/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8676915
SLS is a huge waste of money. Human spaceflight is a huge waste of money. On a per mass basis, unmanned probes return more science.

>>8676920

So humans should never leave Earth then?

>>8676920
>SLS is a huge waste of money
You could have stopped there.

70 ton payload for $2 billion is disgraceful

>>8676936
Does each unit cost 2 billion or is it only development costs so far?

SLS is the cheapest rocket NASA has ever developed.
SpaceX rockets are unsafe.
(NASA is currently investigating whether to delay their commercial crew contract until they can prove that they can launch without exploding)

>>8677084
Do you believe there will be more than one unit?

>>8676915
Manned spacecraft on totally untried launch vehicle? I see no possible downside.

>Solid rockets on a manned vehicle.

Oh for fuck's sake...

>>8677089
>SpaceX rockets are unsafe. (NASA is currently investigating whether to delay their commercial crew contract until they can prove that they can launch without exploding)

>But will launch men on their own rocket's first test flight?

IT JUST DON'T ADD UP!!!

>>8677091
You are avoiding the question, which makes me believe you had some sort of agenda and my question somehow wrecks it. I was only asking because I don't know. I also don't know the answer to your question.

I'm only into SpaceX stuff.

>>8677110
There's plenty of proof that spacex rockets explode frequently.

The US scrapped its space program because making war brings more short-time profits. Nobody is interested in your opinions anymore. China and Japan are now in charge of space technology.

>>8677092
Can't even test fire it because of the solid rocket boosters

>>8677132
SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
And 1 ground handling vehicle loss due to bad design decisions, plus doing new stuff to improve state of the art rocketry

>>8677153
>SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
lol

>>8677157
SpaceX rockets
are
safe

>>8677153
>SpaceX had 1 rocket launch failure due to sabotage
Emotionally tempting, factually wrong. They discovered that carbon composite overwrap and solid oxygen will explode when pressed together. It was an unknown unknown as far as failure modes go, but like so many others, seems obvious in hindsight.

>>8677177
ok

>>8677186
A strut failure resulting in a pressure vessel failure resulting in a stage collapse failure was a novel failure mode. The innovation tax is a bitch in rocket science, and the CRS-7 LOV wasn't a failure mode that could have been reasonably foreseen.

>>8677202
>a novel failure mode

>>8677186
sabotaged
payload would have survived if the regulatory jews allowed them to have the escape system enabled. If manned, the people in it would have lived.

>>8677181
that was a ground handling incident during testing, in retrospect carbon should not be in contact with oxygen.

>>8677220
Recommended article -
http://thespacereview.com/article/3170/1

And if you think SpaceX is bad...
> On December 6, 2010, a new version of the Proton booster lifted off from Baikonur; the rocket was an 8K82M DM-03. The new DM-03 version of the upper stage incorporated additional propellant tankage designed to allow longer burns. All the booster’s systems apparently worked properly, but the vehicle failed to attain orbit.
>The reason for the Proton failure was that the larger DM-03 tanks had been filled with propellants as if was the smaller version. In other words, they did not carefully measure the amount of propellants being pumped into the stage but instead just filled it up, leading to a stage that was much heavier than it should have been for that mission. Even that probably would have been okay if the trajectory had been shaped to make use of the additional propellant properly. If the Proton had flown a lofted trajectory, such as typically is done with the Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, then with aerodynamic drag and gravity losses reduced at the higher altitude the DM-03 could have done a longer burn up where it would have done some good. But the trajectory was not shaped to match the available upper stage propellant and thus, while everything ran just fine, the payload did not attain orbit.

>>8677092

>solids on manned vehicle

What's the problem? I don't see how there's much difference between exploding solid or liquid rocket as far as the crew stuck on top is concerned.

>>8677251
>What's the problem? I don't see how there's much difference between exploding solid or liquid rocket as far as the crew stuck on top is concerned.

When a liquid fuel vehicle explodes, it usually scatters the vapors over a wide area without ignition, as was seen with SpaceX's CRS-7 failure and the loss of Challenger in STS-51L. Solid fuel chunks will just keep burning and burning. It's generally expected that any solid fuel failure will fill a three mile wide area with enough burning material to catastrophically damage any parachute system that would save the lives of the astronauts.

>>8677132
Not germane to the point I was trying to make -- that requiring a system be proved safe before putting a crew in it is a damn fine idea, and exempting your own vehicle from that requirement is a recipe for disaster.

It's a road NASA seems to need to go down every so often, and relearn that "go feer" is not something that can be tolerated in space flight. The results are Apollo 1 and Challenger, and then they have some period of operating according to rational safety guidelines.

>>8677251
In addition to the point raised by the guy that already replied to you, some folks like an engine that can be shut down in an emergency

>>8676924
yes unless they pay out of their own pockets for the sake of tourism

>>8677225
>in retrospect carbon should not be in contact with oxygen.

Basic chemistry is a novel failure mode.

>>8677268
>we should be allowed to kill people because reasons
Why is it only aerospace shitters who say this?

>>8677280
Basic chemistry isn't basic when there doesn't seem to be an ignition source. A unique combination of high pressure helium, sub-chilled liquid oxygen, and a composite overwrap pressure vessel with aluminum liner to find this particular failure mode.

>>8677278
Alternatively you should be put on an operating table and have your organs harvested and sold to help fund spaceflight.

>>8677280
Basic chemistry isn't basic when there isn't an obvious source of ignition. It required sub-chilled liquid oxygen that was close to freezing, an un-coated composite overwrap pressure vessel with aluminum liner, and high pressure helium to find this failure mode.

You can always count on spacex nutters to shit up every thread.

>>8677322
yea ok better to talk about this paper nasa rocket that won't fly for at least 3 years

>>8677352
Flight hardware is being built and the design is finalized, and Exporation Mission 1 is scheduled for September 2018.

>>8677289
Car manufacturers are also pretty big on the concept

>>8677289
drug companies kill hundreds of thousands without people even noticing

>>8677141

t. weebshit

>>8676920
>waste of money
So we lose some paper big deal, the fact we got humans to space is the important thing

>>8677352
SLS will fly before falcon heavy.

>>8677411
the falcon heavy will fly this year

>>8676920
A small group of people could achieve more on mars than a 100 rovers could.

>>8677089
>SpaceX rockets are unsafe.
They aren't. They upgrade and test new technology all the time, iirc the new high pressure helium tank was what caused the explosion.

He'll just have the fall back on older proven technology when launching humans.

>>8677181
>carbon composite overwrap and solid oxygen will explode when pressed together
Sorry? I thought it was because the composite overwrap allowed oxygen bubbles to form under it causing weak points in the high pressure tank.

