BioHazard, just a couple of little technical nitpicks:
You’re making a very dangerous assumption that the top section of a Titan and a habitat module can actually MATE in a secure way. My money says they’re not even close, and then you’re talking some kind of custom adapter that you HOPE will work.
GPS is designed only to work on the Earth’s surface. There’s a constellation of about 22 sattelites in orbit to accomplish this, and presumably the signal footprint of those sattelites only goes DOWN. While orbital mechanics may be simple, it’s not something you can do by the seat of your pants. So you need (1) a flight computer, (2) an interface between the flight computer and the Titan, (3) some sort of user interface on the flight computer in case human intervention is needed, and (4) a communications system to get course corrections from the ground, if needed.
Um, the OP didn’t ask how fast we could get DEAD astronauts to the moon, which is exactly what you’d get with jumping out, etc. And if you wanted your astronauts to live for more than a couple of hours, you’d have to make sure that they habitat module remained intact. Bottom line: landing safely is critical to mission success.
First problem - you can’t just toss anything in the back of the Shuttle like it’s a pickup truck. The interior of the cargo bay is actually pretty fragile, and whatever’s in there is going to be subjected to some fierce vibration and acceleration loads. You’ll need to manufacture a mounting fixture to secure the upper-stage booster in the shuttle bay. Along with that are the interfaces between the booster and the shuttle, which you’ll need so you can supply power to the booster’s on-board systems, and monitor it’s telemetry to make sure it’s still in good health. Integrating a payload into the shuttle is actually a pretty big engineering job in itself.
You also have to worry about how the rocket’s going to survive in orbit until it’s time to fire. Normally a rocket is kept connected to support equipment until seconds before launch, to provide power (and not run down the rocket’s interal batteries), and constantly replenish fuel and oxygen that boils off. Your upper-stage booster is designed with the assumption that it’s going to be ignited within a few minutes of the ground support equipment being unplugged. It simply won’t survive in orbit very long - the fuel tanks will eventually heat up enough to boil their contents and explode.
Can you engineer around this? To a degree, yes - the third stage of the Saturn V was designed to last several hours in orbit. It just means your booster is no longer off-the-shelf hardware, it has to be custom engineered.
This is why the few times the shuttle has been used to launch satalites to geosynchronous orbit, they’ve used solid-fuel boosters. Unfortunatly they don’t do that anymore, the hardware has been scrapped - it’s cheaper to use non-reusable rockets for geosynchronous orbit launch.
The “construction” that’s going on at the ISS consists of carefully piecing together modules which have been engineered to fit together with as little in-orbit work as possible. Everything has matching sockets and carefully lined up bolt holes - it’s like one of those snap-together model kits. Mating a habitat module to a rocket upper stage when neither of them was designed for that is going to be far more difficult, at least if you want the structure to not fall apart the moment you apply thrust. You can’t just duct-tape together a rocket and expect it to work.
Secondly, the station doesn’t really have “habitat modules”. You can’t cut off part of the station and expect just that bit to sustain you - you need most of the station there just to stay alive. At best you could cut off the parts you don’t need - the science lab module, the airlock, most of the truss, and various other non-vital bits, but the remaining mass will still be way too much for your booster to accelerate to the moon.
The goal of the OP was to get live astronauts to the moon. Crashing the ship into the moon will make them very dead, and the shuttle jetpacks don’t have anywhere near the fuel capacity to land. Remember that to get from earth orbit to the moon in a reasonable time takes a lot of speed; you have to kill that velocity before you can safely land. You can’t use the booster that sent you to the moon in the first place, because it’s not designed to light more than once - unless it’s been custom-designed to do so, in which case it’s not off-the-shelf hardware anymore.
Well, if anyone’s interested, here’s a web page detailing a few of the Soviet plans for lunar expeditions…and a few of them even involved landing a Soyuz-capsule on the Lunar surface itself. And, as I recall, the remains of one of the prototype lunar landers still exists today, if that’s of any aid to our hypothetical scenario. (Not that riding into space on a patched-up 30 year old RUSSIAN spacecraft that was never properly tested is especially more appealing than flying an American museum piece to the moon, but it’s FYI)
Wearia, I’m with you, and getting wearier by the moment. It’s like banging head your against the wall in the vain hope that posters would understand the simple concept of urgency.
Oh, environmental concerns
Ooh, we’ll never get hold of any of those old valves we used to use
Oh no, what will we do without whatsisname who used to run the missions…we’re doomed.
Longer than in the 60s to get to the moon?
