"Where next NASA? Where is the shuttle replacement?" Topic

With our UK's Tim Peake going up to the ISS I was wondering where the next space shuttle will come from. I'm not being political here. When and what is the next generation of non Russian space shuttles?

Is it true that they will launch in 2017?Boeing seem to have the CST-100. Anyone know of what the plan is?

Honesty it'd be better if they gave the money to other space agencies, not many Brits got to ride on the NASA programs.
The cost of the Space Shuttle program almost bankrupted NASA last time and somehow the politics always gets in the way of space exploration which is a pity.

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One step beyond. Can't wait for the launch.

No shuttles, a step backwards to capsules.

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Capsules, but capsules that can go beyond Earth orbit. The shuttle wasn't really built for that.

According to the NASA Fact Sheet for the new Space Launch System, the new rocket is scheduled for delivery in 2018.

Not a space shuttle. Its an expendable rocket similar to the Delta/Atlas/Titan. The new space vehicle looks very similar to the old Apollo capsule.

When I was a little kid, I was convinced that when I grew up, we'd have multi-national cooperation for space craft, because that'd be the only way to service our moon colonies.

Reality is dumb :(

Don't forget this, which has been surprisingly successful. However, it is unmanned only, and the military has dibs on it.

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I'd love to see them scale it up somehow cheaply to be manned, but manned and cheap don't usually go together.

The big future of American Space travel has been privatized-

spacex.com/falcon9

blueorigin.com

Hopefully there'll come a time when servicing orbital infrastructure is a frequent enough task that having something like the shuttle (basically a 'mobile' workstation that can bring resupplies with it) will actually be useful. Arguably it sorta found that use (albeit in a very uneconomical way) in constructing the ISS, and it previewed elements of its capabilities with the Hubble mission.

But until we get to that point capsules are the way to go.

(of course if we actually want to get serious about interplanetary or asteroid missions, let alone asteroid 'mining' or moon colonizing, we will need orbital infrastructure to cut down on launch cost).

> No shuttles, a step backwards to capsules.

Not really, the Shuttle was a bad idea from the start. A spaceship is NOT an airplane.

Russia supposedly has plans for a manned moonbase, by 2030.

"Reality is dumb :("
Ivan your are a funny dude thanks :) but honestly dreams are important in getting the ideas going and yours are good. Yip that idea is very cool.
Cheers from International Moon Base Colony 12 Wargamer society :)

The Space Shuttle was beautiful machine that was also grossly overdesigned and inefficient. We don't need another one of those.

I think NASA is finally doing much of what it should be doing; that is focusing on the really difficult part of space exploration, which is designing and conducting effective exploration interplanetary missions (and interstellar, too). Contracting with commercial space operations to reach orbit of Earth is both sensible and far more cost effective than the old way, depending on the whims of pork barrel politicians. Contracting takes the politics out of "getting there," and frees NASA funds to better use.

As for what we do need, that's actually highly dependent on the question "to do what?" A spacecraft for orbital missions around Earth is entirely different from a spacecraft suitable for interplanetary missions, or a craft intended for suborbital point-to-point Earth "hops." In the long run, we don't need one craft design, we need a fleet of role-specific craft.

I will say the one aspect of the Shuttle that is missing is the Space Lab component. The ISS simply isn't in the right orbit for all the work that needs to be done or could be done. A "lift, lab, and land" work environment might still have some utility. I don't know of anything in the works that could fulfill that purpose, but admittedly I'm not following things as closely as I used to.

If the US cut their military budget by 10 % and spent that money on NASA, imagine what they could have done by now.

I have to agree with Parzival on the shuttle. It was supposed to be a reliable space truck but due to all of the requirements turned into a finicky show piece. A robust reliable capsule design will serve much better in the long run. Look at the success of the Soyuz spacecraft.

It's not money that's the issue; it's politics. NASA has had anough money to do far more than it has done. But in the U.S. government money has to be spent to satisfy the political whims of those in power. It's not enough to want to build a rocket; no, that rocket has to be built in Senator Bigname's state, from parts made in Senator Pigstrip's state, which are designed in Senator Heymetoo's beloved home. And this has to happen whether or not it would cost half as much to do these things in any other state, or in a single state.

