Space review: The vision thing

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

In the case of launch *rate*, it's particularly easy. Building rockets
that are ten times bigger can be a technical challenge, but building ten
times as many of the existing design is just a matter of more production
plants.

It occurs to me that the biggest obstacle, next to money, will be the
environmentalists. Building the plants and launch facilities is sure
to attract their attention, not to mention the vast amount of
combustion products dumped into the atmosphere.

The biggest bottleneck in operations will be transport I suspect.

D.
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In article ,
Gregg Germain wrote:
: This is why the 9-g F-16 has a semi-reclined seat.

I have heard - mainly from pilots, that this rationale for the
inclined seat is pure spin....
the real reason for the inclined seats, I am told, was that with the
small space available for a cockpit...

While it could be so, bear in mind that the pilots are not necessarily
authoritative sources on *why* things were done the way they were. It's
not something that's usually discussed in the operating manuals. Pilots
need to know how to make things work, and what behavior to expect, but
what the alternatives were and why this one was chosen is not usually
their problem.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

Mary Shafer writes:
People are a lot tougher than you think. Flight in the Shuttle, in
aborts, is nowhere near the physiological limits of the average,
out-of-shape, overweight couch potato. In fact. the human limits are
much higher than the vehicle limits.

I'm pretty sure the Shuttle never pulls more than 3 g and it's in the
best direction, into the chest. The g load that's harder to sustain
is the head-to-toe load, because that's the one that pulls all the
blood away from the brain, down to the legs. This is why the 9-g F-16
has a semi-reclined seat. However, even I, an asthmatic, obese,
out-of-shape older adult, can tolerate 4 g head-to-toe without a g
suit and over 5 g with one.

I might point out that at these low g levels, the risk is of losing
consciousness, not sustaining physical injury.

Amusement park rides often top out at about 5g, and that is in a head
to toe position. A few weeks ago, I rode Face-off at Paramount's
King's Island (www.pki.com), and right on the side of the ride they
had statistics, including 5g for the maximum g load. Furthermore, the
onset of this is rapid compared to a re-entry; Face-off is a very
short ride, so you go from less than 1g (sliding down an incline with
little friction) to 5g over a span of a handful of seconds.

For a comparison, on Apollo 7, an Apollo CM re-entering from earth
orbit, experienced a maximum of less than 3.5 g's, and that was "into
the chest". The build-up to that maximum was over a period of several
minutes.

Your average large roller coaster pulls higher g's and has a higher
onset rate than those "evil" semi-ballistic capsules that NASA has
been so reluctant to develop into a CRV/CTV. Since I didn't see
anyone receiving a medical check, training, or g-suits at PKI, I'd
think that your "average Joe" would survive an Apollo CM re-entry from
LEO as easily as they survive a ride on The Beast. ;-)

Jeff
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In article ,
John Penta wrote:
Even if they could, I'm not sure many people DESERVE to go to space;
Joe Q. American generally has too short of an attention span to
appreciate such a thing.

Do you "deserve" to go to Florida for a vacation? Should someone be able
to decide that you don't, and therefore you can't?

The only legitimate criterion for whether someone "deserves" to go into
space should be whether he can afford the ticket.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

(Derek Lyons) writes:
It occurs to me that the biggest obstacle, next to money, will be the
environmentalists. Building the plants and launch facilities is sure
to attract their attention, not to mention the vast amount of
combustion products dumped into the atmosphere.

The biggest bottleneck in operations will be transport I suspect.

A quick web search indicates that the US burns 131 billion gallons of
gasoline in one year. The Saturn V first stage "only" held 203,000
gallons of kerosene. That means it would take 645,000 Saturn V first
stages to equal the amount of gasoline burned in the US each year.

The reality is that you could scale up operations of launch vehicles by
several orders of magnitude before there is any significant
environmental impact above and beyond what we're already doing today.

Jeff
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In article ,
Mike Rhino wrote:
Having a national space policy, an overarching goal, made sense when
only the national government could go to space. That time has passed...

Under your plan, the Chinese vision will win.

Uh, they will "win" what, exactly? Who's handing out the prizes?

And do you seriously think that the only way the Western world can beat a
rotting socialist bureaucracy is by creating (or rather, strengthening) its
own rotting socialist bureaucracy?

