Moon Base, ISS, and Shuttle Replacement

This is my understanding of what may happen if President Bush announces a
Moon/Mars mission:

1.The Space Shuttle is to be retired by the end of this decade.
2.A new type of crew vehicle will be developed to get personnel into low
earth orbit. No heavy, bulky cargo; just people. All the contenders for the
new crew vehicle are designed in such a way that the crew is placed at the
very top of the rocket stack, presumeably to avoid Columbia-type debris
impacts and to provide an easy way to give the crew an escape mechanism.
3.A second vehicle will be developed to get from LEO to the Moon. It may be
designed to land on the Moon, otherwise another vehicle would be required to
transfer cargo/people from lunar orbit to the lunar surface.
4.Presumably, the ISS will be a staging area for the lunar missions, which
would probably mean an expansion of the station beyond what has already been
funded.
5.Unmanned rockets will carry the bulk of the remaining ISS sections and
lunar base materials to the ISS.

My question is, how will the ISS be completed in a safe manner if there is
no manned heavy lift capability? I suppose you could launch the ISS sections
on an unmanned rocket, but how would you get those sections to the station
itself. It's one thing to bring a Progress capsule to the station on remote,
quite another to do the same thing with a titanium section that has 50 times
the mass and inertia. That 1 Progress collision into MIR caused all kinds of
damage; imagine what a science module or crew module would do to the ISS.
Plus, all the equipment that will be required to build the lunar base will
have to come up as well, which just means more chances for something to go
wrong.

Just my 2 cents. (By the way, any wild ass guesses on what this will cost?
Imagine everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except a rotating space
station, the USS Discovery, and HAL.)

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:06:25 GMT, "Sam Nelson" wrote:

This is my understanding of what may happen if President Bush announces a
Moon/Mars mission:

1.The Space Shuttle is to be retired by the end of this decade.

Correct.

2.A new type of crew vehicle will be developed to get personnel into low
earth orbit. No heavy, bulky cargo; just people.

Also correct.

All the contenders for the
new crew vehicle are designed in such a way that the crew is placed at the
very top of the rocket stack,

The rockets specified have been the Atlas 5 and Delta IV, so that is
presumably also correct.

3.A second vehicle will be developed to get from LEO to the Moon.

More likely, a single main vehicle will be developed. Its destination
and mission will govern the size of the Service Module (propulsion,
life support, etc.) used.

It may be
designed to land on the Moon, otherwise another vehicle would be required to
transfer cargo/people from lunar orbit to the lunar surface.

Multiple Service Module designs might permit the main spacecraft to
also be the lunar lander.

4.Presumably, the ISS will be a staging area for the lunar missions,

No, ISS could be used for lunar missions, but it would impose a
significant payload and performance penalty on any outbound missions.

5.Unmanned rockets will carry the bulk of the remaining ISS sections and
lunar base materials to the ISS.

My question is, how will the ISS be completed in a safe manner if there is
no manned heavy lift capability?

Shuttle will not be retired until the heavy-lift assembly missions are
completed, that was stipulated in the Bush proposal. I think that's on
the books for 2008 or 2009 at present.

Brian

Brian Thorn wrote in
:

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:06:25 GMT, "Sam Nelson" wrote:

3.A second vehicle will be developed to get from LEO to the Moon.

More likely, a single main vehicle will be developed. Its destination
and mission will govern the size of the Service Module (propulsion,
life support, etc.) used.

The UPI article (upon which most of the other media outlets appeared to
have based their stories) strongly implies this is correct, referring to
the single main vehicle as the "crew exploration vehicle" (CEV) and
referring to the different missions as being performed by "various models
of the CEV."

5.Unmanned rockets will carry the bulk of the remaining ISS sections
and lunar base materials to the ISS.

My question is, how will the ISS be completed in a safe manner if
there is no manned heavy lift capability?

Shuttle will not be retired until the heavy-lift assembly missions are
completed, that was stipulated in the Bush proposal. I think that's on
the books for 2008 or 2009 at present.

That was the previous manifest; look for the date to slip to 2010 soon.
And it would be wise not to keep that date too firm, lest schedule pressure
creep back into the process as it did with STS-107.

(and combining responses here):

It's one thing to bring a Progress
capsule to the station on remote, quite another to do the same thing
with a titanium section that has 50 times the mass and inertia.

Huh? 50 times? Progress has a mass of seven tons. None of the remaining US
ISS modules has a mass over 17 tons.

(and keeping the pedants in this NG in mind, I'm using 1 ton=1000 kg here.)

That 1
Progress collision into MIR caused all kinds of damage; imagine what a
science module or crew module would do to the ISS.

That's what happens when you disable all your navaids, overload the
Progress with trash, and hand a challenging piloting task to a fatigued,
poorly-trained crew, as the Russians stupidly did in the "no-Kurs test"
that caused the collision.

Just my 2 cents. (By the way, any wild ass guesses on what this will
cost? Imagine everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except a rotating
space station, the USS Discovery, and HAL.)

I ran some rough back-of-the-envelope numbers based on the statements in
the UPI article ($800M increase in FY05, 5% increase per year after that,
$3.5G savings per year after 2010 from shuttle retirement) and came up with
a figure of $48 billion in FY04 dollars through the first lunar landing, in
2013. That's about half what Apollo cost, adjusted for inflation.
--
JRF

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