What are they wasting their ample budget on?

It seems like I'm constantly hearing of NASA research that has seemingly nothing to do with spaceflight.

I would humbly suggest that perhaps they should leave the climate research to academia and focus on being good little bus drivers.

6/8/2012 10:39:39 AM

hence your previous post

6/8/2012 12:26:38 PM

http://mars-one.com/en/

Human settlement of Mars in 2023

Mars One will establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. A habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land. The settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars the rest of their lives. Every two years after 2023 an additional crew will arrive, such that there is a real living, growing community on Mars. Mars One has created a technical plan for this mission that is as simple as possible. For every component of the mission we have identified at least one potential supplier. Mars One invites you to join us in this next giant leap for mankind!

6/8/2012 3:57:49 PM

I wouldn't bet on that one for a multitude of reasons.

6/8/2012 5:32:52 PM

1. Their business model relies on generating money from a mega-scale reality show. What happens when ratings slip?

2. Their plan is OVERLY simplistic. There are no details to be found. They do not address radiation mitigation for the trip there for one example.

3. If they want to properly recruit, screen, select and train participants, they would have ALREADY needed to start. What type of people are they going to recruit? People who are older so their lives won't be overly-shortened by radiation exposure (aka they are going to die sooner anyway)... people who have nerves of steel and will be perfectly suited in cramped, isolated quarters for the rest of their lives? Or are they going to recruit young, good looking, high drama crews that will keep the ratings up (jersey shore on mars?)

6/8/2012 5:39:00 PM

I am highly skeptical as well I just thought I would share it. Unfortunately I am not confident there will be people landing on Mars in my lifetime (we are so far behind where we should be in space).

6/8/2012 9:12:07 PM

as much as the space shuttle enabled access to space for 30 years, it is also to blame for our lack of space progress (according to some schools of thought)

in the early 70's, (well really late 60's) if NASA had not gone the route of a reusable space plane and instead improved on the Saturn boosters, we could have had multiple skylabs in the 70's, perhaps connected to have a truly massive space station. We would have been back to the moon in the 80's, and had the basis for a solid mars program in the 90's. (of course all of that is speculation)

6/8/2012 9:59:33 PM

Yes, but people STILL keep coming up with these ideas for reusable craft! Space X keeps making shot after shot to develop truly reusable equipment.

Evidence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B5av0BOajU&feature=plcp
Why Make Rockets Reusable?

It's important to focus on whether or not someone's rhetoric actually addresses the core limitations of something. If you improve something that is NOT a barrier to private space development, then whatever, go masturbate yourself. So I get it the need for re-usability, but this junk is ridiculous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE

Basically they have an idea that they'll recover every part of the rocket by landing it with a precision landing with propellant on board. So now all of your payload is propellant. It's the same track as the space shuttle really. The capital cost is what kills space exploration, not the propellant cost. So why did the space shuttle get so expensive? I don't fucking know. It just does.

So whatever magic thing it is that makes reusable spaceship ideas too expensive - fix that. I don't know what it is, but you aerospace engineers need to fix it. Otherwise, all this stuff is just nonsense. It won't change anything, and we're not going to change anything important.

[Edited on June 9, 2012 at 2:43 PM. Reason : ]

6/9/2012 2:41:44 PM

I saw that thing about a martian colony by 2023, that is not gonna happen. Like Smath said, too many things that haven't been properly researched that will take years. These guys haven't even sent someone into space before and they are planning on having someone on another planet in 11 years?

Also agreed on how ridiculous that SpaceX video is.

6/11/2012 10:31:34 AM

Quote :

"Basically they have an idea that they'll recover every part of the rocket by landing it with a precision landing with propellant on board. So now all of your payload is propellant. It's the same track as the space shuttle really. The capital cost is what kills space exploration, not the propellant cost. So why did the space shuttle get so expensive? I don't fucking know. It just does."

All your payload is propellant? That seems rather dubious. "Elon Musk said in a magazine interview that he will reduce 1st stage velocity from Mach 10 to 6 for reusability, and that this reusability will lower payload performance by 40%."

Is 40% payload reduction worth it for X number of reuses? We're not talking about the government here, SpaceX is in the business of making (and spending less) money.

I don't even get why you're saying "propellant" is what they're trying to save with this model. They need MORE propellant (which you admit is the cheap part) to prevent having to build and repair more rockets (the expensive part).

