  So, it's just a fact of politics and public opinion that swing us away from nuclear solutions a lot of the time (EG: ignoring other factors, radiation exposure near a coal fuel station is higher than near a nuclear reactor, but just see which people would rather live near).

Any mission to Mars or Saturn would be insanely expensive if we were to send humans.  Time spent in transit would be a major factor in the size of the vessel needed, and so stupid high ISP is where the game is at.  Today, ion thrusters are where it's at for ISP, but they produce such insanely crap TWR they're fairly useless so far for manned missions.  There's a host of options besides Orion, many of which are much better politically.  Also, much better developed.  I still think the main issue with Orion is that there's a lot of development work to do, and *that* is where the issue is.  We got the basic physics of it worked out.  We know it should work "in theory".  But, I can hazard a guess as to what happened to the first ever liquid fueled rocket as well.  And how many test launches do we need before we have a working solution?  If we'd burnt all those test fires of nukes back in the 60's on pusher plate dynamics and erosion, suspension reactions to 1000G and all that excrements, then we might be in a position to build one.  But without having done that, we'd need to re-irradiate the planet again.  Because, you can loft up a working Orion, but you'll have a hard job lofting up a few hundred for testing of this or that adjustment.   While all the other systems used for thrust get tested exhaustively at ground level. 

So, yes, the engineering is prohibitive, but not just because the craft would be expensive.