Looking back: Was the shuttle a flop?

I guess something most people don't realize is that the shuttle was, basically, an experimental aircraft. The dern thing only flew 100-some-odd times. In an ideal world, the first ships should have been considered prototypes, and replaced by successively improved designs every 5-10 years. We should be flying shuttle mark 3 or 4 by now.

Alas, the world sucks.

In an ideal world, NASA would have nothing to do with Muslims and would be prepping the next supply ship for our Martian outpost. Oh yeah, and the manned mission to Jupiter's moons would be set for next year.


In an ideal world.

In an ideal world, the Apollo program would have continued and a permanent base on the moon established by the mid to late 70s. Meanwhile, a shuttle-like vehicle of some sort would have been developed and a space station constructed. With this foundation in place, manned Mars expeditions would have gone out, probably by the mid 1980s or so. By the early 2000s there would have been a permanent Mars station and supply ships would be making the trip regularly. We'd have "transfer" vehicles in service that would basically be large cargo and crew haulers going from LEO to the moon, and to Mars. Lunar ice and helium-3 would be being mined for fuel.

We could be out of the nest by now, with permanent human presence on two off-world bodies at the very least.

But no, better to dump infinite amounts of money down various ratholes. Great.

I tell ya, the US will go down in history as the Portugal of the Space Age: we got there first, but then decided it was more fun to jerk off with failed social-welfare bullshit and turned our backs on the biggest human adventure of all time.

It was a flop.

And you know what pisses me off?

You could triple Nasa's budget and it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire US budget. A bigger drop to be sure but still small.

This government is not interested in space exploration. That died with JFK in my opinion. Our government is far more interested in squandering this nations wealth. And the stupid apathetic fools that we are allow them too.

The thing that everyone is missing here is the speed. There is no real need to blast off and reach terminal velocity and all that crap. I'm sure we possess the tech right now to do a slow climb. Something that doesn't require escape velocity because is keeps on pulling at a steady speed instead of blasting off like a cannon. Lets say we had something that could take off and maintain 250mph. If the moon is 250,000 miles away then it would take about 6 days to reach it. The hardest part of its work would be leaving the atmosphere and then coast the rest of the way to the moon, then slowing from 250mph would not be that much of a challenge.

Are you seriously saying that at 250 mph it would only take six days to go to the moon?

Not to mention escape velocity can be conquered at 250 mph?

Now that they've found water on the Moon, why can't they just do an old-fashioned Apollo style splashdown? With parachutes.

I meant weeks. You don't need escape velocity unless you are blasting off and building enough speed to punch through the atmosphere and escape gravity. If you are in a steady pull then that doesn't apply.
250,000 miles divided by 250 = 1000 hours devided by 168 hours in a week = 6 weeks more or less.

Why would I waste my time taking six weeks to go to the moon when I can speed up and get there in days?

I can understand sending unmanned cargo at that speed. Save fuel that way. All you have to do is properly plan the timeframes for sending them.

Agreed.

To a degree, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour were the Mark 2's: lighter, more thermal blankets and less tiles, glass cockpit, the later modification for an external airlock, etc.

I'd like to have seen a Mark 3 with liquid fueled strap on boosters instead of those solids. There was some planning to do that, but it never came to fruition.

No math in the Red Room.

Comments to MA.

Infinite!

IIRC, the Cassini probe passed the moon only something like 9 hours after launch. But of course it wasn't planning on stopping and was accelerating its ass off toward Saturn.

Escape velocity has nothing to do with the atmosphere, and everything to do with escaping Earths gravity. If you travel straight up to the moon at 250mph you will accomplish nothing except to see the Moon zoom past you at roughly 2200mph. Plus your slow burn means you are nowhere near orbital velocity at any point, so if you turn off your engine at any point you will start falling back down to Earth.
All irrelevant points though since I'm pretty sure your base assertion is false, there is no rocket I am aware of that could burn for six weeks in the way you describe.

Stopping is not as big of a deal and it would mean a hell of a lot less fuel burned. Speed costs a lot of money. I think it would be much safer as well.

