/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6448952]

Why all the hate for this rocket? When it's finished it should be the greatest rocket ever built

[Anonymous No.6448983]

>>6448952

we dont need it and cannot afford it

[Anonymous No.6448993]

>When it's finished it should be slightly better than what we had in the 60s... and by then, that will be 60 years ago.

[Anonymous No.6449010]

all launch systems are chronically underused, money for payloads is tight

>hey, lets make yet another rocket!

[Anonymous No.6449020]

>>6448952
Not cost effective. Design was mandated by congress, it is just pork for space states. It's a jobs program not a technology program. The next president will un fund it anyhow.

[Anonymous No.6449035]

>>6448952

>russian engines

a shiggy diggy doodly doo

[Anonymous No.6449040]

>>6449035
Nope.

[Anonymous No.6449055]

>>6448952
>Shuttle contractors didn't bother looking for new opportunities before the ship was retired
>Nevermind their poor planning, let's fund their retirement program

[Anonymous No.6449057]

Even NASA's former No 2 recently said it was a waste of money without a mission:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2014/01/02/garver-nasa-should-cancel-sls-and-mars-2020/

[Anonymous No.6449272]

For the same reason the Spruce Goose was fucking retarded and the DC-3 is what revolutionized air travel.

Bigness is not the appropriate objective to pursue in and of itself, else you would be riding a monster truck to pick up groceries and drive to work. While cool it would also be dumb. Especially dumb if you spent your housing money to buy it and the grocery money to fuel it. That's SLS.

[deleted No.6449291]

>>6449272
That analogy is very thin indeed simply because it was only 20 years later that the age of the wide body aircraft began with the 747 which revolutionised air transport not just air travel.

Bigness is needed from time to time and it's not like small launchers have disappeared.

You're argument is retarded.

[Anonymous No.6449330]

>>6449035
You've got the wrong rockets in mind. SLS uses Shuttle derived engines, the Atlas V and Antares use Russian engines.

[Anonymous No.6449337]

>>6449020
>>6449057
these. The only reason we made the Saturn V was for its mission, manned mission to the moon (to save face from the Russkies beating us to every other space goal). Why are we making SLS? Not to go anywhere in particular.

I am far more excited by SpaceX's ambitions, step by step improvements that have a vision behind them: lower launch costs so that Mars missions are feasible.

[Anonymous No.6449364]

>>6449291

SLS isn't building off of market growth that smaller launchers paved the way for, like the 747. It is uncompetitive for roles that those smaller launches handle now; its very existence is a case where uncompetitive industry was given special preference for reasons of continuing graft. Spruce Goose is an example where the converse to the gigantism mania of SLS huggers is true: bigger can be a failure in a context. Obviously as a SLS critic I think this is the case with SLS, and that it is not the 747 of space, but rather the Spruce Goose.

[deleted No.6449383]

>>6449364
It's the US manned space launch system, it has no competitors, there is no market. It's a crude analogy.

[Anonymous No.6449418]

>>6449383

Then to answer OP, I think the space program has more important mandates to serve than satisfying your belligerent patriotic nationalism that is a false facade sold to types like you for giving uncompeted billions to locked in space shuttle contractors, indefinitely. Wave your flag and feel like a strong man, buddy, you're too dumb to know your space future has been sold out from under you and you cheer for that.

[Anonymous No.6449438]

>>6449337
>I am far more excited by SpaceX's ambitions, step by step improvements that have a vision behind them: lower launch costs so that Mars missions are feasible.
Are you seriously implying this wasn't the long-term goal of the space program from the start? Advertising: it really works.

[Anonymous No.6449446]

When the whole thing is built where is it going? where is the money coming in order to built the things that goes on top of it?

[Anonymous No.6449455]

>>6449418
You couldn't be more wrong. I'm not a nationalist, I'm not even from the states. I think manned space flight wastes resources that could be better spend on space science.