>>8677498
Not on a per mass basis. If we launch the equivalent tonnage in unmanned probes we'd get more science done.

>>8677511
No, he's gonna make a whole new rocket that has another liner on the outside of the COPV tank, so that liquid oxygen isn't in contact with carbon

>>8677523
Yes ofc they'll explore new options. But for manned flight they'll most likely fall back on more flight tested technology before using it.

A PR disaster after killing astronauts is different than blowing up a 200mil satellite.

>>8677517
>Sorry? I thought it was because the composite overwrap allowed oxygen bubbles to form under it causing weak points in the high pressure tank.

The later analysis was that the aluminum liner shrank at a different rate from the COPV, creating voids which oxygen could make their way into. The oxygen then froze in the liner, potentially damaging the over wrap, but also a place where the increasing tank pressure during helium loading would squeeze the frozen oxygen. The carbon overwrap provided combustible material for the oxygen to react with, and rapid, unscheduled disassembly ensued.

>>8677521
But, to be fair, lunar surface sample return was much more successful with Apollo manned missions than all the probe attempts at the time.

There are advantages to a brain and some eyes on site, especially once your probe is far enough away to make real-time control from Urth impossible.

>>8677552
>rapid, unscheduled disassembly ensued.

An anomaly has happened...
BRFB...

You get such lovely euphemisms in rocketry.

>>8677470
Nope.

>>8677553
>>8677553
>>>8677521 (You)
>But, to be fair, lunar surface sample return was much more successful with Apollo manned missions than all the probe attempts at the time.
At the time, but not anymore.
>far enough away to make real-time control from Urth impossible.
Why do you need real time control for picking up rocks?

>>8677553
Apollo consumed a ridiculous amount of money.

Apollo cost $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars. That's 168 billion in current dollars. How many robots could we send to the moon for that money? What kinds of advancements in robotics would we develop in the process?

>going to Mars for science
This has been a meme since the Viking missions. There is no life (nor was there ever) there, there was once water there, the atmosphere is thin and there's no magnetic field.
Missions to Mars are excuses to lay excess grant money down, and to use government money to create jobs that look like they're useful.

>>8678063
Science helps us better understand our place in the universe.

Sure, Mars may not have life, but why does it not have life?

>>8678063
I see a member working on the science team of the landing site committee for Mars 2020, and let me tell you, there is still a shitload of science to be had.

Maybe not current life, maybe not even past life, but Mars is still geologically very interesting.

A boring example, but its unique regime of seasonally changing atmospheric density and grain size has produced unique dune formations that have never been predicted before.

>>8678069
>Science helps us better understand our place in the universe.
lmao what are you trying to say with this hippie shit?

>>8678043
>At the time, but not anymore

Manned missions: 2,415 samples weighing 380.96 kilograms (839.87 lb)

Unmanned missions: 3 samples returned with 326 grams (11.5 oz)

To date... Let me know when you guys catch up...

>Why do you need real time control for picking up rocks?

Watch how fucking carefully the guys running the probes have to be before moving their craft a few feet, very slowly. Contrast with footage of astronauts bounding around on the Moon. rooster-tailing their go-carts, looking at something and deciding at once whether it is worth sampling...

>>8678060
>How many robots could you send for that money?

Turns out, not that many. Sending probes does not create the excitement that enabled Apollo to be funded at that level.

>>8677084
They've probably spent over $20 billion in development costs so far, including what they spent under the "Constellation" program name.

They've been spending over $1.5 billion/year average since the program was started, and it's going to go up as they get closer to actually launching. I don't think it has any hope of getting down near $2 billion per launch. One estimate pushed early on was that it would cost $40 billion up to the fourth flight, which wouldn't happen until the mid-late 2020s (then, rather than being ready for routine flights, they'd need some redesign work, because they'll be out of leftover shuttle engines, and will have to manufacture new ones, which can't be the exact same because mumble mumble). $10 billion per flight is likely as good as it'll get.

Work on the shuttle successor has been underway since the mid-00s, but they still haven't static-fired more than three SSMEs together. Back during the shuttle program, they initially developed the SSMEs planning only to test-fire them singly, and assume three would work together on launch day. Later they admitted the necessity of testing them together, and when they first put three together, in the configuration that would actually be used on the shuttle, they shook each other apart, and the engineers had to go back to the drawing board.

They're just making excuses to push back the launch date by a few more years. There aren't many young people working on this. It's mostly old guys who know they'll be retiring any day now. They just want to putter around, keep collecting paychecks, and not get blamed for any catastrophes. It's better for most of them to just not launch, especially considering how likely it is that this cobble-job will blow up.

>>8678111
>the excitement that enabled Apollo to be funded at that level.
Apollo wasn't all that popular until they actually started landing on the moon.

It probably would have been cancelled if JFK hadn't been shot little more than a year after his big speech about it. He never liked the idea, or thought it was worth the money. His speech was just propaganda against the claim that Soviet communism was going to advance mankind faster than American capitalism.

>>8678221
OK, now show e a probe program that created that kind of national commitment, for any reason at all.

>>8678228
It wasn't the fact that it was a manned program, it was the fact that it was a rocket competition between nuclear superpowers, a kind of war substitute.

ICBMs were brand new, immature technology. Nobody, least of all the public, knew how a rocket war would play out. Would our missiles shoot down their missiles? Could we blow up their missile bunkers before they even launched?

A decisive demonstration of technological superiority could end a war before it even started. The side that believed it would lose a rocket war would be demoralized.

Besides that, was the sympathy of the scientists. If communism was perceived to be better for science than capitalism, the talent would likely flow toward the East.

Remember that the announcement of the Apollo Program followed and referenced the launch of Mariner II, which was coasting toward Venus and later achieved the first successful probe of another planet.
>Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were "made in the United States of America" and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
>The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the 40-yard lines.

JFK's point was to express confidence in the superiority of American technology. He actually hoped to back out of the crazy bullshit about a (perhaps technically feasible, but uneconomical and pointless overkill) moon landing later, once things calmed down, or even make it a longer-term joint mission with the USSR.

>>8678221
What the hell are they teaching you in school, sonny? I lived through that period. We were excited and pumped for the Moonshot. The whole freakin' country was united in its support.

It wasn't until we landed about four or five times in relatively quick succession that the liberals in particular started whining about "but money for the poor," and XVIII and above were canceled.

Reminder that the shuttle was crewed on it's first orbital flight.

>>8678348
And they got away with it. It didn't kill crews until later.

Getting away with a stupid idea one time is not a good justification for trying again.

>>8676915
It would be nearly impossible to cancel the first flight at this point and there's a very real possibility that there won't be a second. Putting a crew on the first rocket is a good PR move. especially if they keep the current flight plan. If NASA wants to avoid another reset on it's shuttle replacement and heavy lift vehicle plans they need every chance they can get get to make the program look good.