Maybe I'm the dumbass, but why is reusable spacecraft a pipe dream? It seems logical that it's the endgame.

6/11/2012 11:06:44 AM

Quote :

"I don't even get why you're saying "propellant" is what they're trying to save with this model. They need MORE propellant (which you admit is the cheap part) to prevent having to build and repair more rockets (the expensive part)."

You're right, I might not have been entirely clear. In an entire host of ways, it seems profitable to be more liberal with the use of propellant because, as we've heard argued, it's maybe 0.5% of the cost for current launch systems.

The problem is that it hasn't worked. The space shuttle was a reusable rocket. Then again, maybe the problem with the space shuttle might have been more that it had to satisfy a dozen mutually exclusive objectives (coming from the late cold war) that created a poor product.

Ultimately I think the calculus comes down more to risk assessment than any of this talk about re-usability or propellent. Really, the problem with the space shuttle was that it crashed. It if never failed, the costs associated with a launch could have been reduced dramatically, instead they increased dramatically. This is why I think separating the crew launch and the payload launches was probably a very good step.

Does re-usability address the right question. To the extent that ship capital costs are the constraining cost, it does. But why are the capital costs high? History doesn't seem to give a clear verdict that reusable/non-reusable is the mechanism behind that. I think that SpaceX and the current direction with the US space program is addressing a lot of the central lessons learned from the shuttle program, and once that shakes out I think we'll have a better LEO presence. The problem is SpaceX is proposing these precision landing routines for their tanks that feel an awful lot like the mistakes of the past. I can see how it's the right "end game", but maybe it's not the right thing for near-term.

6/11/2012 11:34:34 AM

not manned flight, but this is cool: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/18/nasa-voyager-1-spacecraft-nears-interstellar-space/


why did I think that the voyager twins were no longer in use?? can't believe it's been 35 years since they launched and are still going strong. Also speaks to the size of the solar system, for those of us who have trouble imagining the "size" of space... 35 years and they are just now likely to the edge of the solar system. wow.

6/19/2012 9:30:47 AM

yeah, the voyager probes have recently given us a good amount of data on the very outer parts of the solar system... where the influence of the sun (and solar wind) gives way to interstellar space.

6/19/2012 6:09:52 PM

V'ger lives.

6/19/2012 6:47:03 PM

planetary resources is going to launch a kickstarter project. now you can waste your money of futuristic dreams too.

6/21/2012 3:16:46 PM

Not manned, but the MSL lands in about a month.

7/9/2012 8:53:58 AM

MSL



Hopefully everyone here has already seen this face-melting awesomeness. If you have not yet, I suggest playing it with surround sound on your largest screen.

7/9/2012 11:39:38 AM

i hope it goes well... the whole "sky crane" landing method sounds risky.

7/9/2012 12:28:44 PM

here is a picture showing the "Orion" capsule they are building compared to an Apollo capsule. Orion is definitely larger... of course it is dwarfed by the shuttle orbiter

7/11/2012 8:14:16 PM

Not really about manned spaceflight but this is the only active space thread in the Lounge. Some of you guys may be interested to know that the Curiosity rover will be landing on the surface of Mars on August 6 at 1:30AM EST.

They had a full size model of it here at work last week... it is the largest rover ever created. It's about the size of Mini Cooper, making it about twice as big as Spirit/Opportunity that landed in 2004 (which both lasted way longer than designed). The primary mission is to assess the Martian surface for the potential to support life, checking out the geology, water, and surface radiation. It will be nuclear powered allowing it to travel to a lot darker areas of Mars, including the poles.

One of the cooler things about the Curiosity is the lander device. It is too big to employ a standard airbag system like previous rovers used. The Martian soil is too easily kicked up by traditional rocket engines, so a Sky Crane feature is enabled. After entering the Martian atmosphere, the capsule will be slowed with a parachute, then dropped using traditional thrusters to slow the descent even more. The thrusters on the capsule will slow to a hover at a safe distance above the surface, then slowly lower the rover down using tethers. All of this will be completely automated... once the rover enters the atmosphere it will take about seven minutes (Dubbed the 7 Minutes of Terror) to reach the surface and begin broadcasting.