But please continue with this idea that anyone who disagrees with your stupid reasoning when better arguments exist is a flag waving moron. That'll really convince people you have a valid case.

Don't be quite so retarded in future. Ad Hom is not an escape route from discussion.

[Anonymous No.6449468]

>>6448952
1) It's completely unnecessary. The Orion capsule can be adapted to the Falcon or Atlas

2) It's ridiculously expensive

3) It's ridiculously behind schedule

4) #2 and #3 are partly due to the reason that the rocket is being built by the same contractors who fucked up Ares.

[Anonymous No.6449483]

>>6449291

The analogy is not thin. You're just displeased as a closet SLS hugger that it hits too close to home as a big rocket fanatic and throw out baseless slander whenever you come across arguments that rub the wrong way to your beliefs.

During WW2 the DC-3 and the C-47 based upon it saw extensive use that helped win the war, and the Spruce Goose was an expensive pointless diversion that had no impact, even though it was the greatest aircraft built at the time. The OP only stated that SLS's very greatness be the reason for support for it. The Spruce Goose is an example where greatness has nothing to do with anything and as something that should not be supported on greatness alone. The 747 later becoming viable does not then make the Spruce Goose any less of a pipsqueak where it counted compared to the DC-3.. Your rebuttal was weaksauce.

[Anonymous No.6449497]

>>6449035
I wish.

[Anonymous No.6449501]

>>6449272
>Bigness is not the appropriate objective to pursue in and of itself
That's what Ares I was for, yet it seems to get even more hate that Ares V/SLS every time it gets brought up.

[Anonymous No.6449601]

>>6449501
>That's what Ares I was for, yet it seems to get even more hate that Ares V/SLS every time it gets brought up.
Maybe because after half a decade and tens of billions of dollars we didn't even have a fucking working prototype of the rocket

[Anonymous No.6449621]

>>6449501
Ares I was a joke. There was no sense at all in using the shuttle SRB as a first stage. That was pure pork for ATK Thiokol.

The Commercial Crew Program is the sensible approach to producing a crew vehicle.

[Anonymous No.6449934]

>>6449621
>Saturn I was a joke. There was no sense at all in using a cluster of Jupiters and Redstones as a first stage. That was pure pork for Chrysler.

[Anonymous No.6451033]

NASA should be buying rides from the commercial launch industry for its exploration program. This will stimulate the growth and evolution of that industry, and help its myriad customers that include current and future commercial use, military use and other civil space segments like the space science program and ISS. Building SLS instead funnels all that potential and advancement into a make work scheme whose benefits are confined to fielding and maintaining a giant expensive rocket that has little use or demand, but simply exists to exist. This is bad for exploration too because already commercial launch is proving cost superior and SLS is only curtailing the extent of the exploration to a few receding hyped stunts. SLS is Lose-Lose, except for those who it lines their pockets, and for those who are greedy heavy lift fanatics and cultish space program groupies.

[Anonymous No.6451241]

>>6451033
I'm sure that's exactly what NASA would like to be doing, but unfortunately Congress isn't giving them a choice.

[Anonymous No.6451297]

Because NASA need to work on the Anvil V5X (N) interplanetary landing and return system. I submitted the design a few weeks ago but they've stopped returning my calls despite extensive advanced simulations. The Delta-V stats are inaccurate because they don't account for the docking port between the interplanetary nuclear bus and the lander. The lander itself has a Delta-V of almost 2km/s (enough to land on Mars with atmospheric braking and parachutes then return to orbit for an Earth return rendezvous) while the nuclear bus with the lander atop weighs in at almost 6km/s of Delta-V.

They're a bunch of philistines who won't take anyone who doesn't have former Nazi associations seriously (I've enquired, neo-Nazi isn't sufficient, they regard us as posers who joined after it was cool). They also suffer from a health and safety obsession, when I was in communication, they deemed my 'just dump the used reactor on Russia' approach as irresponsible.