>>8678348
The white paint on pictures of the first shuttle always annoys me. It looks so wrong to someone who grew up only ever seeing the unpainted orange tanks.

>>8678378
it looks badass
>you are now aware that Columbia would still be in one piece if all of her tanks were painted like that

>>8677261
Solids are also A hell of alot more powerful, a liquid engine will be a more smooth flight while solids will make you feel like your about to go through the flight panel

>>8678380
I'm not saying the paint doesn't look great. It's just that the unpainted orange tank became so iconic.

>>8678376
>Putting a crew on the first rocket is a good PR move
Unless BOOM!

Then not so much.

The issue is that chance of BOOM! is higher on an untested rocket being launched for the first time.

>>8678407
The chance of boom is higher on the first flight, but I think the risk is worth the reward.

>>8678380
>>you are now aware that Columbia would still be in one piece if all of her tanks were painted like that
Yup. They stopped giving the foam a protective coating. That's the foam upwind of the brittle carbon-carbon shuttle wing leading edges during hypersonic flight. Things regularly happened like owls burrowing into the foam to make a nest.

"What are the odds that'll cause a problem? Like, one in a hundred? We're only doing four flights this year. It probably won't come up for decades!"

>>8678111
The public quickly got bored. So much so that the last several missions were cancelled and the public's disregard for it was even mocked in Superman II.

>>8678362
Well SLS has a launch escape system unlike the shuttle, so even in the case of catastrophic failure the crew should survive.

Plus Orion itself has already flown once on the Delta IV Heavy, and the RS-25 and RL-10 engines they're using have been flying for decades. Even the solid boosters are just an extended version of the boosters used with the shuttle.

>>8678584
>Even the solid boosters are just an extended version of the boosters used with the shuttle.
For all the advances you'd think there *should* be, I still chuckle (or did, when they went) at the Shuttle launches. Ever notice all the sparks shooting out of the side towers under the engine nozzles? The best analogy is... a lighted match. Yes, that's ignition!

>>8678584
>Orion itself has already flown once on the Delta IV Heavy
Some Orion hardware has already flown. It had only a passing resemblance to something fit to carry crew in.

>SLS has a launch escape system unlike the shuttle, so even in the case of catastrophic failure the crew should survive.
If the boosters blow up, chunks of burning solid fuel are likely to burn through the parachutes, causing the crew to fall to their deaths. This concern was one of the reasons Ares I was cancelled.

As for launch escape systems, only one of those has ever been used successfully (to save two flight crew). Another one started a fire on the pad, destroyed the rocket, and killed three ground crew. For all the expense put into this supposed safety system, they've been net negative in terms of human life. Both of these cases were on Soviet rockets.

The launch escape rocket has never been activated on an American manned flight or caused a loss of life, but the US had a similar experience, with one useful activation (Mercury-Atlas 3 -- it saved a capsule with "robot astronaut" during a launch failure) and one counterproductive activation (Mercury-Redstone 1 -- the launch escape system fired and left the capsule behind to activate its parachutes while still attached to the rocket).

>>8678653
All of this applies to spacex rockets + a higher failure rate

>>8678104
The technology has improved since then. It no longer make sense to send people.

The russians were able to accomplish their sample return missions with a fraction of the computing power we have today.

>> very slowly
rovers do not need to be fast. We can take our time and have all the best scientists on earth decide whether a rock should be brought home. However, we have the technology to make them fast, we had the technology to make them fast 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPG0hzoKIto

The Russian lunokhod was actually driven further than the lunar roving vehicle.

>>8678669
>a higher failure rate
Than what?

First of all, SpaceX hasn't had any man-rated flights yet. They've been doing a lot of semi-experimental flights, tweaking the vehicle and pad operations, with a certain amount of accepted risk because progress is important as they reach for reusability, improved performance, and lower-cost pad operations. A manned flight would be as conservative as it gets. Secondly, they've had one launch failure. That's not a rate. That's one failure. And it was one that would easily have been survivable by the capsule crew without depending on the launch abort system.

(And no, the more recent blow-up wasn't a launch failure, it was a loss of vehicle during preflight testing, the point of which is to catch problems before an actual flight. It's nothing to be proud of, but it's not a launch failure and was not something that could happen on a manned launch.)

>>8676915
>Robert Lightfoot
That's a fucking fake name and we all know it

>>8678707
>man-rated flights
what a meme
you really think extra inspections would have prevented either failure (it certainly wouldn't have prevented amos6 which would have been a guaranteed crew fatality incident)

>>8678707
>they've had one launch failure

>>8678632
Those sparks are there to burn off excess hydrogen that gets pushed out of the engines during the ignition process. They have nothing to do with actually starting the engine.

Watch any Delta IV Heavy launch and you'll see the giant fireball scorch the boosters just before it lifts off. With the shuttle they were more careful about the excess hydrogen, since it carries crew and the orbiter itself is somewhat delicate.

>>8677157
I really dont get people who think this was a thing. And the only reason i've heard of why this thing was "sabotaged" was either "jews" or ULA-memes

>>8677298
Is this how China does it?

2016:
>nasa doesn't do anything bold or risky anymore! they're getting left in the dust and have been stagnant for decades!
2017:
>WTF??? how could nasa take a risk like that? Those are people's lives at stake!
Reminder that Elon literally said that his ship would probably kill hundreds of the early travelers and everyone was A-OK with it.

>>8678221
The whole fucking country was walking around with Mercury and Gemini boners, Apollo was just the endgame. As soon as 11 landed it went downhill, with a slight peak at 13's "issues".

Why do you still come to /sci/ when better alternatives exist?

>>8678718
amos6 was a test fire, so no crew would have been in it
and if the crew HAD been in it, the dragon capsule would have easily carried them away

>>8678864
I've asked myself this so, so many times. Maybe i just like the constant FE, MoonHoax, Fuck/Kill/Marry Musk, Global WarmingHoax, MemeDrive and other similar threads that we have 15 of each day?

Why I enjoy punishing myself like this, i just dont know.

>>8678866
>the dragon capsule would have easily carried them away
baseless speculation

>>8678844
A bird flew between the camera and the rocket just before it exploded.
Some idiots latched onto the idea that the bird was actually a missile because it moved so fast. Not realizing the camera was like a mile away and zoomed in on the rocket, making the bird in the foreground appear to move quickly.

>>8678871
why say so?

>>8678882
>prove my unsubstantiated claim wrong please

>>8678888
well within the capabilities of the dragon to carry them away at 6 g's

>>8678718
>it certainly wouldn't have prevented amos6
That was caused by experimentation with new tanking procedures, and the loss of payload was caused by preflight testing (days before the planned launch) with the payload loaded, both of which absolutely wouldn't have been done on a manned flight.

