Yeah, but in a crunch situation (such as strapping a nuke to Liv Tyler’s boyfriend in order to keep him from returning to the Earth), you can bet your ass that every old NASA employee who’s still breathing is going to show up at NASA and offer their services. They’re not going to worry about being paid or anything else, they, like the National Guardsmen who showed up at their duty stations on 9/11 without waiting to be ordered to do, are going to do it because they know that their skills are going to be needed. Many of them wouldn’t have too far to walk, either. A buddy of mine took a tour of Cape Kennedy about two months ago and he said that there was a retired Apollo engineer who sat next to the Saturn V booster they had there and talked to folks about the Apollo program.
Many of the retired folks I know keep up with all the changes in their fields, so I’d be willing to bet that the surviving Apollo engineers all have paid recent visits to NASA, and while they might not have the hands on experience with the new stuff that NASA’s current employees have, you can be certain it’s not totally alien to them either.
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But we don’t, SCR4. As others have pointed out, we can use as many shuttle launches as we like whereas the Apollo missions were limited to what could be boosted in one go. For example, if we need to re-fuel the shuttle, we can dedicate a shuttle mission to boosting a tank full of fuel. In fact, if we were desperate, we could simply put an extra fuel tank in the cargo bay of the shuttle that we’re sending to the moon.
It’s true that space is a harsh environment, etc., etc. But you’re missing the point. First, we already have critical systems, like engines, that have been flight qualified. Second, it’s a bit of a red herring to say that you must “test everything under all kinds of conditions to make sure it doesn’t fail immediately.” Much of the stuff won’t be subject to all kinds of conditions. Rather, it will be (or can be) kept in an environmentally controlled area. Take the computer system. It’s true that my laptop probably won’t work at in a vacuum at -100 C, but neither will the crew.
Remember this is supposed to be get-there-as fast-as-you-can-and-damn-the-expense-and-risk mission. The question is, how could you get there if you really had to?
As others have pointed out, much of the stuff that made that Apollo mission difficult is no longer an issue. Getting into orbit is routine. We no longer need to worry about re-entry as we can use the shuttle, etc. etc. Slapping together a system that will carry a couple of astronauts from low-earth orbit to high-moon orbit just isn’t that complicated.
I admit that the lander would be slightly more tricky. But once again, a couple of off-the-shelf engines and a little ingenuity will work wonders.
To put this in perspective, how long do you think it would take to design and build a brand-new aircraft from scratch capable of reaching an altitude of 5 km? 3 years, 1 year? Six months? How about two hours?
We would never choose to go back to the moon using the methods of the Apollo program. It would be neither expedient nor easy. As has been said earlier, we simply don’t have the capability to do it that way again even if we wanted to.
As for WHY we wouldn’t do it that way, the Apollo program was designed to do the job in a certain way, very quickly, when it had never been done before. It was done relatively quickly - that is, for the time period, given the lack of experience, we did it fast. And this was acomplished using throw-away parts.
The Apollo program was very wasteful in its use of technology. It was a dash across the finish line with little regard for future growth in space. If we were truly trying to build a long lasting, productive space program (rather than just beating the Russians) things would have been done very differently.
It’s my opinion that if we went back, it would be with a new method.
and…
I have no idea what that method might be or what it might cost. But I would love nothing better than to see another person walk on the moon.
Nope. Kennedy issued his before-the-decade-is-out challenge at his innauguration in January 1961. Project Mercury started in late 1958. The first attempted launch (unmanned) blew up on Aug. 21, 1959. The first manned flight–Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 sub-orbital flight–took place on May 5, 1961. Project Gemini was announced (minus the name, which came later) in December 1961, with the first unmanned flight in April 1964 and the first manned flight in March 1965.
I am not an engineer, so please tell me why this wouldn’t work.
If cost is no object, then we can waste a shuttle. So we don’t need to create a living module to get from Earth to the Moon. We launch three shuttle missions in quick succession:
The first carries a fuel tank in the cargo bay, the biggest possible. This is attached to the ISS for safekeeping for a bit.
The second carries a landing module. More on this in a moment.