[Anonymous No.6451301]

>>6449035
What's wrong with Russian engines? They have done well in the past.

[Anonymous No.6451312]

>>6451301
Russia leads the field in external combustion fuelled rockets.

[Anonymous No.6451319]

>>6451312
I was joking. Russia's N1 rocket was №1 in exploding.
>they never resolved combustion instability for large engines

[Anonymous No.6451326]

>>6451319
Is ok, cosmonaut is cheap and plentiful.

[Anonymous No.6451329]

>>6451326

[Anonymous No.6451336]

>>6451297
It was that attitude that killed Project Orion & Project Pluto. They have no sense of adventure. We are stuck with "it's too heavy, we need to cut more out" when we could have had "it's too light, give it marble bathtubs".

[Anonymous No.6451339]

>>6449934
there is a lot of truth to that! The Saturn I was in some sense hastily cobbled together from known working parts. Because it was a Space RACE, and they needed it right away.

[Anonymous No.6451351]

>>6451326
excuse me? which space program killed 17 astronauts? Hint: not Russia's.

[Anonymous No.6451353]

>>6451351
Russia's space program couldn't kill any astronauts because they used cosmonauts.

[Anonymous No.6451354]

>>6451319
They had it figured out for Energia-Buran.

Besides, the N1 launch failures were because of drastic corner cutting, rushing to catch up with the Saturn V program (which had started years earlier), and a Russian engineering philosophy of testing rocket components by flying them.

The first N1 test launch came *after* Saturn V had already put men in orbit around the moon, and only months before Saturn V put a man on the moon. They were in a huge rush.

The N1 program was cancelled after the Saturn V was. They had worked most of the bugs out of the system at this point, but there was little will to continue with a moonshot program trailing far behind the Americans.

Furthermore, when N1 was new, huge rockets lofting huge nuclear bombs were seen as relevant. When it was cancelled, moderately-sized rockets launching MIRV swarms of small, efficient bombs were recognized to be superior.

The mothballed final-version NK-33 engines from the N1 program have proven themselves on Orbital's Antares launch vehicle.

[Anonymous No.6451369]

>>6451336
One of the designers of Orion wanted to put an antique barbers chair in the craft as a final fuck you to the mass budgeters.

[Anonymous No.6451372]

>>6451353
>"American space programme kill 17 astronauts, Soviet space programme kill none. Now, gentlemen, excuse me while I go to cosmonaut funeral"

[Anonymous No.6451376]

>>6451351
"The death of 17 astronauts is a tragedy. The death of 17 cosmonauts is pre-launch preparations"
-Stalin

[Anonymous No.6451377]

>>6451369
I have a new hero, now I must find his name.

[Anonymous No.6451382]

>>6451369
...which kind of shows how fantastical their thinking was.

>After decades of committee analysis, debate, and redesign, the Project Orion spacecraft in the form which was actually delivered was no longer capable of surviving the nuclear blasts originally intended to propel it to orbit, and had to be equipped with a large, multistaged chemical rocket.

[Anonymous No.6451383]

>>6451377
Ted Taylor.

[Anonymous No.6451384]

>>6448952
>spend all the money on a transport
>no money left for stuff to transport
Ever since the Apollo program, NASA has been told by Congress to develop technology that follows the original plan of following up the Moon landing with equally ambitious missions including a mission to Mars but NASA has never been given the budget to actually follow the plan and thus ends up building space shuttles for an LEO infrastructure that doesn't exist and giant rockets with no missions that actually make use of it.

[Anonymous No.6451390]

>>6451384
I blame the ever increasing cost of chimps, in my day, you could buy a 20 pack of chimps and still have change from your dollar, these days you spend over 20 dollars for a 10 pack and it comes with a stupid Surgeon General warning on it. Not to mention that the use of chimps has been banned in bars and even outside in part of New York and other liberal cities.

