Most ridiculous government funded space ideas.

[kurios]

Bad analogy. The three trucks were independent of the drunk. America has control over much of the worlds' nukes, and is allied with the countries that own 99.9% of them.

It would be more like saying a person has control over 65k+ trucks and has yet to crash any of them into innocent civilians (except for two which were justified... however you justify crashing a truck into two people).

Its justified cause the two they hit were drunkards, and therefore worth bonus points.

[jwenting]

Well if you know it so well, then you know it didn't just point at something and blast to it. This isn't Star Trek.

because for taking off that's exactly what you'd do. Point at where you want to end up (not Mars, but where Mars will be when you get to that point), blast straight up for it, then coast, turn the ship, blast retro straight down until you're on the ground.

No need for gravity turns, parking orbits, etc. etc. with that kind of power.

[greatorder]

I guess you never heard about Project Horizon then.

Really, USA have the weirdest/worst ideas ever from time to time.

Don't they have some sort of protocol for if girl scouts decide to lead a rebellion?

[crazyewok]

The Strategic Defense Initiative was pretty crazy just for the sake of its cost and overkill.

[Rickenbacker]

WHAT? Are you kidding me? I've known about MOOSE for ages and I love it! I'd test that sucka in a heartbeat! There's a couple in "Space Rescue" by David Shayler that are even nuttier. There was ENCAP which was basically a heat-shield umbrella with a retrorocket, even sketchier than MOOSE, SAVER which was just a really big balloon with an astronaut at one end, and PARACONE which was a cone-shaped parachute "as it would encounter no more than 6gs it was assumed the space suit could handle the heat loads by itself" Assumed?? really?

Hah! I assume that was thought up before they started testing heat shields for real... But MOOSE is indeed very cool, and if you could come up with a foam material that would actually work as a heatshield without coming apart, we'd have a new sport for all those people who think skydiving is too boring!

As an aside, I can recommend downloading "Coming home" from the NASA website for free. It's a book only about the problems with returning from space. Pretty interesting stuff, and it's a lot more involved than I initially thought.

[Rickenbacker]

Your link about an NTR. Nothing to do with Orion.

NTR is a technology from the 60's that was experimented by both the Soviet Union and the US. As opposed to Orion, NTR prototypes were actually built and extensively tested. Both nations were pretty much ready to roll it out. NASA had plans for a nuclear variant of the Saturn V for Mars missions.

But neither NERVA or the RD-0410 involved atmospheric explosions or 50-mile exclusion zones. That's just stupid.

True, but the US did blow up two nuclear rockets in testing, just to see what would happen. That's a little crazy .

[Galacticruler]

The Strategic Defense Initiative was pretty crazy just for the sake of its cost and overkill.

Much of this.

Also, Apollo. sure, we could, but good god did they waste useless amounts of fuel.

[Nibb31]

True, but the US did blow up two nuclear rockets in testing, just to see what would happen. That's a little crazy .

Got any details?

I don't think any NERVA engines ever exploded, intentionally or not. The USA, USSR, and France all did simulations of crashing nuclear warheads, but those aren't related to spaceflight.

[Themohawkninja]

Much of this.

Also, Apollo. sure, we could, but good god did they waste useless amounts of fuel.

Excluding Apollo 13, when (and how) did the Apollo program waste "useless amounts of fuel"?

[Skyler4856]

Got any details?

I don't think any NERVA engines ever exploded, intentionally or not. The USA, USSR, and France all did simulations of crashing nuclear warheads, but those aren't related to spaceflight.

I would imagine they would like to simulate what would happen to a space craft if the reactor had a meltdown.

[Themohawkninja]

Got any details?

I don't think any NERVA engines ever exploded, intentionally or not. The USA, USSR, and France all did simulations of crashing nuclear warheads, but those aren't related to spaceflight.

One unintentional (core had an unwarrented dry run, which resulted in a hydrogen tank explosion), and one intentional (to determine the radiological hazard if a NERVA were to explode in-flight).

[rdfox]

I don't know anything about the unintentional NERVA detonation, but the Total Nuclear Test (a name where you can tell that SOMEONE really wanted the initials to spell out "TNT" regardless of whether it meant anything or not) used an explosive charge to blow up the engine at full power for, as stated before, radiological hazard research. This was conducted in an area of the Nevada Test Site that was well within the exclusion zone for testing, but had not been significantly contaminated by aboveground tests, allowing them to gather baseline data. (It was actually not far at all from the area where we had conducted "zero-yield" tests of live nukes being set off in one-point-safe mode to gather data on radiological hazards from a nuclear weapon cooking off in the post-crash fire of a heavy bomber.)