The third docks with the space station and picks up both the fuel tank and the landing module. The fuel tank is externally mounted and feeds the shuttle’s own boosters. The landing module goes in the cargo bay.
Then the shuttle is aimed on a lunar intercept trajectory and shot off. For transit, you don’t need more than two astronauts, because there’s no requirement for all the various specialists: No pilot to land the thing, no engineers for satellite repairs, or whatever. On this leg, they’re basically passengers.
At some point very close to the moon, the cargo doors are opened, and the astronauts transfer to the landing module and push themselves out. The shuttle is abandoned to its fate.
The landing module is much smaller and much lighter than the shuttle, so deceleration requires much less fuel. Since you don’t need to fire the rockets all the way to the moon, you could even compromise and burn, say, 90% of the external tank on the initial acceleration, and then design the fraction-of-the-mass lander to attach alongside the tank to use its remaining fuel to get to the surface.
In this scenario, you don’t need to design an orbital rocket, or a life support system for the trip to the moon. All you have to do is refit the shuttle to use the existing external tank to leave the Earth, and use existing components to get to the Moon. The hardest part is the lander, and if that’s all you have to worry about building, you cut the time requirement considerably.
I’m sure there are problems with this plan, but since I’m not an engineer I don’t know what they are. Mostly, I’m wondering if there are any fatal misconceptions, or why this basic approach wouldn’t be better than having to build the whole thing from scratch.
There’s one problem with using the Shuttle for the actual lunar vehicle. The Shuttle depends on the close proximity of the earth for thermal control - the inner surfaces of the cargo bay door are lined with radiator/heat exchangers, and the bay is kept open and pointed at the earth while it’s in orbit.
The plan’s good, but I’d use a Soyuz instead of a Shuttle. There’s a lot less wasted mass in wings and such to bring along, and the Soyuz was originally designed for use in the soviet lunar missions anyway.
We only have four Shuttles and one launch facility. I don’t know the details of Shuttle operations but I doubt we can launch more than two in a month. There are other launchers, but most of them are fairly small. In addition, rendezvous and docking isn’t a trivial maneuver.
You still have to test the system which is the hardest part. As an analogy, say you want to build an amplifier. You go out and buy a bag of transistors, switches and other components, all of which were tested at the manufacturer. If you just wire them together, do you think it’s going to work right away? Of course not. For one thing, even though the components themselves are designed correctly, there’s a good chance you are using them incorrectly - i.e. faulty circuit design. There is also a possibility that some parts are faulty - either they slipped through the screening at the manufacturer or they got damaged somewhere along the way. It’s also possible that components were not installed correctly or damaged during installation, e.g. by setting the soldering iron temperature too high.
It’s the same with spacecraft. The individual components may be flight qualified, but it’s still a major work to get them to work together. I’ve seen many cases where incorrect systems design caused problems. A perfectly ordinary navigational sensor placed next to a standard radio transmitter may malfunction because of the radio interference. A simple flight-qualified battery may overheat and fail because you packaged them a little too tightly, and drew slightly more current than you should have. You also have to test each spacecraft to make sure all the components in that spacecraft works properly.
You need to subject the entire spacecraft to all kinds of conditions because you need to know it works as a system. You need vibration and shock test, to make sure things don’t fall off during launch. You also need thermal-vacuum test to make sure the spacecraft can withstand the vacuum and temperature conditions (both high and low). You also want to test the operation of all mechanical components and sensors.
You still have to get there! It’s no good if all your spacecraft fail halfway to the moon. You’ve got to test it exhaustively to make sure it completes the mission.
Even a lunar transfer vehicle alone will take a while to build. Say you just need a Soyuz strapped to the Boeing IUS. How are you going to separate them once the IUS fuel is gone? You need to build a new adapter with explosive bolts. If they fail to separate it’ll probably be a mission failure, so you have to test this new component to make sure it works. That means all the vibration and thermal-vac test I mentioned above. I’m not saying this particular separation mechanism is necessary, but any time you bring two things and make them do something they haven’t done before, there is a huge amount of design, verification and testing work involved. Those are not caused by bureaucracy or safety regulations. They are necessary for the success of the mission.
