Other Ares 1-X Today

Total agree!

 

Not bad. I was really thinking it would just yaw like crazy and spin out of control with a skinny design like that

 

The Saturn V blueprints were shredded for "Security Reasons"(TM), and anyone who worked on them is either retired or has passed away.
There was a story a while back about cutaway posters of it being removed from the Canaveral gift shop!

 

Saturn V

 

John, you're sooooooo fired

 

Thanks John.

Maybe we should send NASA a copy of this:-

 

If you want to go back a little further you could do Atlas booster and Mercury capsule:



Revell kit 1962 sealed. I'll get to it some day

john

 

Urban legend. The blueprints are complete and stored on Microfilm. However, none of the tools exist at present to manufacture the small machined parts used by the thousands throughout the rocket. They would have to build all new flight computers as well.

 

I watched the launch vids last night - looked fine up until staging. The second stage started to to tumble right after seperation (and to my eye looked almost to colide with the spent solid rocket). I can't imagine that's good, especially as the Nasa team expected it to keep flying straight and true.

It'll probably be fine under power, but there will be a pause during staging to allow for the two sections to seperate slightly before starting the second stage engine, right?

As for building more Saturns - I'm sure that the engineering and modern avionics for it wouldn't be unsurmountable. I know there's a guy who's replicated the Apollo guidence computer for fun...

 

Yeah, I remember that as well. Personally, if I were to get hold of 50 billion dollars out of magic, I would do everything I could to restart Saturn V production, with modern, incremental improvements as the technology is re-validated with new engineering and new launches - just because I could, and because I want to see people colonize the solar system in my lifetime.

 

Noticed that and thought the same. As you said, it'll probably be ok once under power as the 2nd stage was effectively dead weight in this test.

 

Yeah - but during that pause before they start the second stage engine, the second stage has already started to tumble! The upper portion of 1-X was inert, but it mimics the mass and shape of the real thing - so the dynamics would be the same.

So - a bit of hotch potch then?

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/ares1x/091028launch/


This chap's blog is always worth a read:

http://chairforceengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/mike-griffin-saturn-i-and-potemkin.html

 

Sorry I'm just getting to this thread; I've been in meetings all week. 15-hour work days are no fun at all.

It's a weird time for the space program, and one that's a touch familiar. We're retiring an old program, with no real idea as to what we're going to do next. Meanwhile, we're laying off people by the thousands, and the rest of the top scientists will probably leave to pursue other careers - just like the so-called "brain drain" that we saw after the Apollo years, and before the Shuttle Program really began.

It was nice to see something launch - anything really! It gives us a little morale booster and keeps people interested for a bit. With any luck it will pique the public's interest enough to allow Congress to fund NASA without the congress-people committing political suicide. It was also a major milestone for the entire Constellation Program, and one they desperately needed.

We can't simply go back to the Apollo era. The whole idea of "we've been to the moon once, let's just re-use the old stuff" doesn't work for a number of reasons. As mentioned earlier, the entire manufacturing infrastructure would have to be re-built, and that would be both costly and time consuming. One thing a lot of people forget about NASA's good old days is that when we landed on the moon, we had a single mission with almost full public support, and with what amounts to a blank check.

Today, NASA is responsible for a wide variety of programs (ISS, Shuttle, LCROSS, Mars Rover, Hubble, etc.), and each one takes a slice of a tiny - and shrinking - budget. And then there's the almost complete lack of public backing. I don't know how many times every day I see cries to cancel the entire space program. In the end, we don't really have any interest in just re-building a Saturn V and going back to the moon with 3 guys in a glorified trash can. This is the future, and we'd prefer to use current technologies, coupled with technologies that have yet to be developed, to send a full crew. And we'd like to send them safely, in a vehicle that has better facilities for scientific research.

That's what the ISS and the international partnership is all about.

The Shuttle has a pretty decent payload capability. It's our space truck, and currently it's the only vehicle that is capable of delivering the large modules to the ISS. The Shuttle's looming retirement is one of the reasons that NASA is keen to get the ISS to assembly complete.

For all you iPhone owners - NASA just published a "NASA App" last week. It has all kinds of trivia information about the core programs, and the ISS section is particularly neat. It has a tracking feature that shows you the Station's current location, updated real-time, and it includes recent photos and videos from the ISS. It's free, too - your tax dollars at work.

-monkey

 

The booster recovery team have noticed a big dent in the side of the booster casing, as it appears one of the parachutes that it decends on didn't deploy correctly:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/ares1x/091029dent/

Don't wory - it'll polish out, I'm sure. If not, a bit of filler and some paint and you'd never know!

 

Supermonkey if you were put in charge of NASA where would you concentrate your efforts? Do you think private enterprise will overtake NASA with space exploration?

 

They can carry 9% more payload into low earth orbit without the external fuel tank paint, just FYI

An awful lot of weight is taken up by flight surfaces as well. Without the weight of the space shuttle orbiter, the SRBS + Fuel tank with some engines bolted on could achieve much more than it can now. The shuttle as it is falls far short of the Saturn V's lift capability - 262,000 pounds into Low Earth Orbit. That's 5 times what the shuttle can lift!

 

But the cost of the shuttle is far smaller than the Saturn V isn't it? Is raw lifting cap what's really important? Surely it's $/kg?

 

OK. If the paint takes so much payload, then switch to the new 5-segment SRBs developed for Ares.

Or go back to what NASA originally wanted before Senate budget committees decided to add a million porkbarrels to the Shuttle:-
1:- A small re-usable spaceplane based on the X-20 "Dyna-Soar" concept purely for manned flight.
2:- A separate heavy-lift vehicle for cargo only.

 

It's both $/kg and physical lifting abilities. Sometimes, payloads just need to be very, very large to do what you want to do with them. The limited run of Saturn Vs produced an amortized cost of 2.4 to 2.5 billion dollars per launch.

Each aggregate launch of the Space Shuttle is $68 million dollars. However, with the cost of the program taken into account, each launch comes out to 1.5 billion dollars.

 

What we really need is multiple orbital vehicles.
One for the US to ferry people to the ISS and one for big cargo.

Sending the shuttle for every mission is like sending a 54 passenger bus to pick up 5 school kids. Really isn't practical but the US does it all the time.

john