What would you do differently?

[Jesus KerBeard]

Pick any nations space program. Were you in charge from the start until now, what would you have done differently? Would you have gone pretty much the same way, or had a different focus entirely? You can stretch the budget a bit, but try to keep it real.

For me, going with NASA, I think I\'d have gone about things in largely the same way, with a few differences. During the Apollo landings for instance, I\'d have had an unmanned lander in lunar orbit carrying emergency fuel and rations. I don\'t understand why that wasn\'t done IRL, those guys were screwed if something went wrong.

With the space shuttle program, I\'d have put all those external tanks into a high, long term orbit instead of letting them burn up. Then they could be used for an orbital fuel/water depot. Actually, I\'d split them into 3 groups; 1 depot in Earth orbit, 1 smaller one in lunar orbit (mainly as a staging point in transporting water mined from the moon to the Earth depot) and the last group split into multiple depots which would travel back and forth between the moon and mars. The traveling depots would be automated, and be used to transport fuel/water/other supplies to Mars. The supplies could then be parachuted down to explorers/colonists. They\'d use water-based propellant which could come from the moon.

The last thing that comes to mind is that with the exploration of Mars, I\'d be focusing more than seems to have been done on the caves around the equator. They\'re probably rich in geological information, and underground is the way to go with colonising Mars because of the high radiation levels, so setting up in the caves could save a lot of time and cost.

[GroundHOG2010]

The problem was, is and will be for the future for Government run Space Administration is lack of freedom as they aren\'t just tied to a budget but also but the government. If the govenment thinks that the rocket that they have just spent 4 years designing and building, they can remove funding for it, and you lose money. Its a horrible system.

So just saying that I would do this different is actually bulls**t as you couldn\'t do it.

My Rant Of The Day.

[Newman]

One important factor to consider is that NASA (or any other space agency, for that matter) neither sets it\'s own budget, nor is able to choose the political climate that influences certain decisions. Politicians are never going to approve a budget that goes into billions of dollars just for the purely scientific benefit or even just for the symbolism of putting boots on the ground of another planet. You can\'t find a better example of this than the space race. The whole Moon landing was a direct consequence of the cold war and the competition between the US and USSR. The Soviets were first to launch a satellite, put a living being in orbit, and then put a human in space. Leonov was the first astronaut to perform an EVA. The US was determined to be first on the Moon in order to win the space race.

Now, when you take these into account, you can see a space agency has relatively little freedom. For big projects you need big budgets, and those are only given if there\'s a political will to make it happen. The US Congress isn\'t really likely to approve funding for anything as big as a Mars mission any time soon, for example. Now if the Chinese announced they\'re planning such a mission within the decade and demonstrated they might actually pull it off, things might change. Otherwise, there\'s little commercial use for space travel outside putting satellites in Earth orbit. It\'s easy to fantasize things like 'if I was in charge I\'d have sent man to Mars by now'. Unfortunately, that\'s not how the real world works. It\'s somewhat trendy to attack NASA these days, especially after the whole 'retired the shuttle without a replacement' thing, but the truth is NASA is doing some good work with the ever diminishing budget it has - it\'s unmanned probe program is second to none, and the decision to concentrate on that with a limited budget was a good one. Missions like Cassini-Huygens, Dawn, New Horizons, and things like the MSL all serve to expand our knowledge of the Solar System and gain more and more experience and technical prowess when it comes to space flight. I just hope the next big 'space age' happens within our life times - been a while since the Apollo program ended.

[icefire]

Post of the year 2011

[Newman]

For me, going with NASA, I think I\'d have gone about things in largely the same way, with a few differences. During the Apollo landings for instance, I\'d have had an unmanned lander in lunar orbit carrying emergency fuel and rations. I don\'t understand why that wasn\'t done IRL, those guys were screwed if something went wrong.

With the space shuttle program, I\'d have put all those external tanks into a high, long term orbit instead of letting them burn up. Then they could be used for an orbital fuel/water depot. Actually, I\'d split them into 3 groups; 1 depot in Earth orbit, 1 smaller one in lunar orbit (mainly as a staging point in transporting water mined from the moon to the Earth depot) and the last group split into multiple depots which would travel back and forth between the moon and mars. The traveling depots would be automated, and be used to transport fuel/water/other supplies to Mars. The supplies could then be parachuted down to explorers/colonists. They\'d use water-based propellant which could come from the moon.

The last thing that comes to mind is that with the exploration of Mars, I\'d be focusing more than seems to have been done on the caves around the equator. They\'re probably rich in geological information, and underground is the way to go with colonising Mars because of the high radiation levels, so setting up in the caves could save a lot of time and cost.

Unfortunately, you can\'t make viable suggestions without really understanding how things work. Otherwise, the engineers and scientists who spent years getting educated for that job, and then landing jobs at NASA because they happened to be pretty good at what they do will have you at something of a disadvantage when it comes to critically thinking about how to pull off a space mission.

Emergency fuel and supplies - the question becomes, where and when to put them? Do you do it in a separate flight or bring them with you thereby making your 'every gram counts' vehicle heavier? If you launch them separately, where do you put them? Earth orbit? What if the mishap happens in lunar orbit so this can\'t be reached? Lunar orbit? What if the mishap happens in Earth orbit or the surface of the Moon, so they can\'t be reached? Lunar surface? What if the astronauts never get that far? You\'re talking multiple launches for every single mission which raises the cost exponentially without any guarantees it will be worth it whatsoever.

