NASA SLS/Orion/Payloads

[tater]

They're claiming zero boil off on the lander. (been watching the replay vid)

 

 

[wumpus]

16 hours ago, tater said:

Building stations is what you do with overbuilt, otherwise useless hardware.

The difference between building stations and interplanetary vehicles is mostly engines (especially around the Moon where you need the same shielding as an interplanetary vessel).

[tater]

3 hours ago, wumpus said:

The difference between building stations and interplanetary vehicles is mostly engines (especially around the Moon where you need the same shielding as an interplanetary vessel).

True, but reliability is also an issue. LM was right to talk about "self rescue" for any Mars mission. A Earth/Moon station is within external rescue, and also self-rescue home (crew vehicles obviously have propellant to return).

[DerekL1963]

8 minutes ago, tater said:

A Earth/Moon station is within external rescue

In theory.  In practice, unless there's a mission at a point in it's flow that allows it to be repurposed quickly or the casualty is a slow motion one...  not so much.   How many of the current crop of crew vehicles can fly entirely autonomously and conduct a rescue at full capacity?   A purpose launched Soyuz, for example, can only rescue/recover a single station crewmember.  (And the next one won't be along for weeks to months.)

In the submarine force,  our options were the equivalent of an LES and redundant parachutes on a capsule...  Only useful during a small portion of the beginning and ending of a flight or deployment.  So we called the escape, rescue, and survival systems "mommy systems".  That is, their existence kept wives, mothers, and congresscritters happy.  The crews were under no illusion as to their (almost complete lack of) actual usefulness.  If we couldn't reach the surface on our own, it was pretty much game over.

So yeah, it's fine to talk about rescue capability...  But the discussion must be informed by reality.  If they can't evacuate then almost certainly the odds of rescue are slim indeed.

[tater]

True, but any station at least has crew vehicles enough for all station crew, and those vehicles are available for return. External rescue is only even theoretically possible as you say, under the condition that this is part of the mission architecture from the start, and craft are available for nearly immediate launch.

In LEO, assuming commercial crew finally flies, we will have 4 possible crew vehicles in various stages of readiness, worldwide. Soyuz, Dragon, CST-100, and Shenzhou. The latter flies very infrequently, but presumably the others will be in various states of readiness at any given point in any given month. An acute problem---leave NOW---is clearly not going to have an external rescue option without something ready to go. A slower problem, that might allow them to have weeks, is another matter, though. Heck, even a month or two gives a possibility of external rescue, whereas the window for that at Mars is far longer, making any extemporaneous attempts virtually impossible (sorry, The Martian  ).

So I think that external rescue is at least a plausible point to consider for failure modes that require rescue on appropriate timescales (weeks/months not days/hours).

[_Augustus_]

https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/multimedia/sls-core-stage-pathfinder-arrives-at-nasa-michoud.html

Core stage pathfinder arrives at Michoud.

I am willing to bet money on SLS being cancelled before EM-2. EM-1 won't fly until 2020 now, and BFR is going to be flying in 2022.......

[tater]

It won't be cancelled because Elon Musk has a YouTube video of a cool rocket.

[_Augustus_]

23 minutes ago, tater said:

It won't be cancelled because Elon Musk has a YouTube video of a cool rocket.

I think that it will be cancelled once Elon Musk has a rocket bigger than SLS flying.....

[tater]

13 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

I think that it will be cancelled once Elon Musk has a rocket bigger than SLS flying.....

When/if it's flying, then you'll have a point, for sure. Until it is demonstrated obsolete (and likely after a while) it will be funded.

 

[regex]

10 minutes ago, tater said:

When/if it's flying, then you'll have a point, for sure. Until it is demonstrated obsolete (and likely after a while) it will be funded.

 

This ^.

I like Musk. I like his vision. I think he's a p cool dude and we need more people like him who dream big. I want him to succeed because he's p cool.

I always, always doubt his timetable because things happen.

The man and his company have done some amazing things for sure, and I have no doubts they'll do many more, but Musk is a bit ... optimistic about when he'll be getting his windowed monstrosity to Mars. In the meantime, SLS.

Edited September 29, 2017 by regex

[kerbiloid]

25 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

I think that it will be cancelled once Elon Musk has a rocket bigger than SLS flying.....

Or a cool video of such rocket on the YouTube channel.

[tater]

I have some hope that SLS/Orion is the last of "old school" NASA projects, at least for launch vehicles.