Bollocks
And some people don’t seem to understand concepts of reliability and complexity. A spacecraft has got to be tested before flight - all the sensors, wiring and mechanical components, as well as the integrity of the whole structure (i.e. make sure pieces don’t fall off). You’ve got to do all the tests on each spacecraft; you can’t do two tests on the same spacecraft at a time no matter how much resources you have. And obviously you can’t start testing until you’ve finished building the spacecraft. You can’t even start building until you are satisfied that you have a functional design. Design is another thing that cannot be done in parallel; someone has to understand all the components to make sure everything works together. Now tell me, which part of this can we skip and still expect the spacecraft to function?
“All the resources of the world” is not all that much, when you think about it. There are a limited number of engineers with enough knowledge and experience to handle such a project. There is a limited production capacity for components; it’s possible to build a factory that can produce 100 Shuttle engines a week, but building that factory will take months. There is a limited number of vibration test facilities and thermal-vacuum chambers which are needed to test the spacecraft.
There are some things that just cannot be done even with all the resources of this world. Going to the Moon in one month is one of them. If given a whole year, we might launch something that has some chance of success.
OK scr4, perhaps you’d like to think of the question in a slightly different way. If the survival of the human species relied on somebody visiting the moon soon, presumably for you there’s a period which is simply too short, correct? I mean given a mere ten seconds or so, we *couldn’t * make it. But given a day or a week or a month, would you reject the possibility of success and accept defeat? How about 3 months? 5 months? 11 months 15 days?
I’m not trying to be pedantic in considering the minutiae of the time allowed, merely trying to suggest that thinking in a logical and contemporary engineering sense may not necessarily provide the best answer.
eg Take the four shuttles, fill them with a tank of fuel with a simple pump inside. Dump fuel tank in an orbit. Repeat ad nauseum. Run a relay race with three shuttles refuelling the fourth which gets to the moon. Possible? Dunno. Ridiculous? Maybe? Worth trying? If we’ve only got days or weeks to live and with no other viable (:rolleyes: ) plan, what would we have to lose?
It’s not a yes/no question. If there were one month, I think NASA would still launch something but the main purpose would be publicity. I’d give it 0.1% chance of actually succeeding. With 3 months I’d say 3 launches, each with 1% chance of success. A year may be enough to prepare 6 separate spacecraft each with 10% chance of success. Those are just guesses but you get the idea. It takes a 5-year project to design a lunar spacecraft with 99% reliability.
There is no tank designed to fit inside a Shuttle cargo bay. Even if you could find a tank with the right size, strength and weight, you would still need to fabricate a mounting hardware. If there is insufficient analysis and testing of the mounting hardware, there is a good chance that it will break during launch and destroy the entire shuttle. Even if you could do that, the US currently has the capability to do only 4 Shuttle flights a year. It can be improved, but the turnaround time for each Shuttle is several weeks at best. If given one month, that would mean at most one flight for each Shuttle, but even that would be extremely difficult.
Nobody has ever done an in-flight refueling in space. I’m sure NASA has a plan for something like that, but not actual working hardware (pump and coupling). Anyway, as already pointed out, the Shuttle is not equipped to survive a deep-space flight or a lunar landing. It’s doubtful that it has enough thrust to enter a lunar transfer orbit.
I didn’t say we wouldn’t try. I meant the chances of success are extremely small.
I’m not sure about that. Didn’t Mir (and, now, the ISS) reguarily get its manuevering fuel tanks topped off by Progress supply ships?
If we did have to get back to the moon Real Soon, using Russian technology and hardware would be a real help. Unlike the Shuttle, the Soyuz ships were designed to operate all the way to the moon, and don’t have the weight penalties involved of wings and such. Hooking a booster to a Soyuz and sending it to the moon would be a lot easier than trying to do the same with a Shuttle or trying to kludge something together with a space station module on a booster.
Oops, I was wrong about in-flight refueling. Both the ISS and Mir did/do fuel transfer in orbit. Still, integrating the tank, pump and coupling is not a trivial task.
I knew I couldn’t correct it before someone else did…
Good point about using Russian technology. It may help that the Chinese now have Soyuz clones. The Soyuz is a modular system so it’s easier to modify, and they have reliable automated docking systems. And the descent stage of the Soyuz is tiny - it only has a couple hours of life support but that’s enough for our lander. Still, a landing stage would have to be designed pretty much from scratch.
Unmanned probes have discovered an Alien Doomsday Device on the moon. When it activates in N years (just longer than the minimum time to put the mission together) it will exterminate all life on Earth. We need an astronaut to go switch the thing off. It has to be turned off in person, we can’t just nuke it from orbit or send a robot. Since this is an emergency and there are no shortage of voulenteers, we don’t need to worry about getting the astronaut back alive if it means making the mission in time.
We’ll base our lunar mission around a Soyuz. It can keep three people alive for as long as we need, has a reasonable payload capacity, and has the power and environmental systems to function away from Earth. It will probably need to be modified with guidance and communication for the trip, and mounting points for our booster and lander.