Will you please explain how a lawnchair balloon (and a faulty one at that) tells us anything about building a spacecraft?
Another problem is that the Space Shuttle Main Engines cannot be restarted after launch. I don’t think the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engines are powerful enough for lunar orbit insertion.
I still don’t get what would take so long. We’re (or at least I) am talking about a extinction level event. We have to get to the moon. Its not just Nasa and its current staff. Its most of the world co-operation in order to save life on the planet. I can not believe that it would take 5 years. Cost isn’t an option remember! That means that you could have massive construction teams working in shifts day and night. No crappy computers, stuff straight from the developers with the newest hardware and software. Hundred of thousands of people working out skematics and travel plans. I understand that with Nasa current status a moon mission would take years but we’re talking Nasa with a trillion dollars in capital.
I don’t recall the specifics from the movie, but why would anyone build an Orion in LEO? IIRC, Orion consists of a very big radiation shield, with a spaceship on one side and a mechanism for chucking out and detonating nuclear bombs on the other side. Since the radiation shield would have to be huge, and probably made of lead, wouldn’t it make more sense to build it on Earth and use the craft itself to get to LEO? You’d still need a chemical booster to get the first few dozen feet off the ground, but then you can start detonating the nukes.
There would be fallout, of course, but we have an “end-of-the-world” scenario here, and it wouldn’t be worse than the effects of the atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s. Otherwise, if you build in LEO, you’re using up a huge amount of rocket fuel to lift lead into orbit.
Now if you could snag a passing asteroid, and refine it’s metals in orbit, and use the leftover slag for shielding … but if we could do all that, we probably wouldn’t have a problem getting to the moon fast.
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Perhaps this is the problem we’re having. This is a faulty analogy, though it’s generally the way most space-related projects are organized.
A better analogy is that you want to build a car from scratch and drive it for 100 miles. You don’t start shopping for gaskets and gears and such. Rather, you go buy an engine, and a transmission and say, a stereo, bung them onto a chasis and hook them together. Yes, it does require a bit of work to hook them up, but they are essentially black boxes as far as you’re concerned. You can have a reasonable certainty that the transmission will actually do what it’s supposed to do, at least for the 100 miles you will be using it for.
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Once again, this kind of thing typically only happens when you are trying to push the envelope, which is often being done on space missions. That’s something I really doubt would be necessary here. We’ll keep everything well within the rated specs.
This is really what NASA had in mind with its “Better, Faster, Cheaper” campaign. Though this has been more or less dumped, I don’t think it ever got a fair shake. Perhaps if they’d called it “Metric, Faster, Cheaper” it would have been more succesful.
**
Normally, yes, but in this case, it’s somewhat of a red herring. We know pretty well how to design things to handle launch stress. If something breaks off when unpacked from the shuttle at the ISS, we can either fix it or bung up another one. Replacing the occasional failure while building this thing will, in this case, be much faster than doing an enormous amount of ground testing so that we can be sure of five nines reliability.
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A faulty lawnchair balloon?!? The mind boggles! Is there such a thing as a properly designed lawnchair balloon? Anyway, what was so faulty about it? It worked, didn’t it? Not the most refined design or the safest, but certainly fast and effective.
The point here was that, being well outside the box, this isn’t what you’d normally think of as an aircraft. The idea of sending an Airstream trailer or a submarine to the moon sounds awfully silly but the question is could you do it if you had to? I’m quite confident that we could jury rig something together that would have a fair probabity of working. What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen Star Trek?
** It would depend on the trajectory, I think. We wouldn’t have to get to the moon in 72 hours. Though it would take a lot longer to get there, we could design a trajectory that would require hardly any braking at all to enter lunar orbit. Anyway, if the engines don’t have enough thrust to do it the traditional way, just burn them longer. After all, we’re carrying plenty of fuel.
Since there seems to be a sub-thread already going on this subject, here’s another mind-boggler regarding computing power on past and hypothetical moon flights. Not only were NASA’s onboard “computers” barely calculators, they used mechanical storage. Very similar to Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engines” of the 1850’s. No magnetic media. Why? Cosmic rays (or some such thing we don’t have to worry about down here under the atmosphere) sleeting through the cabin would have (could have?) scrambled the data. I’m sorry I can’t give you the issue number, but I read that in Smithsonian a few years ago, and my mind is still boggled.
