Looks aside, NASA’s Orion is “lightyears ahead of what they had in Apollo”

Redundancy is key to travel "farther away than any human spacecraft has ever been.”

Read the whole story

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

Is there any way to have playback speed control on these videos? The guy was quite slow in his pacing.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

Hydrargyrum[/url]":363y1f2v]Are Orion's landing systems and heat shield sufficient for a Mars return trajectory?

According to Lockeed Martin: No. Obscured bureaucrat speak on Slide 17: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/s ... ission.pdf

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

it-guy[/url]":r1aaypvd]

From a practical perspective, if the mission requires humans in order to be successful, then it should be a priority to keep those humans alive to perform the mission. If "safety" bothers you then think of it as "mission resilience."

From political perspective, dead astronauts tend to dampen the public's enthusiasm for space exploration, especially if it is (or becomes) clear that their safety was never a priority. Lack of public enthusiasm can soon lead to lack of budget.

From a human perspective, seriously?

If safety is a priority you should never put humans on a rocket using a segmented SRB with o-rings. The engineers knew this was very sensitive to launch environment: then the Shuttle blew up during launch due to an SRB segment o-ring failure, which should have been enough to even get management's attention.

What does SLS do? Incorporate even more SRB segments! Known, human fatality point of failure. Lets use more!

At least they no longer put the heat shield in the impact zone where pieces hit it every launch and they have an actual launch abort system which is plausible.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

normally butters[/url]":e5ca8vcp]

isparavanje[/url]":e5ca8vcp]

windnwar[/url]":e5ca8vcp]What has been left out is the fact that the current heat shield that was tested is being completely redesigned and may or may not work as well, we won't know till the next test, the life support system may not be complete for testing by the next launch, and the first launch of crew will likely be the first launch of the exploration module being built. So there will be many systems tested for the first time with the crew on board. Provided it continues to be funded for the next 5 to 7 years.


This has been the most long winded development project ever.

I'm curious, do you know why it is being redesigned? Is it using pica?

Orion's heatshield uses AVCOAT, the same concept used by Apollo. It's a non-woven composite honeycomb structure with a mixture of silica fiber and phenolic resin injected into the honeycomb cells.

PICA is an injection-molded expanding foam made of carbon fiber and phenolic resin. PICA has substantial advantages over AVCOAT: much lower density and much lower manufacturing costs.

SpaceX has adopted PICA as PICA-X and has been iterating on the process to optimize performance and manufacturing cost. They are currently flying PICA-X version 2, and Dragon 2 will use PICA-X version 3, which is distinguished by its black color rather than beige material we've seen on Dragon to date.

The Orion EFT-1 test vehicle used a monolithic AVCOAT heat shield. The honeycomb structure was applied to the vehicle in one piece and then each of the thousands of cells were injected with the resin mixture by humans with glorified caulk guns. This process was extremely expensive and extremely time-consuming, and other work could not proceed on the vehicle during the prolonged injection process.

Future Orion vehicles will use a tiled AVCOAT heat shield. The injection process will be more-or-less the same, but the heat shield will be fabricated in multiple pieces which will be bonded to the vehicle after the injection process is complete. This will streamline the manufacturing process... somewhat.

Wasn't the Orion team's main argument against using PICA was that it would be tiled? So, now Orion is stuck with a lower performing, heavier solution - and getting tiled anyway.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

fivemack[/url]":2pvbjrlz]

isparavanje[/url]":2pvbjrlz]That's why the fact that this is still a basic science problem means a Apollo-style program has a high chance of failure.

Can anyone suggest good examples of Apollo-style programs which failed?

IBM's Future System wasn't great; Intel Itanium was really quite expensive and didn't produce anything terribly useful; the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellites seem to have spent an awful lot of money to determine that very high power travelling wave tube amplifiers can't be built and that keeping your optical and radar payloads on a single platform isn't a great idea. Growing wheat with fossil water in Saudi Arabia was daft but didn't involve any especially great engineering challenges.

I'm guessing there are probably some good examples in the oil-and-gas area, but I know little about that; there may have been large refinery plants built to produce materials for which a cheaper substitute was developed before the plant opened, but that seems the kind of economic mistake that businessmen usually contrive not to make.

