Shrinking Orion's crew

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...
Bye-bye six-crew Orion; hello four-crew Orion:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gener...20Orion%20Crew
This is looking a little more Apollo-like.. and a little more doomed...all the
time.
It also means a complete ISS crew switch with one flight is now out once the
ISS goes up to six crew.


Next's years budget deficit was just estimated to be $1.6 trillion.
Or was it $1.8 trillion, I don't remember e x a c t l y.




Pat

Jeff Findley wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...
Why is it important to switch a complete ISS crew with one flight?

The Russians aren't giving up Soyuz, you know. There is absolutely no
defensible reason for Orion to rotate more than the USOS crew.

True, but if Orion is switching out four ISS crew, having a separate Orion
commander and pilot seems to make the mission planning much more similar to
what we have with the shuttle today. It may not be necessarily good or bad,
just different.

Orion will be flyable with one. So I think the mission model will be an
Orion operator* and three rotating ISS crewmembers, with the Orion
operator rotating home with the "old" ISS crew on the "old" Orion
similar to Soyuz taxi flights. The ISS crewmembers won't need much Orion
training beyond the "press the red button and get me the hell home" system.

*- The terms "commander", "pilot", and "mission specialist" will be
retired with the shuttle.

Jeff Findley wrote:
"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...
"Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program that is developing
the Orion, its Ares I crew launch vehicle and the follow-on lunar
vehicles, told Aviation Week on April 22 that the Orion design is
within "plus or minus a couple of hundred pounds" of the 21,000-pound
maximum for the command module set by a requirement to land safely
with only two of the three main parachutes deployed."

True, but he also said:
"Right now we're studying and really on the verge of deciding
that we're going to start with four," Hanley said. "That gives
us a common lunar and ISS version, but we've sized the system
and have a design for six, so we'll grow our capability as we
need it."

This makes me wonder how the capability may grow in the future if the
parachutes really are some kind of "hard" limit.

Same way Apollo did it, with incremental weight reductions and
performance enhancements.

Derek Lyons wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:

Orion sample return capacity

They can bring back twice as many samples as the largest Apollo sample
return mission (which brought back less than 100 pounds of rocks).

Apollo 11 22 kg 48 lb
Apollo 12 34 kg 74 lb
Apollo 14 43 kg 94 lb
Apollo 15 77 kg 169 lb
Apollo 16 95 kg 209 lb
Apollo 17 111 kg 244 lb

And if you were to extrapolate back to Apollo 10, it would have been
*negative*. Apollo 11 had the first LM light enough to even *land* on
the moon, much less return samples.

This is a great illustration of why excessive concern isn't warranted at
this stage. Apollo had negative margins at many points - the 1964 scrub
that led to radical changes in the Block I/Block II split, the later LM
weight scrubs, etc.

If the internet had been around in 1965, Apollo would have been cancelled.

Jeff Findley wrote:
"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...
"Alan Erskine" wrote:
:What about Lunar mission scenarios; two crew? :-\

I think they're talking about still staying with four, as I read it.
Since the concern is weight on the parachutes, there's no reason to
drop the lunar crew below 4.

Where's the margin to carry home some lunar rocks? If the parachutes can't
handle two extra crew, how are scientists on earth supposed to get their
lunar samples?

Apollo had negative margin to even *land*, much less return lunar rocks,
as late as Apollo 10.

"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...
Derek Lyons wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:

Orion sample return capacity

They can bring back twice as many samples as the largest Apollo sample
return mission (which brought back less than 100 pounds of rocks).

Apollo 11 22 kg 48 lb
Apollo 12 34 kg 74 lb
Apollo 14 43 kg 94 lb
Apollo 15 77 kg 169 lb Apollo 16 95 kg 209 lb Apollo 17 111
kg 244 lb

And if you were to extrapolate back to Apollo 10, it would have been
*negative*. Apollo 11 had the first LM light enough to even *land* on the
moon, much less return samples.