You still don't get how experimental Falcon 9 is. It's a development platform for flyback reusability. They are constantly changing things and pushing hard for economy.

Any manned launch will not be experimental. It will be a proven configuration.

>would have been a guaranteed crew fatality incident
This is just you being a chimp. Even if there had been a manned capsule, it wouldn't have been seriously damaged until it fell to the ground. There was plenty of time for the launch escape system to kick in even if it had to be manually triggered, and the Dragon launch escape system should be considerably more reliable than conventional ones based on solid rockets, since the SuperDraco engines can be tested with a static fire before launch, and are in fact intended for routine use on landing.

They're going to extensively test Crew Dragon capsules hovering and landing on the same system used to rocket away from an exploding Falcon 9.

The crew would have 90+% survival probability in case of a failure on the pad. Probably 99+%.

>>8679554
>>8678898
...and here is what happens to Dragon 2 if anything goes seriously wrong with the Falcon 9 it's sitting on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcHD9AmkxA0

It gets out of town in a big hurry.

Failure on the pad is one of the worst scenarios, but there's also enough thrust for it to outrun Falcon 9 at any point during its launch, if there's some loss-of-control failure which prevents a main propulsion shutdown.

Here's the same system during a test of its hover capability, showing the fine control built into it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Pm8ZY0XJI

This isn't a "light it and pray" single-use, emergency-only solid-fuel system like the one that'll be on Orion. These will be liquid-fueled engines that have been individually tested, static fired as an installed set, and refuelled for the flight, designed to be used on every flight and brought to such a level of reliability that they can be used for landing.

>>8677112
I want redditers to get the FUCK out

>>8678069
Jesus the pseudoscience bullshit is unreal in this thread

>>8679591
>>8679554
the second stage failed .03 seconds after the composite vessel

even if dragon detected the explosion immediately the engines would not have gotten up to thrust in time to make an escape

>The crew would have 90+% survival probability in case of a failure on the pad. Probably 99+%.
complete asspull numbers

>high crash rates are ok because we have airbags

>>8679604
>>it wouldn't have been seriously damaged until it fell to the ground
>even if dragon detected the explosion immediately the engines would not have gotten up to thrust in time to make an escape
Stupid monkey.

There are explosions, and there are explosions. This was a soft explosion, a "fast fire". There was a small detonation breaching a pressure tank, a rapid release of pressurized inert gas spreading fuel and oxidizer into the surrounding air, and then rapid burning of both. It made a big, dramatic fireball, but there wasn't a big sharp shockwave, lots of dense shrapnel, or a focused jet of metal.

The conditions in that fireball would be less severe than the conditions during re-entry. That wouldn't threaten Dragon's immediate survival. The danger is for it to sit around in the fire for too long or for it to fall to the ground.

Launch escape systems are designed primarily for this kind of situation: to blast away from an exploding rocket. They "get up to thrust" almost instantly (pressure-fed hypergolic engines: starting them up is only a matter of opening valves, simpler than flicking a cigarette lighter on). Watch this:
https://twitter.com/StateMachines/status/771535425328459780

If you had done even five minutes of reading before taking a position, you'd know this.

>>8679648
>rapid burning of both
I mean, both burning of the fuel with the surrounding air, and the fuel with the oxidizer.

>>8678653
>LES doesn't work
>because examples of soviet incompetence say so

No.
I'm starting to understand the hate for Musk. It's not hate directed at him per se - but at the lobotomized autistic cult around him.

>>8679684
>soviet incompetence
>challenger, columbia, apollo 1
Soviets/Russians lost 4 cosmonauts, out of 139 people put in orbit. Americans lost 17 astronauts out of 171 put in orbit. (of course, ground crew deaths paint a very different picture thanks largely to two major Soviet disasters)

And as I pointed out, the Americans had similar experience to the Soviets with launch escape: one useful activation, one counterproductive activation. No American LES has ever saved an astronaut life.

The problem isn't that LES doesn't work (although in this specific case it's rather doubtful that it would prove effective on a rocket with shuttle SRBs, if they spray their burning solid fuel everywhere --- this is one of the reasons LES for the shuttle crew cabin was rejected: the SRBs were capable of destroying parachutes in a wide radius in likely failure modes, so it would be necessary to glide some distance before bailing out, at which point ordinary parachutes should suffice), it's that it introduces additional failure modes and handling hazards.

>>8679784
If the shuttle had been built with a LES & a reentry capsule, those 2 shuttle crews would have survived

and those stats would be very different

>>8678426
I don't know, man. The risk is "NASA is a bunch of incompetent assholes who killed some guys on the first fucking launch, defund now."

However high you think l the potential benefit is -- and if there is unlikely to be a second flight anyway, I'm not sure I see the potential being very high, the risk is the Death Penalty of the program.

>>8678447
Sure -- they quickly got bored. But the level of interest generated was higher than unmanned landings at the same time.

>>8678653
>If the boosters blow up, chunks of burning solid fuel are likely to burn through the parachutes, causing the crew to fall to their deaths.

Why the fuck are they so wedded to solid boosters on manned flights? Serious question, it makes no sense to me, but presumably the guys designing these things are not total morons and have some reasons.

>one counterproductive activation (Mercury-Redstone 1 -- the launch escape system fired and left the capsule behind to activate its parachutes while still attached to the rocket).

Not sure that was counter-productive -- it had no worse impact than not having the tower there at all. I'd call that one neutral. And at least the tower did what it was supposed to, given the data fed to its control system.

By the way, just got done reading Chris Krafts book -- when he writes about the Gemini escape system, that's some scary fucking shit. When your escape system is such that an astronaut trained to pull the lever and GTFO decides to wait it out and hope the malfunction does not lead to an explosion, that is telling.

>>8678692
>The russians were able to accomplish their sample return missions with a fraction of the computing power we have today.

Yep, with about as much material as Armstrong would have had to pour out of his boot, had he been at the beach instead of on the moon -- a tiny fragment of what was returned by Apollo.

>>8678804
>the orbiter itself is somewhat delicate.

Yeah, it was covered in fine china held on with Elmers,

>>8678847
Perhaps an acceptable compromise would be "bold" but not "risky." There is always risk in anything, particularly in space flight. Taking stupid, unnecessary risks is not required to be bold and have an actual mission.

>>8678847
You don't get anywhere by just sending people on a joy ride about the moon

>>8676920
>>8676924

this
it's only because of muh humanism

we should focus on unmanned and work on improving the efficiency of information transfer (it's quite slow due to distance, we could likely improve it with alternate encoding and transfer techniques) and increasing the independence of our probes and such. In reality it's likely humans will never be a real space-faring species, we will eventually just combine into our technology and loose our humanity, our animalistic body and mind. Even when we do it's unlikely we will actually be traveling around in spacecrafts. It compounds so many complications both blatant and subtle, making space faring 1000x more complicated and challenging. There is no reason to bother, it's a restrictive mindset.