Here is the actual rover:


Is there is life on Mars and they encounter the rover, I'm pretty sure they are gonna think it is trying to kill them:


Sky Crane:


Timeline:

7/31/2012 9:31:08 AM

So...

1:30am is doable. They have live streams.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/

I think this calls for drinking. What bar has WiFi at 1:30am?

7/31/2012 10:44:04 AM

Also there is I think a 15 minute delay from Mars so I don't know if that 1:30am takes that into account. If you are staying up to watch you may want to start the stream at 1:15 just in case.

7/31/2012 11:27:30 AM

what's the stream going to entail, any idea?

7/31/2012 11:43:47 AM

Quote :

"Also there is I think a 15 minute delay from Mars so I don't know if that 1:30am takes that into account"

It does. The Wikipedia page goes into this. The entire process of entering and landing takes 7 minutes. So if I understand correctly, it would go like this:

1:15am: MSL enters the Martian atmosphere
1:22am: The MSL is now on the ground, as either a heap of trash or powering up to do science

1:30am: we first get signal of the MSL entering atmosphere
1:37am: show ends, we find out if science or Mars won

7/31/2012 11:59:11 AM

^^There should be color video of the rover landing on Mars and possibly driving around a bit (but I'd imagine that it would be stationary on the surface for a while before driving). Doesn't really seem that exciting until you think about how the footage is coming from the surface of another planet. Maybe we'll see the Martian sasquatch.

7/31/2012 3:03:56 PM

I have a hard time determining what images the past rovers actually took. NASA is so tricky with enhancing them and combing them that it's hard to determine what its camera actually can get. This is what I can figure out right now.

Mars Pathfinder camera:



Opportunity:



Spirit:



You would think that the MSL, being so ridiculously huge, they would actually put a color camera on it.



Herp derp, I have a gamma backscatter detector and am the most advanced rover NASA's ever made... but I can't take color pictures.

EDIT:

Oh good, NASA isn't entirely dumb-smart.

http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html

Quote :

" Mast Camera (MastCam) The MastCam is Curiosity's workhorse imaging tool. It will capture high-resolution color pictures and video of the Martian landscape, which scientists will study and laypeople will gawk at."

Glad they used some of that 2.some billion dollars on a camera

[Edited on July 31, 2012 at 4:33 PM. Reason : ]

7/31/2012 4:27:57 PM

Literally shooting money into space

I'm Krallum and I approved this message.

7/31/2012 8:27:13 PM

^^ from a scientific perspective, a color camera's weight isn't worth as much as a spectrometer.

From a marketing perspective, which NASA has been doing a great job with for Curiosity, color pictures are very important.

7/31/2012 8:34:52 PM

Lots of info/discussion about the mars rover landing here:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=57.0

8/1/2012 12:44:16 AM

don't be weenies about radiation. there are plenty of people that will do this mission regardless of the radiation. also, it's not that dangerous anyway. they can have a sheath of water and food/piss and shit. also, low sustained radiation LOWERS your risk of cancer. Wathc BBC Horizons Nuclear Nightmares. natural background radiation can have a ten-fold influence on your cancer risk. high radiation=low cancer

8/1/2012 1:06:47 AM

what mission?

8/1/2012 1:14:14 AM

To me, there's just something about a manned mission to Mars that doesn't quite feel "not that dangerous anyway".

Quote :

" also, low sustained radiation LOWERS your risk of cancer. "

If only the nuclear industry could be treated this way...

Quote :

"^^ from a scientific perspective, a color camera's weight isn't worth as much as a spectrometer."

A Mars rover needs a color camera like a space ship needs windows

8/1/2012 8:55:18 AM

Quote :

"a manned mission to Mars that doesn't quite feel "not that dangerous anyway"."

Compared to the Moon, staying on the Martian surface (Provided there are no ridiculous sandstorms) would theoretically be safer but a big part about it being dangerous is the trip there and back. The Moon takes a few days to get to... Mars takes about 4 months. If something like Apollo 13 happened on the way to Mars it would be a lot more difficult to fix. Also, two very significant problems arise when you are in deep space for that long -- loss of bone density due to zero gravity and direct radiation from the sun.

8/1/2012 9:14:11 AM

Will there be any kind of live feed of mission control for the landing?

8/1/2012 11:05:39 AM

I'm sure there will be. Check http://www.nasa.gov leading up to it, they will probably have links to the footage from the rover and a few other things.