The Soyuz doesn’t have the fuel capacity to make it to the moon by itself. We’ll need to attach a booster stage to get it there. (Engineering the Soyuz to carry extra fuel tanks would take a lot more time, and time is what we don’t have.) The booster rocket can be carried up intact and fully fueled by the Shuttle or a Russian Proton rocket and mated to the Soyuz at the ISS. Both the Sozuz and booster will have been engineered in advance to make connecting them fairly easy, and the booster will use either solid fuel or non-cryogenic hypergolic fuels so that in-orbit lifetime is not an issue. We might have to use more than one booster assembly, depending on how large of a booster we can get up there and how low we can get our final payload.
It might be possible to somehow crash-land the Soyuz’s descent stage on the moon, but I wouldn’t want to chance the future of the human race on it. I suspect it would be easier and more reliable to hack together a simple lander vehicle to put down just one man. During the Apollo missions one option was considered was an open-cabin lander, not much more than a rocket engine and fuel tanks on a framework. The astronauts would stay in their suits for the entire trip from lunar orbit to and from the moon. They rejected this in favor of an enclosed cabin, but for our needs - one-way trip from lunar orbit to the surface as simply as possible with not much on-surface time needed - it might work. We might be able to salvage the engine and fuel assembly from an Apollo lunar lander, or adapt a Shuttle OMS engine and fuel tanks for the job. The lander will be attached to the front of the Soyuz during the assembly stage. Once at the moon, the poor bastard picked for the actual landing will suit up, strap himself to the lander, fire the explosive bolts to seperate from the Soyuz, and pilot the lander down to the surface.
So we have three major engineering/design projects working in paralell: the earth-to-lunar-orbit booster, the lander, and the modified Soyuz. We might be able to do it in a year, but it would be really pushing it. Two years, probably. Five years, easily, and we could design it to get the crew back alive too.
A game or thought exercise this may be, but “damn the risks” and “we have to save humanity” are contradictory rules of the game. If the mission is so important that it must succeed, then duct-taping a Winnebago to a Titan IV isn’t going to fly, in any sense of the word.
The seemingly unlimited resources and funding of U.S. + Russians + Chinese + Europeans + Japanese + everyone else with a missile program still doesn’t guarantee results any faster. Nor will throwing 6x more money at a program get it does 6 times faster.
And so what that your cell phone, laptop, or tennis racket have more computing power than all of NASA in 1969? Any computer simulation is only as good as the data going into it and the programmer writing it. Or, as a sign in a co-worker’s office says, “Computers make fast, very accurate mistakes.”
Even though scr4 has already corrected himself, I just wanted to chime in and say that NASA tested in-flight refueling with the shuttle as early as 1984. The real reason I wanted to make this point is it allows me to insert the following slight hijack of which I was unaware.
[hijack] In response to the American Strategic Defence Initiative and continued military use of the shuttle, the Soviet Union fired a ‘warning shot’ from the Terra-3 laser complex at Sary Shagan. The facility tracked Challenger with a low power laser on 10 October 1984. This caused malfunctions to on-board equipment and discomfort / temporary blinding of the crew, leading to a US diplomatic protest.
[/hijack]
Yes, and? Back in the '60’s space – and the moon – were a relatively unknown environment. Now, it’s almost banal. We now have an excellent understanding of radiation levels, micrometeor risks, effects of zero G, etc., etc. The space between here and the moon just isn’t that hostile of an environment. How to design something that will survive in space for a week isn’t that much of a mystery. scr4’s point about system integration is correct but misleading, especially if you are using mostly off-the-shelf components – NASA has excellent data on how these systems perform and can make a very good stab at getting them to work together on the first go, assuming they really had to. The one-year/10% chance of success estimate is way to pessimistic. Remember, achieving earth orbit, which is really the most potentially risky phase of a lunar mission, is a no-brainer.
Some of the pessimists have mentioned Apollo 13 as an example of “things can go wrong”. Yes, but it’s also an example of “things can be improvised” and “things can be fixed”. Did the lunar descent engine go through years of tests for use as an orbit-shaping engine? Were the command module power systems tested for providing supplemental power to the lander? Heck, was duct tape and the cardboard cover of a notebook put through extensive flight-readiness tests for a CO[sub]2[/sub] scrubber adaptor? A team of guys, only three of whom were even “on-site”, used a collection of hardware that could fit in a broom closet to adapt a spacecraft to an entirely different purpose from that for which it was designed, and they did it in a matter of days.
I just heard on the news last night that the Russians have been leaving Soyuz capsuls at the ISS for use as emergency escape vehicals.
If the Soyuz have been designed to go to the moon, what would they need to get to there? Just an extra rocket or fuel tank, or a whole “Service Module” like the Apollo missions had?