Add to that that NASA, like most bureaucracies, is plagued by internal politics, with each department, sub-department and work group all angling for funds for their own use and own preferred project. And then you have the whole "spend it all to justify the increase" mentality that is ripe in every government agency, and you end up with money going down every convenient drain. Really, "throwing money at it" is rarely actually the need; what are really needed are firm deadlines, specific, unchanging goals and objectives, and effective management of it all.

As for the military, much of the true advances in spaceflight are in fact military in origin. But those tend to favor military objectives, which will be largely in the area of suborbital (ballistic) or LEO missions, not really effective for NASA's broader goals and purpose.

Don't expect anything before the mid to late 2020's…

Thanks gents for the info. It has been nice today to see what could be described as "hands across space". The additional interesting bit was the manual docking. Not sure as yet why that happened.

I can see the sense in making near-earth-orbit programs more of a private/commercial-based endeavour. NASA is thinking of the trip to the Moon and Mars. It would be very exciting to see a near-earth-orbit shipyard being made. Hope I live to see it.

Thanks

Too busy with their third priority

Petty much.

Want to discuss this come over to the Blue Fez.

I'm hoping Eagleworks comes through with an emdrive craft.

An emdrive craft would definitely be orbit-to-orbit though (not enough thrust to take off), so surface-to-orbit access would still have to be tackled.

-Will

Sadly, the ultimate reusable Surface-to-orbit craft has a nuclear-thermal rocket: a nuclear reactor heating some kind of reaction mass and blowing it out the back. Problem is that you need to do something about the radiation coming out the back, and you need to address the knee-jerk ZOMGWTF freak-out when the general public hears the word "nuclear". So maybe if that LockMart fusion reactor works we can have a functional SSTO transport with fusion-powered turbines in atmosphere and some variety of thermal rocket out of atmosphere.

All the science that Space Station Freedom was supposed to do can't be done by the International Space Station, because the ISS is in the wrong orbit entirely. But the ISS is in a compromise orbit between Cape Canaveral and Baikonur accessibility.

Yup. The ISS was changed from a science endeavor into a political endeavor by the Clinton Administration. They wanted an international project that included Russia, so they moved the orbit to one easily accessible by the Russian space program, but severely limited as a science platform. Result: Billions wasted.

As for Earth to orbit, I rather like some of the "beamed power" designs. Basically, the ship has a big tank of propellant (like simply water), which is superheated by a ground-based laser or microwave transmitter. Thus, internal power systems need only operate ship's systems, not create thrust.

There's even a design for a beamed system that consists solely of a ground laser and a saucer shaped reflective cone like a ramjet, and no propellant but air. The laser superheats the air inside the cone, the air acts as the propellant, while the craft's movement compresses more air to be heated, and so on. Obviously only good in atmo, but as the initial stage, it's an interesting concept. I can see it could be potentially used to lift a chem or nuke rocket to high atmo and initial high velocity, with the rocket system taking over for the non-atmo flight. The air saucer. Portion could probably even be completely retrievable and fairly quickly reusable; just clean and reset.

I can see the sense in making near-earth-orbit programs more of a private/commercial-based endeavour.

Why would anyone invest money in something that has no return on investment?

There's nothing physical up there that we want at anything like that cost. "Mining" asteroids is a joke -- a tiny bit of Iridium for all that cost?

It's hard enough to fund science on earth, so commercial funding in space is a non-starter (plus there's basically nothing that needs zero-G apart from some pure science stuff like telescopes).

People haven't scaled manned space flight back because they are stupid or short-sighted. They have because it is a money pit with virtually no chance of any big reward that can't be done much more cheaply with robots.

There's no realistic way manned space flight can be commercially successful in the next 100 years. They put a man in space 50 years ago, and we're still strapping them on top of hugely dangerous rockets because we haven't moved a single inch in terms of finding a better way to do it!

Wanting it to be so different won't help. Sometimes new technologies stall for centuries -- most trains still run on rails with engines pulling carriages like they did 250 years ago, and progress in making them better has been very much incremental. And that is for an enterprise that has been profitable from the start.

In the meantime we are flinging unmanned craft all across the Solar System on a regular basis, and you can have a satellite put up for as little as $ 100,000. How would strapping people onto the rockets help any of that?

Well, Space-X just landed their rocket back on the pad, about 11 minutes after it took off, and orbited the Earth once, so that's an option.

Tonight, they claimed this will make getting up to orbit about 100x cheaper. That seems a bit high, but it certainly will be a lot less expensive if they can re-use their rockets for multiple launches.