This is a great illustration of why excessive concern isn't warranted at
this stage. Apollo had negative margins at many points - the 1964 scrub
that led to radical changes in the Block I/Block II split, the later LM
weight scrubs, etc.

If the internet had been around in 1965, Apollo would have been cancelled.

Yes and no. To an extend politics would not let Apollo be cancelled.
Kennedy's Dream was to big to leave unfulfilled.

But Orion doesn't have that advantage.

And to an extend, Apollo could do more than its predecessors.

On the other hand, it's not clear if Orion can even do that much.



--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.

"OM" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:09:14 -0500, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

Orion will be flyable with one.

...This one is news to me, as I'd previously heard two. I'd love a
source cite on this one, especially if it's an up-to-date capabilities
list for Orion.

Air & Space Magazine had an article on Orion a few months ago that discussed
this.


--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.

OM wrote:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:10:05 -0500, "Jorge R. Frank"
wrote:

Same way Apollo did it, with incremental weight reductions and
performance enhancements.

...Aren't Orion and Ares I going through some sort of SWIP right now
as it is?

Yes. And if Apollo is any indication, it will be a continuous process.

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote in message
...
Derek Lyons wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:

Orion sample return capacity

They can bring back twice as many samples as the largest Apollo sample
return mission (which brought back less than 100 pounds of rocks).

Apollo 11 22 kg 48 lb
Apollo 12 34 kg 74 lb
Apollo 14 43 kg 94 lb
Apollo 15 77 kg 169 lb Apollo 16 95 kg 209 lb Apollo 17
111 kg 244 lb

And if you were to extrapolate back to Apollo 10, it would have been
*negative*. Apollo 11 had the first LM light enough to even *land* on
the moon, much less return samples.

This is a great illustration of why excessive concern isn't warranted
at this stage. Apollo had negative margins at many points - the 1964
scrub that led to radical changes in the Block I/Block II split, the
later LM weight scrubs, etc.

If the internet had been around in 1965, Apollo would have been
cancelled.

Yes and no. To an extend politics would not let Apollo be cancelled.
Kennedy's Dream was to big to leave unfulfilled.

Even if thousands of bloggers were posting internal NASA documents (all
genuine) relating to problems with Apollo (and those problems were quite
real, quite expensive to fix, and in fact some *weren't* fixed until
literally the last minute before Apollo 11) while constantly beating the
drum that The Program Is Doomed And Webb Is A Political Hack With No
Business Running A Lemonade Stand Much Less A Program Of This Magnitude?

To the point where Webb himself had to start responding to the charges,
thereby unintentionally giving them credibility... and undermining his own?

It's easy to sit here on a "bright sunny day in April 2009" (even though
there's a thunderstorm rolling through right now) and say that the
Camelot aura would have carried Apollo through all this. But looking at
the weight of the documentation of Apollo's problems in the 1964-65
timeframe, and the relative lack of play those problems seemed to get in
public, I can easily see how a public airing of those problems could
have taken the program down. Perhaps fortunately, they did not, and the
FY65 and 66 budget increases gave NASA the resources to solve them,
leaving it to posterity to sort through the documentation and discover
how close a thing it really was.

Jeff Findley wrote:
Thanks for posting these numbers. Since Apollo missions were so much
shorter than planned Orion/Altair missions, I suppose astronauts on future
lunar missions will need to be extremely choosy about which samples they
bring back to earth.


They might be able to do some analysis right while they are on the Moon.
Microscopic photos of samples could be taken ans sent back to Earth for
instance.
Frankly, I doubt they will find much of interest though.
Any really interesting rocks would tend to be from areas of fairly
chaotic geology - and just like on Apollo, rough terrain will probably
be a automatic disqualifier as a landing site.
It sure would be interesting to find out what's down inside of those
possible volcanic vents in Alphonsus crater though.

Pat