Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT December 1-5, 2014 (2845-2849)

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ZoeB:
Did anyone else watch the entire Orion flight on NASA TV?
I admit that after 3am local, I was a bit on the tired side.

Huge congrats to the team. I have extreme misgivings about the complexity of the re-entry process - so very, very many things that can go wrong - but they got it right first go.

DSL:
I watched it, and was excited. My misgivings stem from the feeling of watching my country basically relearning knowledge and experience that was allowed to molder on a shelf because of various flsvors of politics . A comment that brought me up short was the comment from the Orion engineer/manager who said, "Apollo was before I was born."
And here we are again. I remember what the Shuttle was sold as, and the station was sold as, and seeing both wasted instead as multipurpose and occasionally duplicative efforts. I kept wondering why weren't, by now, testing out a multilayered space program with a deep=space element, a true shuttle for earth-to-orbit and a way station in orbit linking both, so that the tail end of a long and arduous deep space mission doesn't involve trying to thread a fiery needle at insane speed.
I'm sure the more technically savvy people on this forum --the ones who are, in fact, rocket surgeons -- will hasten to tell this here journalism-degree holder why he doesn't have it right, but it's never made sense to me.

BenRG:

--- Quote from: DSL on 06 Dec 2014, 04:47 ---And here we are again. I remember what the Shuttle was sold as, and the station was sold as, and seeing both wasted instead as multipurpose and occasionally duplicative efforts. I kept wondering why weren't, by now, testing out a multilayered space program with a deep=space element, a true shuttle for earth-to-orbit and a way station in orbit linking both, so that the tail end of a long and arduous deep space mission doesn't involve trying to thread a fiery needle at insane speed.
--- End quote ---

It doesn't have to be, no. However, it is by far the easiest way and the only way so far proven to work in practice.

The problem with Orion is, during the development of the program way back in the early noughties, the leadership of NASA got fixated in recreating Project Apollo only on a physically larger scale. Once this paradigm was accepted, everything had to be Apollo-like. Orion had to look like an Apollo but bigger. The lander, Altair, had to look like the LEM but bigger. This had the consequence of imposing penalties and restrictions on the design that made everything more complex, less innovative and more expensive.

The "We must recreate Apollo but bigger" mindset is still in play. Look at pictures of the proposed launcher, SLS. They're going to paint it to look like the Saturn-V. The only apparent reason for doing so appears to be that they want it to look like a Saturn V.

DSL:
I hold on to the hope that the various vehicles under private development play some role in the earth-to-orbit link of a multilayered program ... a quick ants relatively cheap way of getting people to space. What we had with the Shuttle was a semi truck that was occasionally uses to run to the corner store.

KOK:

--- Quote from: DSL on 06 Dec 2014, 04:47 ---And here we are again. I remember what the Shuttle was sold as, and the station was sold as, and seeing both wasted instead as multipurpose and occasionally duplicative efforts. I kept wondering why weren't, by now, testing out a multilayered space program with a deep=space element, a true shuttle for earth-to-orbit and a way station in orbit linking both, so that the tail end of a long and arduous deep space mission doesn't involve trying to thread a fiery needle at insane speed.
I'm sure the more technically savvy people on this forum --the ones who are, in fact, rocket surgeons -- will hasten to tell this here journalism-degree holder why he doesn't have it right, but it's never made sense to me.

--- End quote ---

I am no rocket scentist. But slowing down a vehicle from Mars requires either an unrealistic amount of fuel or using the atmosphere. Or, just maybe, something really clever no one has thought of yet.

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