I’m with Truth Seeker. Give the guys from Monster Garage a space shuttle and a couple of weeks, and they’ll be there. Plus they’ll give it a cool flame design paint job.
What’s all this nonsense about getting back to the moon? We haven’t been there yet. It was all a hoax, and I know because I saw this documentary on TV…
It’s clear that if we were faced with the dire situation posited by the OP, we should just give all the money we were planning to spend to the Russians and let them do it.
Except that Snopes says it ain’t true
Always knew that story was bogus and here’s the proof!
Tuckerfan: sorry, you’d still have to design a full-fledged landing-stage (and relaunch stage, if you seek recovery) for your “LM-Soyuz”. The Soyuz stack only has orbital-maneouvering/re-entry braking retros, nothing that can sustain its whole weight all the way from lunar orbit to surface and/or back. And without its service module, the Soyuz reentry capsule + orbital lab module “habitable” components have an endurance of maybe a couple of hours (BTW, Soyuzes are recovered on Earth by parachute [useless on the moon] and when it is about 50 feet from the ground a final braking retro hung under the parachute harness fires to “soften” the landing).
Parachute useless, right, knew that.
I didn’t mean to imply that we should use a stock Soyuz capsule for this, but that it’d be cheaper and easier to modify a Soyuz, than to try to design the whole thing from scratch. If the Soyuz is similar to the Mercury/Gemini capsules the US used, then there’s a booster engine which is jettisoned once the craft achieves orbit. Instead of jettisoning that, they could hang on to it and use that (since once it’s mated to the ISS module and refueled shuttle external tanks it’ll have fuel to burn) to push themselves towards the Moon. Landing a Soyuz on the Moon would be tricky, of course, but it’d be easier to land one of those on the Moon under power than it would be on Earth under power (less fuel needed to land on the Moon).
Getting them to be able to leave the Moon would be trickier, but not necessarily impossible. If the gear necessary for an Earth landing (parachute, heat shield, etc.) were scrapped, that’d make the Soyuz craft lighter, which means less mass to get off the Moon.
One could also have two Soyuz craft attached to the ISS/ET module. Use one of the Soyuz to push the whole set-up to the Moon, the other one to push it back to Earth.
While the OP stated that suicide missions were acceptable, I don’t think that NASA would, for a moment, consider such a mission. They’d bust their asses as they did on Apollo 13 to ensure that they did everything in their power to bring the astronauts back home alive.
One thing that I haven’t mentioned up to this point is that I think that NASA would throw out as much computer hardware on the space craft as it possibly could. Much of the Apollo 13 mission was accomplished not by using the on-board computers of the Apollo spacecraft, but by NASA telling Lovell and crew when to manually fire the rockets. I can imagine NASA telling the crew of our hypothetical mission, “We’ll tell you when to fire and for how long.” That’d at least get them from EO to LO. It would also enable NASA to keep crunching numbers right up until the last possible second.
the actual ship wouldn’t hardly even need a computer would it? Sure, possibly during landing, and maybe on the ‘dark side’… the rest of the time, we could just use radio to send signals to the ship. Fly it by remote control. Heck, we could send up special satellites beforehand to do so the whole way. Have the entire internet dedicated to crunching this thing’s numbers, if we needed.
The entire Internet could crunch the thing’s numbers in less time than it would take to say “Hey Internet, can you crunch this thing’s numbers?” A university astrophysics class could probably do it on TI-82s without too much trouble.
And technically, no computer as we know if needs be involved on the lander. The “computer” on the Apollo capsule had one duty: process the signals calculated by a computer at mission control and fire the rockets accordingly.
No need for the special satellites at all. One of the things they learned early on in the space program is: If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything at all. Once you’re out of Earth orbit, there’s not a heck of a lot of things for you to bump into. Orbital mechanics is not a new science, and once we sent something to the Moon, other than a few minor course corrections along the way, the points and times needed for a burn to place a ship in orbit, send it towards the Earth or the Moon are relatively easy to work out. Heck, Dover Publications even prints a Do It Yourself Guide!
The Saturn V rockets are never going to be rebuilt or refubished. There are better technologies that can be adapted to a moon trip, that were not available 30-40 years ago. Alas, I cannot find any links, but there was a nuclear rocket program going on in the 70’s called NIRVA or something. Secondly, there is another method involving a laser, which superheats the atmosphere, and generates propulsion from rapid expansion of air. Both of these projects could be used to better effect a mission to the moon especially under a doomsday scenario, where speed is of the essence, and safety can be compromised a bit.
I forgot to mention, Existing ICBM’s can be adapted to a lunar mission. This I do have a cite on, http://www.space.com/news/nuclear_moon_020822.html
Ok enough from my peanut gallery
Here’s what the article says:
So where are we going to find this highly reliable space plane? It can be designed with present technology, but it will be a 10-year project. As for NERVA and laser propulsion, they have only been tested in unmanned, low-altitude tests. Even in a doomsday scenario it will take many years to make them into practical spacecraft.