[Anonymous No.6451392]

>2014
>still investing good money after bad in dead-end chemical rockets

[Anonymous No.6451407]

>>6451392
alternative? I can't think of anything else that has gone to orbit, or even off the ground.

[Anonymous No.6451408]

>>6451392
Project Orion is a bad idea. Colonizing space by irradiating Earth is putting the cart before the horse.

[Anonymous No.6451412]

>>6451408
Colonizing space by irradiating Earth is killing two birds with one stone: it's both means and motivation.

[Anonymous No.6451413]

>>6451408
Not to mention that using nuclear propulsion (reactor, bomb or otherwise) is a terrible waste because getting into orbit and atmospheric flight is when they're at their least efficient.

[Anonymous No.6451448]

>>6451413
That assumes that you're not interacting productively with the atmosphere.

A nuclear jet engine of some kind could be very efficient at accelerating to hypersonic speeds in the atmosphere, gaining the momentum needed to coast into space and thus serving as a highly cost-effective reusable first stage.

A flyback booster loaded with something cheap like water or argon could serve as a cost-effective, efficient, high-thrust second stage, getting the high-performance third stage up to the speed where it's efficient.

[Anonymous No.6451452]

>>6451413
It's shortcomings aside, it's reassuring to know that if push came to shove humans would be able to put a LOT of mass into orbit and beyond.

[Anonymous No.6451502]

>>6451448
While an open cycle nuclear jet engine is highly efficient it would struggle to achieve the kind of thrust to weight ratio you need from a first stage. Still, some sort of giant space plane might be feasible.

[Anonymous No.6451524]

>>6451502
A spaceplane doesn't need a thrust-to-weight ratio exceeding one, and a nuclear jet engine doesn't need to carry any propellant (though it would need to carry some coolant or have large radiators if it's popping out of the atmosphere, since you can't just shut a nuclear reactor down all at once).

>open cycle
u wot m8?

[Anonymous No.6451554]

>>6451502
>>6451524
Isn't the entire point of Project Orion to get a relative mountain of mass into orbit? Making it more efficient by sacrificing it's primary benefit is counterproductive.

[Anonymous No.6451565]

>>6451554
Building a launch system that cleanly and efficiently takes loads up day after day would be a much bigger step forward than attempting to launch one overbuilt megarocket which is too dirty, dangerous, and expensive to repeat.

[Anonymous No.6451668]

>>6451448
>>6451502
>>6451524

I'm confused what you guys are talking about when you say "nuclear jet engine." Are you talking about accelerating fission products electrically? A jet engine implies you are combusting fuel and oxygen which doesn't make any sense in the context of a nuclear engine.

[Anonymous No.6451687]

>>6451668
>A jet engine implies you are combusting fuel and oxygen
Why would it? "Jet" doesn't mean "combustion".

The commonly observed distinction between "jet" and "rocket" is that a rocket has no air intake. "Jet" includes turbofans, turbojets, ramjets, scramjets, and various hybrids of these concepts. Admittedly, the line can get fuzzy when one talks about air-augmented rockets and air turborockets.

A nuclear jet engine would be one which produces thrust by heating compressed intake air.

[Anonymous No.6451935]

>>6451565
We already have rockets for that task. They don't even slightly irradiate the atmosphere with nuclear space planes. Just imagine if it crashed.

Project Orion was meant to carry payloads, just itself, which was massive. Once in orbit it would never enter an atmosphere again. It would spend most of its time exploding its way across the outer solar system in mere weeks.

[Anonymous No.6452247]

>>6451372
Like Russia would report death of cosmonauts.
Phantom cosmonaut is one of the more believable conspiracies.
>Soviet space programme kill none.
Rest In Peace
Vladimir Komarov
Georgi Dobrovolski
Viktor Patsayev
Vladislav Volkov
Valentin Bondarenko
Yuri Gagarin
Sergei Vozovikov

[Anonymous No.6452259]

>>6451687
Jets and rockets where originally interchangeable words, like engine and motor still are. JATO jet assisted tack off uses rockets not jets, now they call it RATO but that just sounds gay.