I think that if SX and BO can get their stuff in the air, then the whole public private partnership model can really take off. Ideally NASA would concentrate on building hardware for specific science tasks, or for novel engineering that is not right for the market to play with. They can build dedicated spacecraft (vacuum only), they can work on advanced propulsion, and other testbeds. They can get the stuff put into space far more cost-effectively on NG, or BFR, etc.

[DAL59]

The new ITS will also have a swinging fairing, so it could put up a really big probe for NASA, with enough fuel in the probe to go to anywhere.

[tater]

Yeah, like Shuttle used to launch things from the cargo bay.

Way OT, though, this is an SLS thread. What can SLS do?

[_Augustus_]

13 minutes ago, tater said:

What can SLS do?

Create jobs for Congress-critters' districts, waste NASA's money, and launch missions to a useless lunar space station once a year......

[insert_name]

39 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

Create jobs for Congress-critters' districts, waste NASA's money, and launch missions to a useless lunar space station once a year......

and launch outer solar system probes in a more reasonable timescale, Europa clipper is probably going up on one, and Nasa's Ice giant study recommends the use of SLS as a launch Vehicle

[DAL59]

Why is NASA using the SLS to decrease transit time instead of increasing the mass of the clipper?  Unless they can send a lander, they might detect "signs" of life, but not actual life.  Why not just sent the lander and not the orbiter?

[Mitchz95]

5 hours ago, insert_name said:

and launch outer solar system probes in a more reasonable timescale, Europa clipper is probably going up on one, and Nasa's Ice giant study recommends the use of SLS as a launch Vehicle

That's only two payloads, which won't be ready for years if not decades. SLS is supposed to enter service two years from now.

[tater]

1 hour ago, Mitchz95 said:

That's only two payloads, which won't be ready for years if not decades. SLS is supposed to enter service two years from now.

And to keep costs just ridiculously high, instead of absurdly, ridiculously high, they need to fly the thing twice a year.

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, tater said:

And to keep costs just ridiculously high, instead of absurdly, ridiculously high, they need to fly the thing twice a year.

They can carry barrels of water.
They anyway will have to put into orbit a lot of water, why not begin doing this now.

[tater]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They can carry barrels of water.
They anyway will have to put into orbit a lot of water, why not begin doing this now.

You, sir, should lobby Congress, I'm pretty sure they'd drink this idea up.

[Nikolai]

On 9/28/2017 at 9:05 AM, tater said:

Engineering is making technologies. Science is studying the universe. They are not the same thing. This is not controversial to anyone in engineering I have ever talked to. Engineers use science, and scientists use engineering. The goals are different.

If it doesn't generalize to increase the understanding of the natural universe, it's not science.

Yup, yup.  And without engineering, science is just another kind of philosophy.

Like I said, ongoing debate.  =shrug=  I guess this is all tangential to the point anyway, which is that space exploration is done to eventually put people in space, and we kind of seem to agree on that.  Where people fall on this particular point doesn't really matter with respect to that.

On 9/28/2017 at 9:05 AM, tater said:

I'm unsure why this is unclear.

That particular point wasn't unclear.  My question is why you felt the need to point out specifically that it was circular, not what your point was.  But that seems kind of academic, really -- I genuinely think we agree about much more than we disagree about.

[Mitchz95]

On 9/30/2017 at 3:37 AM, kerbiloid said:

They can carry barrels of water.
They anyway will have to put into orbit a lot of water, why not begin doing this now.

... Could that actually be a viable market? Just load up dozens of SLS rockets with water and shoot them off into orbit, to be used by some future space-based industry?

They could just build a scaled-up Cygnus or something and fill it to the brim with water. It has engines and thrusters, so it can just fly wherever it's needed.

[qzgy]

7 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

some future space-based industry?

This makes the assumption that a) the future exists and b) that a space based industry will appear by then, then being whenever the cygnus water craft don't burn up from orbital decay.

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

... Could that actually be a viable market?

If they are ready to take this profit as deferred revenue.

(But probably smart people could get some fee right now).

8 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

Just load up dozens of SLS rockets with water and shoot them off into orbit, to be used by some future space-based industry?

They could just build a scaled-up Cygnus or something and fill it to the brim with water. It has engines and thrusters, so it can just fly wherever it's needed.

As currently they anyway deliver water to ISS with cargo ships, and probably in future they anyway should deliver water in much greater amounts with either small or big dumb rockets, I'm just not sure which way will look more silly fifty years later...

8 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

so it can just fly wherever it's needed.

They can dock to each other and create Orbital Water Deposit. When it gets enough big and stop melting every orbit turn, it will become an artificial Miniminmus.

Edited October 2, 2017 by kerbiloid