Obama banks on NASA's big launcher

Only one decent solution.

Let's get Project Orion back on track!

Could all be sorted in just one spectacular launch.

NASA is a problem. I wish they would move far beyond Ares...

To me and to most people I guess, NASA is a place of science combined with that sense of wonder of learning about space, plus of course the hope and need to get the human race into space etc.. Therefore I truly want to see NASA thrive and do ever better. So every setback that NASA experiences saddens me and irritates me. Plus I find the whole Ares concept a setback, (with its basically ancient technology), when we should be moving towards something far more like HOTOL and Skylon etc..

But I've come to realize there is (and has always been) another mostly hidden side to NASA, which is that its always been very much a part of the US military. For example NASA has a very important and central role in military spy and communications satellites. Ares looks a lot more suited to these goals, than as a futuristic experiment in trying to develop next generation reusable space vehicles. Plus the Shuttle also provides a service and upgrade capability to these military satellites. So I expect Gary F could be right about them holding onto the Shuttle for a little while longer.

In some ways, the military goals are getting in the way of advancing the development of next generation reusable space vehicles. I expect this is at least partly due to the limited technical views of politicians pressuring NASA into focusing on military biased goals.

So NASA is a problem. Without the military funding, we couldn't have such a big and well funded NASA because the politicians funding money would go into other military funding, because as always, politicians are always focused on power, in whatever form it comes in, including furthering military power (as always out of fear of what others may do against them, and some times their concerns are real and so not without reason, because the politicians opponent opposite numbers in other governments are thinking the same as them. They are all vying for power and playing their world chess games and so spying on what the other side is doing, is all part of that eternal game hence their need for spy satellites etc... (This political need to spy has been played for centuries with whatever technology was available at the time).

So sadly it looks like we are stuck with a military funded and therefore military biased NASA. I wish the world could finally get over the endless political chess game, of both political fears of loosing power and political desires of ever more power. Its as if we are all being dragged along by the politicians fears and desires, when we should be instead focusing on scientific goals, to make this world so much better for all and to work as hard as we can to see and move beyond Earth.

So it looks like we are stuck with projects like Ares. :(

@Destroy All Monsters

"Whatever happened to Bush Jr's. Space Program"

IIRC beyond his initial annoucnement speech pretty much nothing. He committed no political capital to getting any funding passed or even talking it up as something the US should be doing.

The real problem with dumping Aries 1 is the SRB work seems to be key to keeping ATK (or whatever Morton Thiokol are called these days) in Salt Lake City Utah in business. There are concerns this would lead to a rise in the cost of other solid rockets they make (I think they do Trident and various others).*

SpaceX reckon they could get the Dragon capsule to crew rated in 36 months (6 months of that being a safety float). Most of that time is designing the crew escape tower (It's a bit more complicated than it looks) which is likely to be a solid, and a fairly slow test cycle at the Cape for compatability with the existing infrastructure.

Note that Lockheed studied crew return and man-rating for Biglow's space hotel concept using Atlas V with a Centaur 2nd stage. They concluded (unlike NASA) that man rating *was* possible with limited design changes which could be applied to *all* future Atlas vehicles, provided someone else did the capsule.

No word on what Orbital could do to restore crew return with their entry on COTS. With crew transfer to ISS taken care of and a reasonable cargo capability work can move straight to Aries V.

Note They were at the time of winning the Shuttle contract the *only* mfg of large solids which could not move them by barge as a *single* unit (Salt Lake city being land locked) and they ended up *bottom* of the NASA scoring panel's results for various other reasons, *however* the agency head at the time was a Mormon and asked they be re-scored. US taxpayers has been living with the results of that for roughly the last 35 years.

Mine's the one with "Some of my best friends are Mormons" on the back.

ESA? cHINA

Time for someone to step into the breach:

http://www.bristolspaceplanes.com/

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/

Alien: 'cos they might offer to sub-contract

Money and Stupidity

I'm a little at a loss why the shuttle system needs to be retired. Certainly the ships are wearing out, but why not refitting or building replacements? Surely, as mentioned above, keeping 2 flying wouldn't be cost prohibitive? I remember when the shuttle came out they claimed there would be so much commercial and scientific use it would soon be a money maker.....but we know how that turned out. I've sometimes also wondered why a 2-man mini-shuttle couldn't do for the smaller payloads to send back and forth.

We've needed a heavy lift rocket ever since the Saturn V was mothballed, and it looks like we're returning to the same situation of the late 1970's after Apollo ended and before the shuttle arrived. I remember hearing one scientist saying that if we had the same drive to reach Mars as we did for the Moon we could have been there by 1980. Instead we have the shuttle retiring and no suitable replacement, and not being able to do anything.

We also have the same type of political leadership as the late 70's----although the supreme idiocy of the Obama camp makes Carter look like a conservative Republican. I wonder also about the future of NASA, and whether it won't get lost in a series of think-of-the-children and carbon credit cuts. Forget going to Mars, we'll soon have trouble just going to the store.

Informed comment

1. nuclear-powered launchers are fantasy. Never going to happen. Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts. iMlite, might I suggest Aviation Leak is a better source than the Daily Mail?