To be more specific about terms a jet has an inlet and that air is accelerated providing thrust. A rocket carries its propellant onboard. There are mixtures of the concepts from skylon which brings atmospheric oxygen into the combustion chamber to ramjets which mix air with exhaust from fuel rich rockets.

[Anonymous No.6452274]

>>6448983
>cannot afford it
>it's funded despite NASA getting just 0.48% of the federal budget

Sure.

[Anonymous No.6452317]

>>6452274
Why don't they just build the Saturn V with modern materials and techniques. I'm sure it would be much cheaper. Instead they endlessly refine shit little triangle carved into a tanks costs millions and gets 3% lighter yeay success we know how to make something that is 3% better and 9536% more expensive.

[Anonymous No.6452334]

>>6451935
>We already have rockets for that task.
No we don't. We have incredibly expensive, delicate rockets of dubious reliability that we use once and throw away.

An airbreathing nuclear spaceplane, even an SSTO, might be far more ruggedly built than a chemical rocket, with under half of its loaded mass consisting of fuel, making it comparable in this way to a commercial aircraft.

Advanced models based on fission fragment reactors or advanced fusion reactors might tank up on cheap, common fluids such as argon or water, rather than costly and dangerous energetic propellant combinations. Because they have potent onboard energy sources for many flights, they might even be capable of refuelling themselves from the air or water, and taking off and landing without any special ground facilities.

If you want a "Millennium Falcon", it's going to have some kind of nuclear power source.

>Just imagine if it crashed.
It would be a small fraction as horrible as Orion if it works correctly.

[Anonymous No.6452340]

>>6452317
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that it wouldn't be able to go to Mars. That's the signal they've sent, anyway.

I agree there's too much pork in NASA's funding, but even with that it's still a good investment overall. If only they realized that a vibrant and ambitious NASA helped their military technology, then it would get the funding it deserves (around 1% of the budget).

[Anonymous No.6452370]

>>6452334
So do it faggot. Just don't expect me to help pay for your pipe dream.

[Anonymous No.6452381]

>>6452317
>Why don't they just build the Saturn V with modern materials and techniques.
The shuttle contractors are a powerful lobbying group.

Also, it has to do with the rhetoric of certain groups who have been pushing for a return to beyond-Earth-orbit glory. When the space shuttle was NASA's main launch vehicle (which was for a ridiculously long time, considering how cost-ineffective it was), people kept pointing out, "We don't even have to make anything new: just stick a set of shuttle main engines on a simple shuttle-sized payload fairing, and use the same solid rocket boosters, and it'll carry way more payload into orbit than the shuttle. You won't get the main engines back, but their cost is small compared to the Orbiter and all its maintenance. We should be able to throw this together in a couple of months and have a heavy-lift vehicle whenever we want."

Of course, this ignores some important realities of rocket design, testing, and construction, not to mention just how bad things are at NASA, in terms of management and congress meddling.

But it was persuasive, and they essentially went with the idea of reshuffling shuttle components to make an expendable rocket. Of course, they couldn't do it quickly or efficiently. They had to redesign everything. And they had to make it man-rated, instead of just having it for launching things like unoccupied interplanetary vessel components which can be assembled in space, and using a medium-lift rocket to lift the crew for missions.

The meaning of using shuttle components has been totally lost.

[Anonymous No.6452445]

>>6452381
A little back-of-the-envelope math strongly suggests that just by replacing the shuttle orbiter with a minimal fairing and engine mount should give you a payload capacity of about 80-90 tons to LEO.

So, it's pretty annoying that such an unmanned cargo launch vehicle wasn't a ready option for less than the cost of a shuttle flight when the shuttle was retired.