If NASA concentrates on the
moon, that would leave low Earth orbit available for private companies.

NASA will assure you that LEO is the first step to the Moon, so they must
do one if they're going to do the other. Besides, the giant launch
systems they'll have to build for going to the Moon will make getting into
LEO so cheap that no second-rate private system will be able to compete.
Or so they will tell anyone who asks... and they're the Official Experts,
after all.

(Hint: no sane investor will get into a market if there is any chance of
government-sponsored competition, because Uncle Sam always has more money
than he does.)

That would allow us to try your plan while at the same time keeping a backup
plan just in case your plan fails.

The whole point of Randall's proposal is that there is no single central
*plan* to fail. Stop thinking in terms of five-year (or ten-year) plans,
and start thinking in terms of competition and freedom.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
jeff findley wrote:
...That means it would take 645,000 Saturn V first
stages to equal the amount of gasoline burned in the US each year.
The reality is that you could scale up operations of launch vehicles by
several orders of magnitude before there is any significant
environmental impact above and beyond what we're already doing today.

Agreed, with one reservation: you need to look carefully at things
injected into the *upper* atmosphere by rocket exhausts, especially things
that don't naturally get there in any quantity, such as water vapor (!).
Rockets are utterly insignificant compared to all the things we already do
to the lower atmosphere, but the upper atmosphere sees much less human and
natural activity, and is generally less massive and more fragile.

The ozone layer is obviously a special concern... and even water vapor in
the stratosphere is probably bad for the ozone layer! (The stratosphere
is normally extremely dry. Water vapor there turns into ice crystals, and
various forms of undesirable chemistry happen on their surfaces.)

Such problems *probably* are not serious even with major growth in launch
activities, but the matter bears watching, and automatically dismissing it
as insignificant is politically dangerous.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

In article ,
Gregg Germain wrote:
: This is why the 9-g F-16 has a semi-reclined seat.

I have heard - mainly from pilots, that this rationale for the
inclined seat is pure spin....
the real reason for the inclined seats, I am told, was that with the
small space available for a cockpit...

While it could be so, bear in mind that the pilots are not necessarily
authoritative sources on *why* things were done the way they were. It's
not something that's usually discussed in the operating manuals.

No, but such things frequently *are* explained in the familiarization
manuals, or the general information & reference manuals. All but the
simplest military equipment usually has more than one manual, with
each manual optimized for a specific usage, as well as more general
manuals.

For instance my old equipment had a (quite) thick installation and
removal manual, but it was only carried at the shipyard and training
installation tech libraries. OTOH, every installation that had
anything to do with the 88/2 had the 4399, the general reference
manual. We used the WP's in 46189 for normal operations, but were
issued 46188 for DASO or OT/FOT operations. (Then there are the
SMP's, the one-shots, the bubble charts, the SSPINSTs, the
SUBLANT/SUBPAC instructions, the SWOPs, the NWPs...)

Pilots need to know how to make things work, and what behavior to expect,
but what the alternatives were and why this one was chosen is not usually
their problem.

Agreed, but that does not mean that the information wasn't available
to them.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

Paul Blay wrote:

Yeah, but by the time his children grow up they'll most likely be paying more
for their energy anyway.

Predictions like this keep being made, and they keep being wrong.

The cost of energy is dictated by the productivity of the energy
industry (and the cost of producing the energy conversion equipment
that that industry uses). There is no obvious inherent upper bound
on this productivity or lower bound on the cost.

SPS proponents like to implicitly assume, as you are doing, that terrestrial
technology does not also continue to advance.

Paul

On 13 Nov 2003 17:19:00 GMT, Andrew Gray wrote:

(I think there's only one American who's flown on a Soyuz but not a
Shuttle, mind, so that factor's not too significant...)

Yes, Dennis Tito is the only American who has lifted off and landed on a Soyuz
but not a shuttle.

Incidentally, Ed Lu has the distinction of being the first American *astronaut*
to lift off and land in a Soyuz. Tito, a "space flight participant", was
officially a cosmonaut.

--
Michael R. Grabois # http://chili.cjb.net # http://wizardimps.blogspot.com
"People say losing builds character. That's the stupidest thing I ever
heard. All losing does is suck. " -- Charles Barkley, 9/29/96