>>8678104
To be fair their isn't any desire to return large samples from the moon considering we know what is there now because of Apollo. Most of the missions have been about moon water.

>>8679784
>No American LES has ever saved an astronaut life.

To be fair, none have been asked to. Our only launch-related fatalities occurred on a vehicle with no fucking capability for the crew to escape. Which still makes me angry.

>SRBs were capable of destroying parachutes in a wide radius
That seems a stronger argument against SRBs than against LES.

Problem with NASA is their under siege mentality. Pic related is Linda Ham, the mission director of the doomed Columbia mission. Instead of being held responsible for her part in the disaster, NASA applauded her and put her in charge of the Constellation program. She should be rotting in jail for at least involuntary manslaughter. But NASA can't admit mistakes and covers up for their own.

>>8679867
I think we'd have still lost the second crew, they would still be dealing with reentry issues in a now-probably-tumbling craft surrounded by a field of flaming debris..

>>8679922
Certainly you don;t get far if you stop there and don't follow up.

>>8679932
If the launch escape capsule was like a Dragon and capable of reentry
Woulda been fine
Then they could just leave the shuttle up there to maybe repair at a later point

>>8679867
>If the shuttle had been built with a LES & a reentry capsule, those 2 shuttle crews would have survived
...and the two cosmonaut death incidents could have been prevented with much smaller changes.

...and complicating the shuttle further might have led to deaths in other ways.

Actually it's by no means certain that the Challenger crew would have been saved by a LES. First of all, this isn't the kind of situation that a LES as such is needed for. It's an abort high in the air, and a LES is mainly to get you up to an altitude where you can deploy parachutes. Secondly, there is the problem of burning solid fuel.

Adding a LES and separate reentry capsule would have been a really major design change. A lot of weight and cost to add, and quite impractical to test. Even if you can imagine that such a program would have been pursued, you can't guess what the results would have been.

It's important to remember that the shuttle was developed by experienced men from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo manned spaceflight programs, whereas SLS/Orion is being developed by a generation that only has experience with sustaining the space shuttle program. Similarly, the Russians have only sustained Soyuz. Regardless of the accumulation of knowledge, individual experience matters. Regardless of the history of "NASA", the people working on SLS/Orion are not at all the sort of people who developed the shuttle. Right now, the only people with orbital capsule development experience informed by actual flight of hardware are at SpaceX, because at least someone at NASA had the common sense to call for a program of cargo capsules as a stepping stone to a reliable crew capsule.

>>8679899
I mean it had to survive re-entry and be (sort of) reusable, so it was probably a good idea to avoid scorching the entire thing.

The Delta IV Heavy boosters are expendable, so they don't care if they get a little toasty.

>>8679931
Columbia was doomed from the get go. The only chance they had was in-situ repair of the wing or launching another shuttle to rescue them, both of which were a big stretch. If anyone is to blame it's the engineers that decided the foam strikes from previous launches weren't a big deal.

>>8679886
>Why the fuck are they so wedded to solid boosters on manned flights?
Thiokol/ATK/Orbital-ATK had/has friends in high places. It's a big missile company. Makes rocket motors (among other things) for all kinds of military missiles. Naturally, as a major military contractor, they have a powerful lobby in Washington.

NASA wanted pressure-fed liquid boosters. They rated Thiokol's proposed solid boosters as the worst of four bids tendered. There was direct interference from the president's office, which set up a new evaluation committee to go back and declare the SRBs the best option.

It's not called the "Senate Launch System" for nothing.

>>8679894
I don't think you get the point. Technology has improved, we don't need humans to pick up rocks anymore. Because we don't need humans to pick up rocks and don't need to send our robot home, we can send more rocks back.

>>8679957
You're assuming that the escape capsule would have survived vehicle breakup undamaged. I don't think that's a valid assumption. Keep in mind that the shuttle didn't really "burn up" in the atmosphere during reentry. Columbia broke up due to the extreme aerodynamic forces you get when hypersonic aircraft tumbles out of control as the Columbia did when her hydraulics failed.

>>8680063
>The only chance they had was in-situ repair of the wing or launching another shuttle to rescue them, both of which were a big stretch.
There were other possibilities, like a resupply until a shuttle could rescue them (they had EVA capability, so it wasn't necessary for a supply ship to be able to dock). Or even a resupply with simple re-entry gear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
(the lighter the load relative to the area, the less heat shielding you need -- they could have assembled a much less polished version of the MOOSE concept, which was a rapid-deployment system, inside the shuttle, and they could even have used the shuttle for the de-orbit burn before quickly deploying in their makeshift return vehicles)

They'd have had to throw together something in a hurry, but that was done with Apollo 13. There were things they could have tried. Instead, they turned their faces away from evidence that there was a problem, hoped for the best, and made excuses when it all went predictably bad.

The way they handled it was a royal fuck-up. NASA is not a reality-based organization, it's a political/bureaucratic one. They had a woman as mission director because competence, focus, and holding up under pressure weren't as important as signalling progressive values.

>>8680151
Annoying thing is that NASA actually has some competent women working for them but they're engineers who hate politics. The women who do rise through the ranks tend to be the ones who are good at administrative politics and whose incompetence gives them motivation to not stay in any given role very long. Which leads to women like Ham pushing their way to levels where they can cause great harm. It's incredible how many men at NASA stepped forward to make excuses for Ham after she got an orbiter full of astronauts killed. Makes you wonder what was their motivation.

>>8680246
>NASA actually has some competent women working for them
Sure, there are plenty of ways women can make a contribution.

However, when you look at important leadership positions in major undertakings, a woman is almost never the right choice. The higher the level of competence you go to, the smaller the proportion of women you find, so when you look to a position that's supposed to by held by someone of the very highest competence, and you find a woman, it almost always means that something has gone badly wrong.

A shuttle mission director was in charge of a billion+ dollar undertaking, with a several-billion-dollar downside if things went badly. On top of that, it's a highly technical undertaking, and one that may call for staying up all night to make life-or-death decisions. I doubt there's ever been such a case where the best candidate available was a woman.

>>8680282
NASA's projects are really high stakes which is why it makes so little sense to use it as a testing ground for every sociological experiment that a given administration wants to push. Hopefully this will change but I'm not optimistic.