I can’t help thinking of the article I once read about Lee Iacocca and his convertible. Lee decided one day that building a convertible might be a good idea and asked his chief design engineer to build him one that he could drive around in. The design engineer told him that it would take at least a year to design, test, and build one and started describing the processes involved. Lee supposedly replied “Bill, you don’t understand. Get hold of a car and saw the top off of the damned thing.”
Two weeks later, Lee was driving around in his new convertible.
(Or as a friend of mine once told me “when your project is in deep trouble, find yourself an engineer who isn’t afraid to use a hacksaw”.)
Because, forone reason or another, the spacecraft in Deep Impact wasn’t actually an Orion, it was more like a NERVA, which is slightly different. Why the name change? Beats me. But I’m guessing it was because the screenwriter thought that “Orion” sounded cooler. (Which is true, but totally beside the point)
People don’t seem to understand that there are fundamental differences between spacecraft and other machinery. Spacecraft are designed to be used once, and operate in an environment which is very difficult to reproduce on the ground. You can do test flights to test a design, but you can’t fly one particular spacecraft multiple times to find and fix its problems. Once a mission starts there is no going back; you can’t do repairs along the way, and you can’t stop and wait for help. Spacecraft are manufactured in limited numbers, which means inconsistent quality. If you were producing 5000 space capsules you can afford the time and money to build a dedicated assembly plant and perfect the techniques so you can stamp out near-perfect capsules, but there isn’t enough demand to allow such an approach.
Look at all the failures we’ve had despite all the “proper” design and testing. The failurs are not the result of pushing the limits of technology. Aerospace engineers are extremely conservative people who hate using components that have never flown before. (This is such a big problem that NASA launches satelltes whose primary function is to prove that certain new components work.) They fail because one-off systems, even built from off-the-shelf components, are difficult to get right on the first try. Challenger failed because they never tested the SRB O-rings under extreme weather conditions. The first Ariane 5 failed because the control software, tried and proven on the Ariane 4, didn’t handle the new hardware properly. Mars Polar Lander most likely failed because the landing system was never tested under realistic conditions. Apollo 13 was almost a disaster because a small fault in one of the tanks was not detected. The Soyuz 11 cosmonauts asphyxiated because vibration caused a valve to come loose. Need I go on? These are all system integration problems that could have been prevented by more extensive testing.
-Another fundamental difference. Said hacksawed car would no longer pass a multitude of laws and regulations concerning things like crashworthiness. Also, it’s maximum capability has been compromised- taking the top off a car not otherwise designed to be a convertible reduces its structural strength and rigidity by a considerable margin.
Sure, it would be fine for a short-trip grocery-getter over smooth roads, but if you started to really push it, taking fast corners, lots of rough roads, high speed driving and so on, you’d start to see problems. Steering gets “soft” since the chassis is flexing. Doors don’t open and close properly anymore, since the car is sagging in the middle. Ad nauseum.
And spaceflight always “pushes the envelope”- the heavier a spacecraft is, the less payload it can carry, and/or the more fuel it has to burn to achieve the same orbital velocity. Thus components are engineered to be as strong as necessary, plus a margin, and no more.
Plus, with spaceflight, any number of otherwise minor failures can mean the failure of the entire mission. Challenger was caused by simple O-rings. In a car, if your radiator springs a leak, you can coast to a stop and wait for help. Or nurse the car to a service station, or at least get out and scoop up some rainwater out of a puddle with an old beer can. In a spacecraft, if there’s an external malfuction, you might not even be able to reach it.
And even if you suit up and head outside with a band-aid, what happens if all your coolant/Lox/fuel has leaked away? Can’t call for a triple-A truck, can you? It doesn’t even have to “all” leak away- if you need five hundred pounds of fuel for a proper landing burn, and the leak has you down to four hundred sixty pounds, then what? Risk landing an extra 90 MPH too fast?
