I’m a NASA fanboy, and I think that humanity needs to get into space and do stuff like build permanent space habitats, moon bases, expore the planets and whatever else we can dream up. I think the benefits will pay of a million fold if we do. But doing those things requires inexpensive and reliable access to space. We don’t have it, and we’re not planning to get it anytime soon.

NASA should cancel the Space Shuttle program immediately. If the astronauts are willing to risk it, one more flight to Hubble, then call it quits.

Let’s get to work on the real problem — reliable access to space will never happen if we don’t start working on it. Let’s start now.

/gary
http://antibogon.org/blog/

There doesn’t seem to be anything in those links about the Blue Gemini program intending to reuse the capsules, only that they took an existing capsule and reflew it once to gather data.

Yeah, my memory was pretty hazy about what I read. I think what I had carried away from the article was that reusing a capsule had been done once, and that the Air Force concluded it could probably be done repeatedly. Seems to me like a reasonable idea for the CEV.

P. Edward Murray, depending upon your concept of a space elevator. I think the NASA feasibility study gave some pretty good results on the reasonableness to developing the technology. There are some unanswered questions and some design challenges that require more study for a solid answer, but some of the necessary technology is already being developed commercially for other applications, specifically the carbon nanotube fiber tethers.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Blue+Gemini

A blue Gemini…don’t remember that..was it just a test?

I’m having trouble finding the article I originally read, but here’s a reference:
http://whizzospace.com/museum/museum3.htm

It seems to me that this is no different than putting drywall tape in the seams of new sheetrock. If you don’t, any significant vibration and you get chunks of dried mud tumbling out. Embed a binder and it’s far less likely to crack/break off.

As for the netting becoming a debris hazard, it would be embedded with the rest of the tank and so it seems like it wouldn’t be a major issue.

Also, with some testing, a good size for the mesh could be determined that would limit the size of foam chunks since the borders of the mesh would limit the size.

Nuclear Fusion? Hey, I would like to see this happen but every time you ask it’s always another 10 years down the road…

When they finally get a real reactor going for say 5 minutes or more then that might be feasible…we are a heck of a long way from that though.

The new CEV was decided to be a combination of Shuttle and Apollo type technology. The spacecraft itself will be an expendable crew vehicle sort of like an up-scale Apollo command capsule – seats up to six I think. It uses the ablative heat shield, not the shuttle tile. The launch vehicle will consist of a solid rocket booster built off Shuttle SRB tech.

Ew, I’m not sure I like that. The SRBs were a shortcut from liquid-propelled boosters in the first place, to save money. Sounds to me like we might as well go back to putting an old-fashioned capsule on a booster.

You know, I recall there was an effort there to reuse capsules for a while. If I remember right, a Blue Gemini (the military version) flew, returned to earth and was refurbished, then flew again without incident. It was an unmanned test, but why couldn’t we have a CEV that’s refurbished with a new heat shield between launches? And use LOX to launch it for Pete’s sake!

No, you got me there, how silly of me. She did however write all of The Beatles’s songs.

“One of my grandmothers had her hair piled up half a meter (not unlike Marge Simpson, even down to the colour!) and she used hairspray by the bucket load. I never saw any hair or foam fall off her head (there must have been foam in there, it couldn’t all have been hair, could it?).”

Your grandmother probably never travelled at 17,000 miles per hour.

Not very likely. The Shuttle provides a couple of important features for crew servicing of the HST besides just the crew. First, it has that nifty payload bay that allows carrying the large (phone booth sized) boxes that are replaced inside the HST. Second, it provides a work platform that anchors the HST to the vehicle with crew and those large boxes. Then there’s that handy robotic arm (RMS) that allows the crew to move said large boxes of electronics around and in and out of the HST without breaking them or the crew. (Yeah, everything’s “weightless”, but they aren’t massless, so inertia still bites). There’s also a large pile of tools necessary for the crew to do any decent work. Those tools are cumbersome to strap on to the crew themselves and then try to crawl around. The RMS has a work platform that can be attached that can carry and store extra tools.

And also, the Soyuz docking system is worthless for HST, because HST doesn’t have a docking system. The Shuttle captures HST using the robotic grapple fixture and then attaches it to the HST work platform in the Payload Bay so the two stay together. Conceivably, a docking system could be designed and built to allow Soyuz to mount to the HST, but it currently doesn’t exist. And once you get there, you don’t have (1) the Payloads to replace the ORUs in HST, so there’s no point servicing it if you don’t have the parts to fix it; and (2) The robotic arm to help move those parts and crew members around, so it’s nearly impossible to do the servicing.

Gp Said:
>was wondering, before they actually discovered the foams falling of thing, it did fall of for all the other missions right? so did they like ignore it or what?

Foam shedding has been a consistent problem with the External Tank. They’ve noted the problem, called “popcorning”, before. The foam installation process can create small pockets or voids, which allow pressure build up from temperature and pressure changes, which puts enough stress in the foam to cause it to break and have pieces fall off. The shuttle was designed to withstand a certain amount of damage to the tiles precisely because they didn’t think they could eliminate all possible sources of damage. However, the foam shedding was unexpected and they never really solved it. They sort of monitored the problem and assumed that as long as the shedding was in a certain range, it would be okay. Columbia showed their assumptions weren’t valid and allowing the ongoing problem without understanding the true cause wasn’t a good practice because they hadn’t quantified the possible damage amount, only the list of what had happened so far. So it wasn’t entirely ignoring it, but it wasn’t fully addressing the problem, either.

Gp Said:
>and and….why is soyuz doing much much better after a few hundreds launches?

Soyuz is a completely expended vehicle – 1 time use. Each Soyuz capsule is built from scratch, like the old Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo vehicles.

Leon Said:
>This talk about Shuttle/Soyuz/CEV brings to mind something I’ve been wondering–do we know what this CEV is supposed to be(come)? Will it be an Apollo-like capsule, a reusable shuttle-type vehicle (maybe a piggybacked spaceplane with a shuttlecock like SpaceShipOne, my favorite idea), or something else altogether?

The new CEV was decided to be a combination of Shuttle and Apollo type technology. The spacecraft itself will be an expendable crew vehicle sort of like an up-scale Apollo command capsule – seats up to six I think. It uses the ablative heat shield, not the shuttle tile. The launch vehicle will consist of a solid rocket booster built off Shuttle SRB tech.

We can build just as good a capsule as the Soyuz capsule. A capsule on a booster is not technology on the edge of feasibility.

And let’s not forget, the Russians are working on developing a space vehicle to replace Soyuz–so they’re not entirely satisfied with it themselves.

This talk about Shuttle/Soyuz/CEV brings to mind something I’ve been wondering–do we know what this CEV is supposed to be(come)? Will it be an Apollo-like capsule, a reusable shuttle-type vehicle (maybe a piggybacked spaceplane with a shuttlecock like SpaceShipOne, my favorite idea), or something else altogether?

We can build just as good a capsule as the Soyuz capsule. A capsule on a booster is not technology on the edge of feasibility.

But, I probably agree that this technology is just too costly, unreliable and uncapable unough that it should be scrapped.