There was something like ~$50,000,000,000 LNG import plants built in the USA, just in time for the fracking boom. Some of them are being converted to LNG export plants for another ~$50,000,000,000, just in time for natural gas prices that collapsed around the world...

Admittedly, some of the LNG export plants have locked in long-term (up to 20 year) sales contracts.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

Snark218[/url]":3p0e85fb]

jballou[/url]":3p0e85fb]So it's big and heavy enough to go to all those celestial objects between the moon and halfway to Mars. What's the point of being too big for the moon, and too small for Mars? Are asteroid landings or just long-term moon visits the goal here?

In my opinion, a Mars mission is wholly infeasible using any current, upcoming, or even planned system, full stop. Mars ain't happening in the short-to-medium term, and NASA knows it. We're going to see asteroid and lunar missions happen, and those are feasible and practical, but I will cheerfully lay money on our not having even a Mars-capable platform until 2050 at the earliest, and Mars missions not until after that date - if at all, ever. And I'll further wager that the first ten years of manned Mars missions, if they happen, will keep the actual humans in orbit or on Phobos or Deimos.

The wildcard would be if a Bezos, Musk, or Branson - or all of them - do something a government can't do, like send a one-way, no-return mission. I can easily, easily see Sir Richard sending himself on a one-way VirginMars trip, landing, and living on the surface until he died, starved, or got cancer. I could see that happening in the 2030-2040 timeframe, possibly.

Hopefully we'll get details on the SpaceX Raptor and MCT later this year.

In mid 2009 they managed their first commercial payload: 180kg to LEO on a Falcon 1.
In early 2016, they had dV to spare with a huge geosynchronous payload: 5,270kg to SSO on a Falcon 9FT.

Less than 7 years and they iterated more than an order of magnitude increase in payload to a much more challenging orbit, while also developing their own cargo capsule and mostly developed a man-rated version of the capsule.

...and that's with a ~6 month stand-down and reorg after a failure.

I will be shocked if they haven't launched an unmanned Mars mission by 2020 (more likely 2018 imo) and a manned mission by 2030.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

new2mac[/url]":3ht9akrj]

Tom the Melaniephile[/url]":3ht9akrj]

I will be shocked if they haven't launched an unmanned Mars mission by 2020 (more likely 2018 imo) and a manned mission by 2030.

Actually, Musk has been unequivocal about this in recent interviews, they're doing their manned mission to Mars in 2025.

Yeah, that's why I allowed a 5 year "Musk Optimism Factor"

I'm a big fan, but he's been darn consistent in his over-optimism. I developed this technique when I was younger with a local weather forecaster. I could very accurately predict the snow depth we were going to get, by applying an optimism/pessimism factor to what he said.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

LordFrith[/url]":3axboxnq]

new2mac[/url]":3axboxnq]

Tom the Melaniephile[/url]":3axboxnq]

I will be shocked if they haven't launched an unmanned Mars mission by 2020 (more likely 2018 imo) and a manned mission by 2030.

Actually, Musk has been unequivocal about this in recent interviews, they're doing their manned mission to Mars in 2025.

We've already done like a dozen unmanned Mars missions. What would be the big deal?

1) SpaceX has never done a Mars mission. Or anything beyond GSO. Much like their first successful LEO payload (2009) or first successful GSO payload, it's a big capability milestone for them.

2) Historically, Mars missions have had a very high failure rate.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

Christopher James Huff[/url]":8ca8adzt]

Tom the Melaniephile[/url]":8ca8adzt]

LordFrith[/url]":8ca8adzt]

new2mac[/url]":8ca8adzt]

Tom the Melaniephile[/url]":8ca8adzt]

I will be shocked if they haven't launched an unmanned Mars mission by 2020 (more likely 2018 imo) and a manned mission by 2030.

Actually, Musk has been unequivocal about this in recent interviews, they're doing their manned mission to Mars in 2025.

We've already done like a dozen unmanned Mars missions. What would be the big deal?

1) SpaceX has never done a Mars mission. Or anything beyond GSO. Much like their first successful LEO payload (2009) or first successful GSO payload, it's a big capability milestone for them.

They launched DSCOVR to Earth-Sun L1 last year.

You're right, though SpaceX handed off control well before that. Upon further pondering, have they retained control of anything beyond SSO?