Fact of the matter is, they were on a clock - time and money were of the essence. This was always going to be a risky mission and if a serious enough failure happened at any time, the astronaut\'s lives would have been at risk. Risk which wouldn\'t be too diminished by putting emergency supplies at points you\'re hoping they might still reach if something happened. One of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission was actually 'will the ascent stage rocket engine fire at all' - they weren\'t really sure if it will fail (apparently they were having problems with this engine, sometimes it wouldn\'t start). If this had happened, the astronauts would have been stuck on the surface of the Moon, and could only wave at your 'unmanned lander with emergency supplies in Lunar orbit'. No amount of emergency supplies could have saved them at this point even if they had managed to reach them. This is basically similar to suggesting that Columbus was careless because he didn\'t send a ship carrying emergency supplies close to the coasts of North America. Space travel is a lot different bag of tricks than putting a barrel of rum around a rescue dog\'s neck, and being an explorer going somewhere where no man has gone before always was and will be a risky business.

Using the shuttle\'s boosters for orbital depots in Earth orbit, Lunar orbit, and Mars orbit. Apparently the boosters ought to be able to move around automatically. First of all, the boosters were ejected at about 45-46km altitude, iirc. High, yes, still well below orbital speeds and altitude, yes. The whole reason the boosters are ejected is because the tanks are spent. If the tanks are spent the boosters have no way of reaching orbit. Unless you attach more boosters to lift these empty boosters, thereby still having discarded boosters at a higher price and complexity. Or you leave them attached to the shuttle which then has to lug that extra mass up there, which completely defeats the purpose of staging in the first place and quite probably makes the shuttle unable to reach orbit too. Since this plan of yours doesn\'t even work to reach LEO, I won\'t even comment on the completely non-viable idea of using them in Lunar and Mars orbits, and between. Not to mention they wouldn\'t serve any purpose empty so you\'d actually have to fly up a separate craft to fuel them. Which then begs the question 'why doesn\'t that craft just detach a full tank and go back rather than transfer fuel to that piece of orbital junk?' If something like this was viable, I\'m fairly sure one of those rocket scientist guys, you know the ones with white lab coats and glasses that kinda look smart, would have thought about it? Maybe?

As for Mars exploration, well, first you need to overcome the obstacle of actually reaching it with a manned mission. To give this mission a chance to succeed without a catastrophic loss of craft and crew, you need a generous budget. And that\'s one obstacle that doesn\'t seem to be possible to cross at this point in time. Once we can actually reach Mars with a manned mission, I\'m sure those aforementioned smarty-pants guys in white lab coats and glasses will be able to figure out what the good landing spots are. As for colonizing it.. much bigger technical challenges that need to be overcome first. Since we can\'t even put people there temporarily at this moment, maybe we should focus on that first..

[rdfox]

Using the shuttle\'s boosters for orbital depots in Earth orbit, Lunar orbit, and Mars orbit. Apparently the boosters ought to be able to move around automatically. First of all, the boosters were ejected at about 45-46km altitude, iirc. High, yes, still well below orbital speeds and altitude, yes. The whole reason the boosters are ejected is because the tanks are spent. If the tanks are spent the boosters have no way of reaching orbit. Unless you attach more boosters to lift these empty boosters, thereby still having discarded boosters at a higher price and complexity. Or you leave them attached to the shuttle which then has to lug that extra mass up there, which completely defeats the purpose of staging in the first place and quite probably makes the shuttle unable to reach orbit too.

I\'ll note that what he described wasn\'t taking the SRBs, which are jettisoned in a suborbital condition, up to orbit, but rather taking the External Tank that last hundred feet per second into orbit. The ET wasn\'t dry when jettisoned; it had, depending on orbit and payload, between 9% and 12% of its total fuel still on board, to provide an abort reserve, since the loss of engines apparently required more delta-vee (and RTLS *always* had hideous delta-vee requirements!). The big reason it was jettisoned before reaching orbit was to save the weight and cost of a *deorbit* engine on the tank, thus the use of the OMS engines to raise perigee after MECO--without them, you\'d re-enter about three-quarters of an orbit later, on a trajectory for the Indian Ocean. NASA didn\'t want to leave hundreds of empty external tanks floating around in exactly the sort of orbit the Shuttle was going to insert into, unless there was some use for them up there.

NASA did have a number of 'wet workshop' proposals for taking the ET all the way to orbit, based on the original Skylab concept that used a Saturn IB to launch the station as an upper stage; none of them were pursued because it was felt that they were a bit too risky, both in terms of the orbital construction work involved, and in terms of making sure the LH2 tank in particular was completely purged before use. Still, the 'wet workshop' concept will always be there to tantalize designers with the thought of putting a space station with truly massive internal volume into orbit, while keeping payload weight down to being just the weight of the docking module and any pre-installed equipment. (Remember, Skylab was a converted S-IVB Saturn IB second stage, with the backup unit now at the Smithsonian being converted from a Saturn V third stage version of the same stage; it provided a pressurized volume of 319.8 cubic meters, in a SINGLE LAUNCH, compared to the 32 missions over twelve years required to provide a total of 837 cubic meters in the ISS, and it *could* have been launched as a Saturn IB wet workshop instead of a Saturn V dry workshop. Even if NASA had merely used up the remaining Apollo hardware to expand Skylab, we could have had a space station 122.4 cubic meters *larger* than the ISS in orbit by 1975, with a total of three launches to put it up there as dry workshops, retaining the Saturn IBs to send up crews...)

[ryacko]

Soviets needed consolidation and more funding. Work was duplicated among several design bureaus.

[Jesus KerBeard]

Newman, chill out man. This was supposed to be pretty much a fantasy thread about how you\'d have liked things to be done, not about the reasons those things weren\'t done IRL.