8/1/2012 5:28:33 PM

Wraith, can you discuss what part of the SLS you have worked on? I know there is a lot of discussion about moving from the block I baseline to either a "block 1A" or a "block 1B"... can you talk about how much is speculation vs the direction NASA is leaning?

Quote :

"Block 1: 4 engine core, RSRMV boosters, Delta IV u/s, Orion unmanned for EM-1 and another Block 1 for maybe cargo or Orion Block 1A: same core, advanced boosters (Kero/Lox or improved RSRMV) no plan for u/s as last heard. Has high acceleration due to high performance of core and boosters, so not looking good. Block 1B: still four engine core, uses baseline RSRMV boosters, new 8.4 meter u/s based on multiple RL-10 engines. rebalances LV so no acceleration issues, and still have stockpile of available RSRMV segments. "

^taken off an SLS discussion board.

I've also heard talk of bringing back an updated version of the F1 (from Saturn V... aka badass mother fucking engine)

[Edited on August 1, 2012 at 11:08 PM. Reason : ]

8/1/2012 11:03:05 PM

I work on control systems design and analysis. The three main tasks I work on now (and probably for the next few years) are engine dynamic oscillation interaction with the vehicle structural modes of vibration (AKA pogo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation), structural dynamics model implementation into simulations, and liftoff/stage separation analysis.

The block 1 model is far from being baselined though... some of the heritage components like the space shuttle main engines and boosters obviously are but most of the core is still in the design phase. The Block 1A and 1B vehicles are just different configurations for different trajectories/missions that are being further looked at. The descriptions you posted are mostly correct, although I don't know why 1A is described as "not looking good" ... the advanced boosters are in my personal opinion one of the more interesting parts of some of the advanced configurations. The J-2X program from the Ares days isn't dead yet either, but I haven't heard anything about updating the F1. With current engine options I just don't see the need.

8/2/2012 9:42:14 AM

oh, yeah that was just some guy's post... not sure why he said "not looking so good"... maybe because the acceleration with the updated boosters was too high for the baseline design to handle? (just speculating based on what was quoted)

8/2/2012 1:20:01 PM

http://www.asterank.com/3d/

This is a cool website... it is a simulation showing the potential value of near earth objects if we were to utilize their raw materials.

8/2/2012 11:59:18 PM

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/08/curiosity-just-days-away-from-mars/100346/

A lot of cool pictures of Curiosity going from construction to launch.

8/3/2012 3:36:11 PM

Tonight!


http://naturalsciences.org/about-us/news/seven-minutes-terror-museum-hosts-overnight-coverage-mars-rover-landing

8/5/2012 2:28:16 PM

Quote :

"Will there be any kind of live feed of mission control for the landing?"

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

8/5/2012 6:24:38 PM

Summary:

- Curiosity will broadcast through the entire decent, but it switches the broadcasting antenna through each decent stage
- Those only work for the first half of the decent, BUT
- The signal might make it to the satellite, so we'll get confirmation anyway
- That might not work either, and we might not hear from it for up to 3 days, even if successful
- it has cartoons

8/5/2012 7:30:49 PM

I only now noticed the pose it was striking here.

It's totally saying:

"what now rock? didn't think I'd find you in this part of the solar system, did ya? sittin here so cocky. That's right, imma probe ya now, uh uh uh"

8/5/2012 8:08:42 PM

dish network has the nasa channel also (ch 286)

8/5/2012 8:17:13 PM

So whos got odds that theres a nice fireball? While Id love for this to work, has NASA even attempted to do this for real on earth??

8/5/2012 9:54:30 PM

So best case scenario, what type of data gets transmitted back and how quickly can it be sent

8/5/2012 11:20:50 PM

if they are able to rotate one of the old mars orbiters to listen for the signal, we COULD know pretty much right away. if not, the rover will actually land on the side of mars pointing away from earth

8/6/2012 12:38:35 AM

Quote :

"While Id love for this to work, has NASA even attempted to do this for real on earth??"

They haven't had a capsule enter the earth's atmosphere and drop a rover/etc, but they have done drop tests/hover tests/all sorts of crap to test each piece of hardware and software plenty of times. There is no way they would have a project this expensive and this much in the public eye without doing the proper testing.

8/6/2012 12:45:43 AM

IT WORKED!!!!1

8/6/2012 1:44:47 AM