>>8679922
>You don't get anywhere by just sending people on a joy ride about the moon

how to spot a retard 55

>>8680246
>Annoying thing is that NASA actually has some competent women working for them but they're engineers who hate politics.
This is bad how ?
politics is just masturbating

>>8676915
Okay so seriously what do we need to do to revolutionize our space flight? New propulsion systems, a switch to an alternative energy source, can't we just not launch straight into space and instead make a slow ascent into the atmosphere? Who says we have to break straight through? Better heat shields? Better battery cores so we can make these things cheaper in the log run?

As far off as the solution may be, I want to know: what is it?

>pic related this entire thread

>>8680484
>Okay so seriously what do we need to do to revolutionize our space flight?
Just stop fucking awful go-nowhere programs like SLS/Orion, just recreating capabilities established in the 60s.

SpaceX is reaching for what we'd need. So is Blue Origin. It would be good to have more companies working on the same problems, and it would be good to get more problems out of their way, like a designated launch lane that's always kept open or "traverse at own risk" rather than it being a big fuss to schedule a launch.

There are many small advances needed to bring space travel into the cost range range of air travel, no large ones. We just need efficiently reusable versions of what we already have in single-use form.

>>8678048
imagine if we kept spending .7% of GDP on the space program.

>>8680772
Presumably it would just be about four times as bloated and wasteful.

Spending isn't the problem, cost-efficiency is the problem. The shuttle program, for instance, was turned into a pork program, so nobody cared when this "reusable" vehicle cost several times more to fly than the expendable vehicles they had when they started, and they carried on launching it for decades. The ISS is a colossal waste of money.

Cost to develop SLS/Orion (re-invention of capabilities from half a century ago in inferior form, with an overweight capsule and underpowered launch vehicle not capable of going anywhere interesting) and do a minimal test program of four launches was estimated early on at $40 billion and fifteen years. And they're not on track to do that well.

Cost to develop ITS (unprecedented capabilities combined with a multiple-order-of-magnitude cost reduction suitable to make colonization of another planet possible) is estimated at $10 billion and six years.

That's the difference between trying to have a big budget project and promotions all around vs. trying to make money count.

>>8680756
Any more examples. As unlikely as it'd seems I really want to choose a field early on to study so in my lifetime I can help facilitate space travel. I want to live to experience commerce on Mars and Mercury. Hell if we get there I see no reason why we wouldn't just go all the way with the technology worked out. What's going on with the other side of the equation, where are we on terraforming technology/methods?

Legit I plan to keep healthy to live longer and cut vidya and TV and other distractions so I can properly dedicate my life to helping solve these problems. I want to get out there.

>>8681039
I'm not a big believer in terraforming. I think it'll be practical sooner, and give much faster results, to dome over huge areas of land (or in the case of Venus, build huge carbon blimp island habitats with solar-powered robots).

>>8680947
>Cost to develop ITS (unprecedented capabilities combined with a multiple-order-of-magnitude cost reduction suitable to make colonization of another planet possible) is estimated at $10 billion and six years.

>>8681119
Are you laughing at it like it's not going to happen? It's entirely possible (even likely) that it will slip in schedule and go over budget, but that's true of the far more expensive, far less ambitious SLS/Orion as well.

ITS: single type of modern engine designed from a clean sheet for efficient, largely automated production in today's industrial context
SLS: propulsion based on 3 very different, slavish reproductions of 1960s and 1970s technology requiring special small-batch supply lines and personnel training for obsolete materials and obscure labor-intensive processes, designed by people now all dead or retired, passed to people lacking creative experience

ITS: flyback booster, based on recent experience successfully developing this technology and lessons learned on what should be done to enhance value of recovered
SLS: disposable boosters, based on a 1970s reusable design so bad it just wasn't worth reusing, designed by people now all dead or retired, passed to people lacking creative experience

ITS: upper stage like a smaller flyback booster with an ablative/self-healing heat shield based both on the flyback booster experience and ongoing experience of developing a propulsive-landing orbital capsule
SLS: disposable main stage, adapted from a 1970s reusable design so bad it just wasn't worth reusing, designed by people now all dead or retired, passed to people lacking creative experience

ITS: in-orbit refuelling for Earth-departure, taking advantage of reusability to keep costs down while providing mind-boggling oversized payloads to anywhere any payload has previously gone, and potential for ISRU refuelling for return voyages, based on recent experience in rendezvous
SLS: disposable Earth-departure third stage based on 1960s technology, lacking the power of the original or the capability and cost-effectiveness for any interesting missions, the original designed by people now all dead or retired, passed to people lacking creative experience

>>8679923
It's slow because of the speed of light. Idiot

>>8681119
Reminder: Saturn V was taken from concept to reality in 5 years, with no previous experience on that scale and 1960s technology.

It cost a lot to develop because everything was done by hand and testing had to be done with real physical articles. The engines were all hand-stitched together by highly-skilled welders, after the parts were cast and finished by hand or cut from stock by machinists. Today you can iterate your design by simulating it on a bank of cheap graphics cards and then put powdered metal in a 3d printer and have it produce the equivalent to a high-precision thousand-part structure in a few hours while a bored tech keeps an eye on it.

>>8679784
>Soviets/Russians lost 4 cosmonauts,

that we know of. the ussr had a bad habit of covering up anything negative like that, even for mundane things.

>ITS test article fails during first cryogenic testing
wtf I love SLS now

>>8681237
>Saturn V was taken from concept to reality in 5 years
nope
the overall concept and key components (the engines and others) were in development even before the US launched their first human into space

>>8681678
>>Saturn V was taken from concept to reality in 5 years
>nope
>the overall concept and key components (the engines and others) were in development even before
Not a correction. Finalized concept to reality was 5 years. It does take time to develop a concept.

When it was publicly announced, ITS was about at the level that Saturn V was in 1962, if not further along. It also had years of work put in prior to settling on a final rough design. They already had prototypes of a composite tank and an engine (which had been in development at least since 2009).

>>8681675
>What is testing to failure?
We'll see if this was intentional or not. They're going to have to make several of these (and larger ones) per year after all. They can't treat the prototypes as too precious. In any case, it's hardly a disaster to find problems at this stage.

>>8681705
>Finalized concept
no such thing
Raptor has been in development since 2011 (and probably earlier)

You're the only one here advocating for the canceling of rockets, by the way.

>>8681713
>>Finalized concept
>no such thing
Fucking chimp. If you can't understand what is meant on your own, ask.

In 1962, NASA finalized the Saturn V concept by committing to build a three-stage vehicle powered by five F-1s at lift-off and J-2s on the upper stages. In 2016, SpaceX finalized the ITS concept by committing to build a fully-reusable, propulsive-landing two-stage vehicle with composite tanks, self-pressurizing LOX/CH4, large (specific) numbers of Raptor engines on both stages, and a variety of integrated-spacecraft variants of the upper stage.