A nice thread. Back to the OP, though. Don’t we still have a couple of lunar landers etc? Could we not take one up in a shuttle, refuel the shuttle in orbit, launch the shuttle to the moon, go down in the lunar lander, then return?
I note the comments about cooling, and I have two questions:
Just as the shuttle needs to point its vanes to the Earth for cooling, so can it not point to the moon?
Since, in space, the nose of the spacecraft doesn’t have to point in the direction of travel, can we still not point the shuttle’s vanes at the Earth? For what distance would this be feasible?
Not spaceworthy for nearly 30 years – if they ever got fully readied to begin with. Due to their missions being cancelled 2 or 3 years before they were to happen, some never fully outfitted with inflight systems, others cannibalized for spare parts. More parts removed before and after being sent to museum, many of those parts lost track of.
Structural parts/pressure hulls drilled through or otherwise altered to mount them for display. Blueprints require parts and systems no longer made to those specs or not at all. A lot of the subcontractors that made them, out of business.
Would probably take longer to reassemble an operational LEM out of the museum pieces + parts that industry would have to retool anew to make, as to cobble one together out of currently on-the-shelves technology.
I think the one in the Smithsonian is a “real” lander, but it’s a 30-year old piece of equipment. Chances are it will require many replacement parts to make it functional - parts that can no longer be obtained.
I think the thermal control on the Shuttle is very crude; it is simply “thermally coupled” to the earth. If you place two objects close together, they exchange heat by radiation and tend towards the same temperature. The efficiency depends on how much of your “sky” is taken up by the earth. From low earth orbit, half of your “sky” is taken up by the earth and the other half by space, so it’s very efficient. The smaller the earth becomes, the less efficient the coupling. From the moon, the earth is only about 2 degrees in diameter. It’ll be completely useless for thermal control. The moon’s surface temperature isn’t very stable (too hot during the day, way too cold at night) so you don’t want your spacecraft temperature coupled to the moon’s surface temperature.
Minor nitpick here, but the nose of an aircraft doesn’t necessarily have to point in the direction of travel either. A plane can fly in a “slip” or a “crab” with the nose pointed away from the direction of flight. Aerobatic planes even fly backwards briefly in some circumstances, like the completion of a torque roll.
However, a spacecraft’s orientation can be COMPLETELY opposite the direction of travel, which is what I think you meant, and you’re correct.
More to the point of the thread, the space shuttle is confined to earth orbit, period. Useless for a lunar mission except for transporting components to orbit.
The LM’s could be put back together and made servicable, but it’d take the guys at The Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility some time to do it. (They’d be first choice to take a crack at making a LM spaceworthy since they’re the folks who restore aircraft for The National Air and Space Museum and have more combined experience than anyone else on the planet at doing these kinds of things.)
It seems to me that it’d be faster to modify a Soyuz to make a lunar landing than it would to restore a LM, since a Soyuz is already spaceworthy.
how long would it take to get a rock to the moon? say we had to get a pound of gold to the moon or dr evil would blow up the earth. how long would THAT take? no care about getting people or anything, not even to the level of a satilite just a rock. could smash into the ground, no requirements other than it be on the moon, QUICK.
could we launch that in a week? a month? could we launch that tommarow morning?
A rock? Hmm. WAGging it, I’d say no longer than a month, if we had a rocket ready (I don’t know if Deltas are built on a “as needed basis” or if they’ve got a stockpile of them somewhere.).
BAH I say. My cousin’s boyfriend turned his car into a convertable, he had no trouble getting it to pass inspection, and its 5 years later without any problems. Not only that, but he did the whole thing during a weekend long drinking binge. In fact, he was so drunk that he didn’t remember doing it. He woke up on monday and said “What the F*** happened to my F***ing car?”
As for the OP, I say they can be on the way to the moon in under 12 hours, but thats IF there is a very convieniently scheduled shuttle mission to the ISS thats about to launch. Here’s how: They throw in one of the top stages of a Titan(?) rocket, the biggest that will fit in the cargo bay of the shuttle, along with tools and some supplies (the ISS is under construction so the tools and supplies may not be neccesary). When the Astronauts get to the ISS they disconnect one of the habitat modules and connect the rocket to it (don’t forget that there are already astronauts in the ISS that can do construction in space). The kamikazi volunteers then jump in the habitat module and head to the moon. During the whole operation, the scientists back home can be crunching the numbers for the flight plan, orbit, etc. The EXACT position of the Moon Mission can be tracked either from the GPS system, or with the Hubble telescope and the scientists at mission control can alter the burns, etc to compensate for deviations. As for the actual control of the rocket, the astronauts can bring a laptop hooked up to the control of the rocket or the scientists can control it remotely with off the self HW. The astronauts that do the construction will most likely get a huge dose of radiation, and the Suicider astronauts will most likely get a FATAL dose. As for landing they can either jump out of the habitat module at the correct time and use the standard shuttle jetpacks to get a soft landing, or they can just crash land at full speed.
Sorry my post is so hinked I’m in a big rush to write this before my boss notices that I’m not working…