Technically, EVERY lunar flight of the Apollo program could be said to have wasted a great deal of fuel, in a series of different ways. For all of these, remember, every gram you shave off the payload of a given rocket stage is, very VERY roughly, about five to ten grams less propellant and propellant tank mass required in the stage to get the target delta-V, and if you add that up on what's essentially a four-stage rocket like the Apollo-Saturn V vehicle (S-IC, S-II, S-IVB, and SM), you end up with shaving one gram of deadweight from the CSM resulting in a total vehicle mass reduction of 781-11,111 grams (using those same numbers multiplied through for each stage's propellant reductions), so while these may seem small, they resulted in significant mass penalties in the lower stages.

First off, the Service Module's Service Propulsion System engine was far bigger than it actually needed to be--it was a legacy of the days when Apollo was conceived of as a Direct Ascent lunar landing, and was sized to lift the entire Command and Service Modules off the lunar surface for the return home. While the SPS's net delta-V was reduced a great deal (by shrinking the propellant tanks to make room for the Scientific Instrument Module bay of the SM) after the LOR decision, the SPS engine itself was about twice the size, power, and mass that were actually required for its maneuvers; this meant a significant amount of extra payload weight for the Saturn V to put onto a lunar trajectory. When the final missions were so close on their weight limits that NASA even considered cutting the number of bandages in the first aid kit (from twelve to six) to save weight, that was a couple hundred pounds that they desperately would have loved to be able to eliminate. (And the defense here: Using the already-designed SPS engine saved a lot of money and time in the engineering process compared to designing a new engine for the job. The Lunar Module Ascent Engine would have been sufficient in size, but was designed to only be fired either once or twice before certain critical components failed and it wouldn't ignite again, and it had no gimbal capability, meaning that it would have required re-engineering to be used as the SPS engine. The LM Descent Engine didn't have problems with multistart durability and could be gimballed, but it was a complex, throttleable engine that didn't have the same "100% reliability" standard required of the SPS and LMAE, since it would always have the option of aborting the landing with the Ascent Engine if it failed. And just scaling down the SPS would have been essentially designing a new engine from scratch, so it was felt that they had a better chance of meeting budget limits and the Kennedy deadline by sticking with the oversized, overpowered legacy SPS engine.)

Speaking of the SIM, it, too, resulted in wasted fuel on all the flights before 15. Since the Service Module was designed to have its center of mass correctly oriented on the longitudinal axis, providing for carrying the SIM on the J missions (15 through 17, plus possibly the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions, though don't quote me on those having the SIM) meant that its bay not only had to be kept as void space for the earlier missions, but that ballast (in, IIRC, the form of a big steel plug) had to be carried in that space to simulate the mass of the SIM that would be included in the future. That's several hundred pounds of unnecessary mass on the earlier flights. (Defense: Pretty much the same as the above. If you didn't do this, you'd have to have two completely different SM designs, with one most likely shorter than the other; even if you made it so that the J-mission SM was essentially a standard SM with an SIM mounted on top of it, you'd still need to move the SM's RCS quads up the sides of the SM to balance them, and then you have issues with the CG shifting as propellant is consumed. Either way, if you have two different SM configurations used in flight, you're going to have to aerodynamically certify the Apollo-Saturn V vehicle with both SM lengths, meaning a lot more engineering work and at least one more Saturn V unmanned test flight to verify the wind tunnel numbers.)