>>They already had prototypes of a composite tank and an engine (which had been in development at least since 2009).
>Raptor has been in development since 2011 (and probably earlier)
What point do you think you're making?

>You're the only one
Oh great, another mentally ill person who thinks he can see who Anonymous is.

>advocating for the canceling of rockets
SLS isn't a rocket. It's vast misappropriation of taxpayer funds with the construction of a rocket as pretense.

>>8681834
F-1 development started in 1955
First Saturn V flight was November 1967
Your claim that "Saturn V was taken from concept to reality in 5 years" is simply false, and even if it weren't, NASA is far more risk-averse today than they were the 60s, which alone is enough to explain development times for the SLS (final concept in 2011, first flight in 2018.)

>What point do you think you're making?
ITS will take at least 10 years to develop (more likely 15 or more years considering Spacex's propecency for delays.)

>Oh great, another mentally ill person who thinks he can see who Anonymous is.
It's easy enough to tell who is who by reading tone of writing, autist.

>SLS isn't a rocket.
???

>misappropriation
Giving money to congressmens' districts to create jobs for engineers in 10+ different states is a more valid reason than any single reason to give SpaceX even a single cent for doing anything.
If you don't like the federal government funding SLS then why are you ok with commercial crew or COTS (which objectively accomplish nothing other than giving Spacex free development money)

>Fucking chimp
>>>/pol/
>>>/r/eddit

>>8681925
>F-1 development started in 1955
>First Saturn V flight was November 1967
RL10 development started in the 1950s
First SLS flight is... ?

Saturn V wasn't more than a concept when it was announced in 1962. It was taken from concept to reality in five years. I don't know how you fail so badly to understand this, or why you're so insistent on arguing about what I meant by what I said rather than addressing the underlying point

>propecency
You really are a chimp.

>why are you ok with commercial crew or COTS (which objectively accomplish nothing other than giving Spacex free development money)
Ah, the false symmetry gambit: if you're as dismissive of the thing I'm supporting, as I am of the thing you're supporting, the reasoning doesn't matter and we're on equal footing, right?

COTS and Commercial Crew are *service* contracts, and they have to put up with a tremendous amount of NASA interference to get the development portion of the funds (there have been long delays of Dragon 2 development because NASA has to review and sign off on things, and NASA is taking months to do them, when they had said they'd only take weeks).

They've taken 8 loads of cargo to and from the ISS, providing the only capability NASA has for return of prolonged microgravity experiments from orbit for study on Earth. There's no option where NASA gets these services for less money than they're paying SpaceX, so don't try and claim this is some kind of big giveaway.

Anyway, even if "giving SpaceX free development money" was what was happening, they'd be using it to develop cost-effective military and scientific launch options to offer to the US government, whereas SLS is developing an option too expensive to be useful. In the worst interpretation and most pessimistic appraisal of their future, SpaceX comes out looking like the EELV program, which is a better use of tax money than SLS by orders of magnitude.

>>8681989
>RL10 development started in the 1950s
>First SLS flight is... ?
engines are critical items on the SLS schedule

>Saturn V wasn't more than a concept when it was announced in 1962. It was taken from concept to reality in five years.
You have to be dumb as a rock to keep arguing this point.
>hurrr absolutely zero work was done on saturn v hardware before 1962

>You really are a chimp.
ad hominem
Go back to your reddit hugbox.

>Ah, the false symmetry gambit
Not false symmetry when your argument is "cancel SLS and give the money to spacex instead"

>NASA interference
Are you retarded?
The only interference the programs have gotten is from congress. Congress funds these programs; NASA has zero say in the matter.

>(there have been long delays of Dragon 2 development because NASA has to review and sign off on things, and NASA is taking months to do them, when they had said they'd only take weeks)
Literally what? You have a source for this bullshit?

>They've taken 8 loads of cargo to and from the ISS
and blown 1 up

> There's no option where NASA gets these services for less money than they're paying SpaceX There's no option where NASA gets these services for less money than they're paying SpaceX
Soyuz/Progress is actually cheaper at $65 mil a flight vs $120 for Spacex

>even if "giving SpaceX free development money" was what was happening
It is; see commercial crew program worth several billion.

>whereas SLS is developing an option too expensive to be useful
What metrics are you defining that by? SLS is cheaper than the shuttle (and has 3 or 4.5 times the capability). Are you saying the shuttle did nothing useful?

>SpaceX comes out looking like the EELV program
Not with that accident rate it doesn't. I'm surprised the DoD hasn't stripped them of their defense payload rights considering their constantly changing rocket design and accident rate.

ITS is not a launch option for payloads.
It has no payload capability version planned, only cargo space.

>>8682015
engines are not* critical items on the SLS schedule

>>8682015
>The only interference the programs have gotten is from congress. Congress funds these programs; NASA has zero say in the matter.
NASA set the detailed terms of, evaluated, and selected the bids, oversees everything, and decides when milestones are met and the rewards are paid out.

>>(there have been long delays of Dragon 2 development because NASA has to review and sign off on things, and NASA is taking months to do them, when they had said they'd only take weeks)
>Literally what? You have a source for this bullshit?
Stop pretending to be informed, you god-damned chimp.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/nasa-inspector-commercial-crew-likely-wont-fly-until-late-2018/
>"We found significant delays in NASA’s evaluation and approval of these hazard reports and related requests for variances from NASA requirements that increase the risk costly redesign work may be required late in development, which could further delay certification," Martin reported. "The contractors told us reviews can take as long as six months. We also found NASA does not monitor the overall timeliness of its safety review process."

The problem was noted in internal audits years ago (page v):
https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY13/IG-14-001.pdf

Imagine you're working on one of these projects, and you need NASA's input to proceed, and they take half a year to get back to you. There's nothing you can do but have your schedule pushed back half a year.

>>8682042
>arstechnica.com
Not surprising that a retarded conspiracy theorist would read that rag.

Nevertheless
>"We found significant delays in NASA’s evaluation and approval of these hazard reports and related requests for variances from NASA requirements that increase the risk costly redesign work may be required late in development"
Nothing about this implies that delays have or are guaranteed to happen.
Eric "everybody except spacex is wrong" Berger strikes again.

>Imagine you're working on one of these projects, and you need NASA's input to proceed, and they take half a year to get back to you. There's nothing you can do but have your schedule pushed back half a year.
Imagine you're NASA waiting on spacex to finish the craft that was supposed to be ready in 2015 but they keep redesigning the rocket every 3 months and on top of that blow it up annually.

>>8682060
>>"We found significant delays in NASA’s evaluation and approval
>Nothing about this implies that delays have or are guaranteed to happen.
Go be a chimp somewhere else.

