CEV to be made commercially available

jonathan wrote:
"Scott Lowther" wrote in message
news
Breaking news...

http://www.starshipmodeler.net/cgi-b...ic.php?t=31504


Ever see this spectacular kit of the space station?
I've been tempted to order one.

http://www.imrcmodels.com/iss/issphoto01.htm





--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how
unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be
a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking
puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape
the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis
Miller


Jonathan? In as much as you are posting about nothing more interesting
than a plastic model...an observation about your sig....interesting
that you are impressed by the rant of a grubby chickenhawk. If Miss
Miller wishes to define minimal standards of American patriotism she
ought to don a flack vest, grab an M-16, drive an unarmored HumVee
around Baghdad, shouting, "I support the invasion of Iraq, whatda wanna
do about it, Camel Jockey?" It's soooo easy to be a rock'em, sock'em,
"kill'em all, let god sort'em out" patriot when the most dangerous act
in your life is pouring a cup of coffee, rather than visiting your
friendly Marine Corps recruiter armed with a thousand dollar bribe and
a phoney birth certificate, begging to enlist.

snidely wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:


snidely wrote:



And why build a spacefaring civilization on the Stick as opposed to
other options?




It's not an either/or situation. Stick is what's coming, at least as
currently projected; if somebody wants to build something better, that's
great.




Jeff is pointing out that they have: A5 and DivH.



Neitther of which is better than Stick for this mission. Lower payload,
lower growth potential, less reliable

--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

snidely wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:
[...]


Not robust, fully
reusable, low-maintenance reentry TPS.



Not needed. What's the point of returning things? With the exception of
people, who can be returned easily using sixties tech, there's nothing
manmade in space that is more valuable back on the ground.




And in the same thread you're telling us to return SSMEs from spent
stages and reuse them.



Yes, for the purposes of making money. Making money =/ "opening the
space frontier."


--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Scott Lowther wrote:
No, there are, say, a dozen SSME's in fragments on the Pacific floor.
NASA isn't going to leave them in orbit until there is definitely
something that can be done with them.


It's easier to leave them in orbit than to deorbit them, once they're
already in orbit..

Quick - what's the expected lifetime of a Stick upper stage after a CEV
launch?

I'll even include a link to the slide from the ESAS:

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2005/nas.esas.18.l.jpg

-jake

Jake McGuire wrote:

Scott Lowther wrote:


No, there are, say, a dozen SSME's in fragments on the Pacific floor.
NASA isn't going to leave them in orbit until there is definitely
something that can be done with them.



It's easier to leave them in orbit than to deorbit them, once they're
already in orbit..



Quick - what's the expected lifetime of a Stick upper stage after a CEV
launch?


Not very long. So the whiners had better be on the ball.

PS: That slide is almost entirely wrong ont he details. It represents
*one* configuration among a great many. Note, for example, that the
diameter is wrong.

--
"The only thing that galls me about someone burning the American flag is how unoriginal it is. I mean if you're going to pull the Freedom-of-speech card, don't be a hack, come up with something interesting. Fashion Old Glory into a wisecracking puppet and blister the system with a scathing ventriloquism act, or better yet, drape the flag over your head and desecrate it with a large caliber bullet hole." Dennis Miller

Henry Spencer wrote:

I agree with the conversion, but those numbers are still rather too high;
I wonder if the original NASA quotation contains a conversion error. LOX
for DC-X cost under half that, according to the guy who did the buying,
and that was one-time purchases of much smaller quantities. (That was a
few years earlier, but I have trouble believing that the price rose that
much.) The USAF was paying 4c/lb in 2003.

Perhaps there's a difference in price depending on purity? Maybe
the more expensive stuff has more stringent limits on nitrogen,
methane, etc. concentrations.

I also imagine it depends on how far they have to truck the stuff.

Paul

wrote in message

We've already *done* that.

We've already cured diseases. Why do it again?

Exactly. I've never understood the inane whining about "Apollo redux",
regarding the vehicle designs we're seeing lately. Form follows function.
Given the plan laid out, the vehicle designs seem pretty good. It's
sensible. The architecture implements the policy. I suspect the real problem
people have is with the policy driving the architecture - the VSE. The
problem I have with the implementation of the policy is that - in spite of
the goals requirements of the VSE and other written national space
policies - I've seen little evidence that NASA will be using the opportunity
to spur and nurtur space startups.

Jon

"Jon S. Berndt" jsb.at.hal-pc-dot.org wrote in message
news:4357809e$0$10626

policies - I've seen little evidence that NASA will be using the
opportunity
to spur and nurtur space startups.

Clarification - not so much "space startups" as promising commercial space
enterprises, whether existing, or new.

Jon

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

markedly reduce the number of weather-related landing delays. Instead of
building infrastructure to support the vehicle, build the vehicle to use
existing infrastructure.

That makes as much sense as designing airplanes that takeoff from and
land on the tracks at railroad stations.

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...


Jeff Findley wrote:
NASA clearly lacks that imagination, as their lunar mission architecture
requires only a single docking in LEO before departing for the moon.
They
lack the desire to do any orbital assembly (beyond a single docking).
The
second stages of the stick will do nothing more than create a light show
as
they reenter earth's atmosphere and burn up. Your wishful thinking will
not
change this, just as the same wishful thinking never resulted in a single
ET
being taken to LEO.

KISS- Keep It Simple, Stupid! :-)
The less things involved in getting from point A to point B, the more
likely you are to make it to point B.

Who says a modular approach can't result in a simple system? Just because
NASA wants to throw everything into LEO on one SDHLV (except for the CEV and
it's SM), doesn't mean that what's put into LEO is simple. What it likely
means is that every single lander will be custom built, in much the same way
that the LM's were built for Apollo. It means that you don't get any
simplicity by mass production of hardware.

Tanks of propellant don't have to be overly complex. The vehicle to gather
them up and stick them together need not be overly complex either. A simple
OMV could be a CEV derived vehicle with a couple of manipulator arms on it's
SM. Manipulator arms are proven shuttle/ISS technology. They've been used
multiple times to berth MPLM's to ISS. No EVA needed. Take this approach
and yes, you might need a dozen or more tanks for a single lunar mission,
but they're all the *same* design, built on the *same* assembly line,
assembled in LEO in the *same* way. That drives down the complexity. This
gets us away from large, complex, one-off designs.

Orbital assembly need not be complex as long as you stick to proven
interfaces and assembly methods. Once an interface is proven, you're just
making and using multiple copies of it to build bigger vehicles in LEO.
This puts us on a path to Mars. NASA's plans to return to the moon do not.

Jeff
--
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