2. STS is dead, done and dusted in September 2010 or thereabouts. No chance of any refitting or refactoring; aerospace museums are already jostling for the opportunity to take one of the three remaining Orbiters (Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery.) One's earmarked for the Smithsonian, of course.

3. The "Ares V - lite" vehicle was... Ares I. There's no way an Ares V could be used for routine ISS crew-rotation missions, so that either goes to SpaceX' Dragon capsule (who's launched, the Falcon-9, is being readied for it's first launch right now:

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

4. IMO, Ares V without I makes less sense than I without V. The only real justification for V (apart from willy-waving about having something competitive to Ariane 5 in lifting capacity) is for pushing large masses beyond LEO. Manned missions to the moon and Mars are often mentioned, because Dubya thought it would be a great soundbite and had a slim chance of making him the 21st century Kennedy. Alas, they completely omitted to provide the budget to do it with. Hence (partly) the horrible squeeze on unmanned probes. After MSL in 2011, there's nothing on the drawing-board until some vaguely hypothesised joint rovers project with ESA. (The latter's contrib is based on Exo-Mars, which began as an ambitious attempt to do a Mars rover in the MER class, then slipped, over-spent it's budget, slipped and slipped again. It smells doomed to me.)

5. Off-topic: as one commentard to others, you lot do know that some of your tax goes to the European Space Agency, ESA, right? That they're currently operating flagship-class orbiters at Mars and Venus, the recently launched Planck and Kepler space telescopes, and assorted other current missions?

No, I didn't think so.

Snarkback: Well who needs space exploration anyway?

I mean, we'd all be much more entertained with an exploration of Tiger Woods' little black book, right? Or to watch Paula Abdul dancing with Fred Schneider? So who *needs* to know what the surface of Mars looks like, after all? It's just such a groovy earth we have going on ... in our little commercially engineered bubble.

Putting the snark aside, I just wish people would realize that space exploration leads to more opportunities for *skilled employment/labor/work* - from the vehicles to the instrumentation, not to forget the gurus who plot the launch and orbital trajectories, and all the support tasks and community economies. It's practical, not only scientific.

As far as the selection of launch vehicle, then, I don't s'pose I gots much place to says what them NASA folks use to punch a schmart guy or a schmart missus into orbit.... Nice to hear about it, though, that NASA still exists.

Shuttles?

Does anyone know of the actual feasability of prolonging the Shuttle's service life? I thought they were each designed for many more lauches than they had made, and that it was mostly a budget issues and "worried about that foam stuff" issue. And, let's face it, if you are going to worry about the foam insulation (or any tile issues), well you _could_ just use them to destruction (a bit hard on the crew obviously). But most crews know that risks are involved, and most crew would fly a shuttle even if you told them 1 in 100 it fails and kills them (and some are on record for that).

Preserving the Shuttles makes a lot of sense, and frankly is the last piece of truely impressive US hardware still flying...couple that with Ares V for heavy lift, and you still have a viable US space program.

FLAME icon, just in case those tiles fail again...

Hanger 18

Why cant they just wheel out something from Hanger 18, or what ever Operation High-Jump found in the Antartic..... be it real the Alien mother ship, or Nazi UFOS

Are we all sure that the 'New Labour' govenrment havent secretly started running NASA?

Seems like a fundemental cockup on a scale I havent seen since the UK General Election of '97

Paris, as it doesnt take her much effort to swallow a big one..

You can never have too much lift

I'm quite sure NASA will find a use for all that "excess" lift capacity in the Aries V design. At least this time they seem to have sized the capsule to the *last* launcher left flying and not the first.(Saturn 1b).

Of course that will compromise the doctrine that "Cargo must be kept seperate from crew" which was one of the results of the Challenger disaster report.

Note IMHO it's a pretty stupid conclusion. It only makes sense if you trade reliability for launch cost.

This was something NASA looked like considering at one time and IIRC Loral came up with a pretty impressive launcher design to capitalise on it. They were convinced they could do an H2/O2 pressure fed SSTO. It would do 1 tonne to LEO for later delivery to ISS with a 70-90% success rate.

In most *other* transport systems you can trade delivery speed for cost. Faster and heavier usually racks it up (You want that 20 ft container sitting in your LA parking lot in London by this time tomorrow? How much you got?) but it costs *exactly* as much to deliver a roll of toiler paper to ISS as it does some new precision instruments (or that favourite butt of El Reg gags the urine re-cycle unit).

Unless reliability is *truly* on the table and the odd explosion scattering 500 ready meals and 300 bog rolls across the Pacific is no longer viewed as a major disaster who cares what stuff is put on what NASA vehicle.

Deep six Aries 1.

So, size is what counts to Obama

And Paris, because she's an expert on such things.

The ol' spacebus

Would you volunteer to sit atop a mid '70s camper van strapped to an enormous fuel tank and two fireworks, then let them fire you off into space? Me neither. Not even if they fitted an mp3 player.

I thought the point of Ares I was to make crew launches safe, while Ares V could focus on the big lift duties with a lower reliability requirement. The point being that human spaceflight is exciting and glamorous and space telescopes, robotic probes and remote sensing get valuable work done but just don't make the news.