And Minty- Quite right. I was on a slow machine and didn’t bother to Google. I had the numbers '54 and '55 floating about, so maybe I had some of the early Russian events in mind.
You’re absolutely right. As I recall, it didn’t - and that was my main point. Tasks are accomplished a lot quicker when you ignore the unimportant stuff, and sometimes the trick is to find a project manager that recognizes which obstacles aren’t important.
As I recall, the OP described an “absolutely had to get there ASAP, not getting the man back is acceptable, the fate of the world is at stake” situation. In such a situation, I would hope that the folks in charge of the project would not be wasting a lot of time worrying about environmental impact statements.
Maybe it would be simpler to think of this as a military operation, using any and all facilities as appropriate but not being run by the folks who currently run NASA. While the current NASA administration are precisely the folks you want for today’s role (don’t make any mistakes, run a safe, reliable and relatively inexpensive shuttle service launching other people’s hardware into orbit) they aren’t the sort of folks that should run the operation described in the OP.
I think you missed his point. It’s no big deal if a car’s structural integrity is compromised; if it breaks, you pull over and wait for a tow truck. If your hacksawed spacecraft break down halfway to the moon, you lose your spacecraft and with it your chance to save humanity (or whatever the stakes are). Safety and reliability are not marketing hype or human rights issues. An unsafe, unreliable spacecraft is unlikely to accomplish its mission. You may be willing to kill your astronaut, but if he dies before accomplishing the mission then you have failed.
Actually, the Apollo computers used magnetic core memories for RAM storage. No moving parts, but it did store data in magnetic media - the magnetic cores were magnetized and demagnetized to each store 1 bit of data. The ROM data was simply hard-wired.
I think I’ve got it figured out. This would rely on a few assumptions, but not so many or so wild that I think it invalidates the whole idea. Plus, it could be done in such a way that it wouldn’t automatically be a suicide mission. It would have to be an international effort and it would use mostly off the shelf hardware.
The shuttle carries enough fuel in it’s external tanks that if NASA so chose, they could park the tank in orbit near the ISS. So, what we’re going to do is get as many of those puppies up there as fast as we can. We’ll need the Russians, Chinese, and anyone else with launch capabilities to send up rockets containing fuel, in order to fill up the tanks. (We can also build tanks which will fit in the shuttle’s cargo bays, that can be used to refill the orbiting external tanks.) Now there’s at least one or more components of the ISS that haven’t been sent up yet. Presumably, these things contain their own, independant lifesupport systems (if not, one could be added to it). This is what the astronauts will live in on their way to the Moon. We’ll need a Soyuz capsule to be attached to the module so the astronauts have a way to get from Lunar orbit down to the surface. (It might be possible to modify the thing that it land and return from the Moon. Don’t know enough about the Soyuz capsules to be certain.)
Strap the fueled external tanks to the ISS module, use the Soyuz capsule’s engine to push the combined units to the Moon and into orbit. Once there, the astronauts climb into the Soyuz capsule and drop down to the Moon’s surface. Mission accomplished!
Now, lunar rocks will give off oxygen if heated to something like 1,000 + degrees, so the astronauts can have air to breathe (once they’ve cooled it down) if they bring a small nuclear reactor with them. With some freeze-dried food, they could survive for at least a week. (Depending upon how much room there is in a Soyuz capsule.)
As for getting them back, well, that depends upon a few things, that I’m not clear about. If a Soyuz capsule can survive landing on the Moon and have engines which function well enough for it to get back to Lunar orbit, then, really all we have to so is ensure that the astronauts have an adequate supply of hydrogen. (They could make their own oxygen from heating the rocks.) They could refuel their Soyuz on the Moon, get back into orbit, and make their way back to the ISS and hitch a ride home on the next passing shuttle, or use the docked Soyuz escape module, if that wasn’t possible.
The beauty of this is that we could (theoretically, of course) do an unmanned test or two, while the astronauts are running through the simulators. Additionally, we could use this method to resupply (possibly even figuring out a way to soft land an ISS module on the Moon) the astronauts whilst they’re on the Moon, doing whatever it is that they have to do.