Finally, and probably the biggest issue, Apollo did not fly a Hohmann transfer orbit trajectory. Instead, it flew a highly accelerated transfer trajectory to the Moon (a free-return trajectory on 8, 10, 11, and 12, and an almost-free-return on the later lunar missions that required non-equatorial lunar orbits), taking just three days to make the trip between Earth and Moon instead of the 14 that a Hohmann orbit would have required. This is a huge guzzler of delta-V in two ways. First, a Hohmann transfer is the minimum-energy transfer to get up to the target distance from the Earth--the S-IVB could have been designed to just barely get the CSM/LM combination across the equigravisphere so that it would start accelerating towards the Moon on gravity alone, making it much smaller and thereby the rest of the Saturn V stack smaller. (I'm going to ignore Apollo 8 using a mass simulator in place of the LM; that mission was laid on incredibly quickly, at least partly for political reasons, and wasn't part of the original plan, but that would have been able to vastly save mass and fuel had they planned it that way from the start.) Secondly, a Hohmann transfer has lower delta-V requirements for capture and orbital insertion AT the destination--Apollo actually had to make three burns to enter Lunar orbit (one to change from the free-return trajectory to one for the orbital insertion, one essentially to "capture" it into a 160x60 nautical mile orbit, and finally one to circularize to 60x60 nautical miles), each of which required more delta-V than a Hohmann transfer would have, as an ideal Hohmann transfer would have just required one burn at perilune to insert *and* circularize all in one step. (Defense: NASA had two VERY good reasons for using the accelerated transfer. First, they weren't entirely sure whether the radiation environment of cislunar space would be healthy for the crew, and it was felt that it would be better to get them through it and the Van Allen belts as quickly as possible, to minimize the radiation dose--this later proved to be a good thing, as the incidence of cancer and cataracts amongst the Apollo lunar mission crews has been significantly higher than amongst the general population of astronauts, much less humanity as a whole. Secondly, and probably more importantly, NASA did careful weight calculations and determined that the three-day transfer was probably the best balance between the required mass of consumables and redundant equipment for a safe and successful crewed mission, and the mass of propellant required to get the required delta-V with a given payload. The extra food, water, oxygen, hydrogen (for the fuel cells), lithium hydroxide, hydrazine (for the RCS), and additional Environmental Control System redundancies needed to extend the missions by 22 days to take a Hohmann transfer orbit would have simply increased payload mass to the point where it would have taken *more* propellant to fly that than the accelerated transfer ended up doing.)

So yeah, in all cases, the Apollo flights wasted a significant amount of fuel that could have been saved. However, in each case, there were very, very good reasons for the "wasteful" choices made--and that's even before considering the fact that the cost of re-engineering the vehicle to eliminate these wastes would have been far greater than the pennies per gallon of RP-1 kerosene, LOX, LH2, nitrogen tetroxide, and hydrazine, and pennies per pound of aluminum (vehicle structure) that NASA would have saved, even if the maximum weight savings had been achieved. There's an old engineering mantra: "Fast, good, cheap--pick any two." Apollo had to be good, because human lives were riding on it. And the Kennedy deadline mandated that it had to be fast. So this meant that it wouldn't be cheap, either in terms of cubic dollars spent on the program, or in terms of operational costs to fly the missions. Was it the most efficient way of getting to the Moon? No. Was it the most efficient way to get there with a manned spacecraft before 11:59PM Central Standard Time on 31 December 1969, given the program's start date? Almost certainly...

[Accelerando]

The most obvious problem with Project Orion, and the one that almost never seems to be acknowledged by either its supporters or those discussing it in general (yell at me if it's been pointed out earlier in this thread), is its payload capacity and associated inability to scale down. Having the cargo space for 1000+ tons, or more, and no ability to scale back fission bombs beyond a certain point is a huge stumbling block because it means that in order for launches to be as cheap as possible you have to be able to build 1000 tons of equipment, which is like an entire space program in and of itself: you wouldn't have found many customers for that in the 1950s-70s. I'm not sure how this scales for pure fusion bombs.

[crazyewok]

The most obvious problem with Project Orion, and the one that almost never seems to be acknowledged by either its supporters or those discussing it in general (yell at me if it's been pointed out earlier in this thread), is its payload capacity and associated inability to scale down. Having the cargo space for 1000+ tons, or more, and no ability to scale back fission bombs beyond a certain point is a huge stumbling block because it means that in order for launches to be as cheap as possible you have to be able to build 1000 tons of equipment, which is like an entire space program in and of itself: you wouldn't have found many customers for that in the 1950s-70s. I'm not sure how this scales for pure fusion bombs.

No your right that probably is a problem especialy if you jump into makeing the super size versions!

But I guess with the sort of low costs its promises it would open up projects to almost every educational insitution. Also the private sector would most likley jump onto it and do things they can only dream of now. Im sure a 10,000 ton ship would be filled pretty quicky. I mean you dont have to launch one every month.