>>>Literally what? You have a source for this bullshit?
>Imagine you're NASA [and it's not entirely your fault alone]
If you were still stupid and ignorant but at least had the grace to face up to it when you're proven wrong, I wouldn't call you a chimp, but you choose to behave like an animal unfit to live among humans.

>>8682073
>Go be a chimp somewhere else.
Not an argument.

>>8682073
>If you were still stupid and ignorant but at least had the grace to face up to it when you're proven wrong, I wouldn't call you a chimp, but you choose to behave like an animal unfit to live among humans.
Not an argument.

>>8678847

Every action you take you will meet opposition. The only solution for that is to take no action whatsoever, leaving others to take it for you.

Crewed SLS. Risky. I like it.

>>8682438
How about you take sane risks and don't put a crew on the very first firing of a cobbled together shitfest of a rocket

>>8682444
see
>>8678847
>Elon literally said that his ship would probably kill hundreds of the early travelers and everyone was A-OK with it.

>>8682444

Risks are taken all the time. And it's definitely not a shitfest of a rocket.

>>8682481
First of all, he didn't say "probably", he admitted it was a real risk.

Secondly, he didn't say hundreds. He was talking especially about the possibility of a crew loss on early Mars missions, which would be loaded with perhaps a dozen highly-risk-tolerant crew, not about routine voyage where they feel comfortable packing it with colonists.

Most importantly, that's for the first people travelling to Mars, after all reasonable precautions have been taken (including sending the same type of vehicle without crew). That's for doing something grand and significant which is inherently dangerous with "unknown unknowns" because nobody has done it before.

SLS is a fucking rocket to nowhere. They're going to recreate an Apollo mid-project development flight from half a century ago, on a rocket that's not suitable to recreate an actual moon landing, let alone do something new and worthwhile.

With Apollo, they tested the capsule suborbitally twice, then beyond LEO twice before putting crew onboard, then they tested it with crew in LEO with a rocket that had been used four times before, then they finally sent a crew beyond LEO for the first time, on a rocket that had been used twice before.

Apollo was taking some pretty wild risks, trying to win a space race with the Soviets and meet a deadline presented as a defense of the American way of life against accusations of scientific and technological inferiority to communism, and they were still being far more cautious and responsible than this proposed SLS crewed first mission plan which would be done for no particular reason.

>>8682646
>it's ok when spacex does it

>>8682503
>it's definitely not a shitfest of a rocket.
Only the finest 1970s technology for our boys, arbitrarily rearranged and modified by a bunch of guys with no practical experience developing a new system (or seriously altering an old one).

You know, after six years of the SLS program and several more years under the name "Constellation" (because remember, the SLS is a product of a failure by the same people to produce the rockets that were actually wanted, and they begged and whined to their friends in Congress for them to do something so they could keep their jobs even though they couldn't do them), they still haven't tested four shuttle main engines together. When they first tested three together, they shook each other apart with their vibrations, and when they first used them on a real flight with the side boosters, there was again unexpected and serious damage.

Now they're using more of them together, with upgraded solid boosters that will go on firing into higher altitudes, higher speeds, and lower air pressures. What will happen? We'll find out when (if) they try it.

"A shitfest of a rocket" is a pretty fair description.

>>8682737
SpaceX is never going to "do it". When they send a crew into orbit, it'll be after the experience of a dozen capsule flights in the same line, and at least one unmanned flight of the exact configuration, on a launch vehicle with dozens of flights. And they'll do it to LEO, where an emergency return to the Earth surface can be accomplished in minutes, not days.

When they send a crew to Mars, it will be after a similar program of LEO flights and unmanned testing.

This is pointless idiotic recklessness.

>>8679957
>Then they could just leave the shuttle up there to maybe repair at a later point

That would be possible IF they knew about the problem before reentry. They did not.

After which, >>8680110 what he said.

>>8678653
>>8677261
>Exploding SRBs take out LES parachutes
Thanks, hadn't heard this before.

>>8680038
>Secondly, there is the problem of burning solid fuel.

In this case, no, the SFBs continued to fly on away on their own, they were not destroyed when the ship fell apart.

>Adding a LES and separate reentry capsule would have been a really major design change.

Mu memory is, you have that backwards. Initial concepts called for some escape system,. but it got Proxmired out in budget cuts.

>>8681566
>that we know of. the ussr had a bad habit of covering up anything negative like that, even for mundane things.

Sure, but since the fall of the USSR, we know a lot more about their program.

They lost 4.

There were a few instances where some guy on the radio listening though he heard snatches of broken radio signals that indicated a ship in trouble. In my favorite, he heard the poor Cosmonaut trapped in his ship as the orbiting craft got into trouble and shot away from the Earth and into deep space. I will leave it as an exercise for the student to deduce why that evidence is not trustworthy.

>>8682864
>That would be possible IF they knew about the problem before reentry. They did not.
If they had a backup plan for if the heat shield was damaged, they'd have checked it before deciding to re-enter normally.

The fact that they had no backup plan was specifically raised as a justification for not inspecting for possible damage.

>>8682873
>the SFBs continued to fly on away on their own, they were not destroyed when the ship fell apart.
They still had to be destroyed. Can't let them fly out of the range and maybe hit a ship or something.

They had hard rules about that. If it went out of control and veered off course, they'd have blown it up with the remote-control explosives even with the crew onboard. It's bad for the astronauts to die, but they chose accept the risk. It's much worse to kill innocents outside of the range.

>SpaceX will land people on mars within a deca-
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/832684512630829056

>>8682042
>>Literally what? You have a source for this bullshit?Stop pretending to be informed, you god-damned chimp.

But do you have a source for your claim?

>>8683321
Did you read the links provided? About NASA going far over their budgeted time for reviews and responses?

>>8683341
>budgeted time
Read it again; it's "estimated time" not "budgeted time."

>>8683355
You're splitting hairs. It doesn't matter what word they use to describe it, it matters that they're repeatedly making SpaceX stop and wait much longer than they were told they'd have to wait for necessary input when they were figuring out the timeline, and that therefore much of the schedule slippage results from NASA's poor performance, not SpaceX's.

And if you look back, the original point was that to get NASA's funding, they had to accept a lot of interference in their development process, a big injection of NASA's inefficiency and politics. NASA's raising the bar for crew safety much, much higher for the commercial crew contractors than the standards they've ever achieved or those they hold Russia to. I mean, look at this idiocy with talking about putting crew on the first test flight of SLS and the first complete Orion spacecraft when it's going to be out there for a week with no way to turn it around any sooner. It's absolute hypocrisy.

So is this the same chimp or another chimp?

>>8683385
>You're splitting hairs.

>>8683396
>lol i was only pretending to be retarded, this is actually my masterful trolling technique