It would not have to burn for six weeks, just long enough to get out of the earths gravity, then coast. The Rendezvous would have to be calculated out. You are still thinking in terms of a cannon.

I don't think Humans would like going that fast......

It would be less safe. Unless you've got shield technology the longer humans take to get to the moon the more dangerous it gets.

Are you really that stupid?

To get to the moon at 250 mph you would need some fucking unobtainium super engine that can fire continually for weeks. Because if at any time you turned it off you would lose all your forward speed in 20 or 30 seconds, and start falling back to earth after that.

To make matters worse once you reached the moon's orbit youwould be unable to match speeds with the moon, since it orbits at several thousand mph and you're stuck at 250. To be fair by the time you got out there you'd be going a bit faster than 250, maybe 300 or 400 mph because the earth's gravity is weaker at that distance. But still you can't catch the moon. And worse, because of this you're not orbiting at all, you're still standing on your thrust which is the only thing stopping you from plunging 250,000 miles back to earth which is still pulling on you with its gravity.

All this said, it might still be possible to eventually reach the moon, with this hypothetical magic engine of inexhaustibile fuel, but not as you imagine.

We'll assume you've just reached 250,000 miles altitude only to see the moon rush past your face at its orbital velocity. What you need to do now is turn your craft 90 degrees. You will immediately begin falling back to earth, but your impossibilium super engine is also thrusting you at 90 degrees to this fall. Since it was able to raise you at 250 mph vertically against earth's gravity for weeks, it should be able to impart a pretty good delta-v by the time you've fallen back to earth, with the result that you miss earth entirely and fall into orbit around earth. I haven't done any calcs at all on this so I have no idea of the ellipsicity of it... Anyway what you need to do then is turn your engine off, and fire it at the perigee of the orbit to circularise it, this may need to be done several times.

Now that you're in orbit, you can work on getting back to the moon, properly this time. Just keep thrusting ahead with your fantastium engine, your orbital velocity will keep building, and you will spiral outwards towards the moon, eventually approaching its vicinity at comparable orbital velocity. Eventually you will cross its hill sphere and fall into orbit around it.

You realize the moon is within Earth's gravity well? I wouldn't count on coasting at 250 mph and making it to the moon.

Have any of you read anything about the "space elevator" Idea? Just a steady climb.

Space elevators are actually more like space ladders. Have you ever climbed a ladder? You don't start moving and then coast up it, you have to keep expending energy to gain height.

The "Space Elevator" depends on having a very long cable from the Earth's surface to outer space. If we had the tech to make it we've probably would have already done it.

So what's your point?

To geostationary orbit.

(Go away and come back when you've learned what geostationary orbit is. I suggest you start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)

And the elevator line is under tension during the elevator's entire climb. Its endpoint just happens to coincide with that band of space where the orbital period equals the earth's rotational period. So by the time its got there its angular velocity is supporting it.

You do but not as much as if you tried to jump up all at once. The farther you get from the earth the less gravity has an effect. Its the rockets that start moving and then coast the entire rest of the way. The slower moving craft would have to burn longer but not near as much fuel because the atmosphere would not come into play as much with drag and all that.

I still think this is as good as EP's idea.

I has as much basis in logic, anyhoo.

In an ideal world, the US would be sending military teams across the galaxy using wormholes generated by an alien device found in the Egyptian desert in 1928.

I've said too much.

I think you are getting that backwards. The government is interested in what will keep politicians in office, period. That has always been the case and will always be the case. If the public was interested in space exploration, the government would be interested in space exploration.

The public, however, is interested in the immediate gratification of free government handouts, rather than serious, long-range investment in order to keep our country strong in terms of economy, technology, and national defense. The country that lags behind in space will be the underdog 50 or 100 years from now, and will rue the lack of foresight of two whole generations who moaned about all that money "wasted" in space and preferred to let the Chinese and Russians do it. They will wonder how the Chinese and Russians ended up dominating the solar system and why "the government" didn't do something about it when there was still time.