Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Robert, Joe, et al., We've been down this road before. Even if the folklore (?) about the blueprints being stored in a trailer that burned is true, there is at least one Saturn V left--on display at Johnson Space Center in Houston, possibly yet another in Huntley, Alabama--that could be reverse-engineered. They were marvelous, flawless craft. That we have to go through so many contortions now to justify a probe to Europa is ample testimony that the technology they represented is sorely missed. Blame Nixon--he's the one that cancelled Apollo in favor of the Shuttle, on the dubious claim that they would make great launch vehicles for spy satellites, etc. Maybe they have, but I don't think so. Recall that Apollo was a JFK project, and Nixon was not one of his biggest fans. We all suffer now for the short-sighted views of a single, powerful man. Gary At 10:58 PM 9/5/2003 -0600, you wrote: Robert, The biggest problem is that even if you had the blueprints it still wouldn't work right. The techniques used in manufacturing the Saturn are forever lost. We have newer (and supposedly better) ways of building things. A lot of things have just changed too much. Now with that said, if the Rocketdyne people kept anything about how the engines were built, then we could design a HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) that could lift significantly more than the Saturn did. We now have lightweight and strong composites. Even if the craft were not reusable, at $250 Million a launch the craft would be cheap. Joe L. On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 16:55, Robert J. Bradbury wrote: The recent release of the CAIB report has caused both hearings in Congress as well as lots of speculations, e.g.: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/05/1731237mode=threadtid=134tid=160tid=98tid=99 Obviously if we had inexpensive heavy lift capacity today, the entire debate about what to send to Europa (or Pluto) and when to send it would be very very different. The most interesting comment I found in the above URL: When NASA killed Saturn, they killed more than the vehicle. Rocketyne engineers did an analysis, and the engines on the Saturn 5 were so overengineered that they could have been re-used 13 times each without overhaul before being refurbished! The Saturn 5 system, if built today with modern technology and some basic return features could be built for about 100 million each after initial investment! That's 100 TONS of lift that could be made reusable (imagine putting a giant deoployable para-sail on the beast) and could lift payloads as wide as 30 ft across. Two of these launches could have put the entire ISS as it currently is configured in orbit! Does anyone know if this claim is valid and what the source might be? I have heard that the Saturn 5 blueprints were destroyed -- does anyone know if this claim is valid or an urban legend? If these claims are true, does anyone know who is most directly responsible for the termination of the knowledge of how to build a Saturn 5 -- and whether they are still alive -- because I'd certainly like to contact them and give them a piece of my mind. (A related but slightly different conversation vector is whether or not Russia still has the ability to build the Energia since it is the most recently flown rocket that might be considered to have heavy lift capacity.) Robert == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/ == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/ == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Joe Latrell writes, in response to Robert Bradbury, about the loss of Saturn V design information: ... if the Rocketdyne people kept anything about how the engines were built, then we could design a HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) that could lift significantly more than the Saturn did. We now have lightweight and strong composites. Even if the craft were not reusable, at $250 Million a launch the craft would be cheap. Nothing that costs $250 million can be called "cheap." No matter what, you're still talking about tens of thousands of dollars per pound of payload launched. The typical engineering response to this high launch cost is well-known: adding tens of thousands of dollars per pound of "added value" to payloads on the ground. While I doubt some of the figures cited on this Slashdot thread (despite SlashDot's stratospherically-high reputation as a source of accurate information) accepting the figures at face value still doesn't give you "cheap" launch. Maybe a launcher that cost $250 million in 1969 on a one-shot basis could be made for $100 million now, but making it reliably reusable as a whole system is almost certainly not a simple matter of attaching return parasails to New Improved Saturn Vs, Any approach that does make such a system reusable is going to have its own recurring costs. The Shuttle solid fuel boosters are quasi-reusable, but they really aren't very big -- designed (according to what may be somewhat of an urban legend) to be shippable through railway tunnels if need be. If making "big dumb boosters" reusable were so easy, why haven't the Russians done it already? Why hasn't *anyone* done it already? If there were some factor of 5 or 10 improvement in launch costs with big boosters, available so easily, comsat companies alone (forget about NASA) would have footed the RD bill, long ago, on bank credit willingly extended. In an op-ed on SpaceDaily.com, entitled "Back to the Future," I chimed in about returning to a more ballistic style of launch. It is, after all, hardly an original proposal. However, it never occurred to me that this would involve significant reusability, except perhaps for the return capsules (which appears more practical than I realized.) I'm not against using older, proven techniques. I am against wishful thinking, however -- which is precisely why I wrote that essay. The Shuttle is a collection of wishful thinking concepts flying in close formation. As always, if you want real traction, it helps to have your feet on the ground. -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] Joe L. On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 16:55, Robert J. Bradbury wrote: The recent release of the CAIB report has caused both hearings in Congress as well as lots of speculations, e.g.: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/05/1731237mode=threadtid= 134tid=160tid=98tid=99 Obviously if we had inexpensive heavy lift capacity today, the entire debate about what to send to Europa (or Pluto) and when to send it would be very very different. The most interesting comment I found in the above URL: "When NASA killed Saturn, they killed more than the vehicle. Rocketyne engineers did an analysis, and the engines on the Saturn 5 were so overengineered that they could have been re-used 13 times each without overhaul before being refurbished! The Saturn 5 system, if built today with modern technology and some basic return features could be built for about 100 million each after initial investment! That's 100 TONS of lift that could be made reusable (imagine putting a giant deoployable para-sail on the beast) and could lift payloads as wide as 30 ft across. Two of these launches could have put the entire ISS as it currently is configured in orbit!" Does anyone know if this claim is valid and what the source might be? I have heard that the Saturn 5 blueprints were destroyed -- does anyone know if this claim is valid or an urban legend? If these claims are true, does anyone know who is most directly responsible for the termination of the knowledge of how to build a Saturn 5 -- and whether they are still alive -- because I'd certainly like to contact them and give them a piece of my mind. (A related but slightly different conversation vector is whether or not Russia still has the ability to build the Energia since it is the most recently flown rocket that might be considered to have heavy lift capacity.) Robert == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/ == You are
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
I am no fan of Tricky Dick, but his decision on funding a penny-wise- pound-foolish compromised design for future space transportation has to be put into political perspective -- I don't think it was simply a swipe at JFK's legacy. Apollo was, after all, planned with the idea in mind that it could be junked if public enthusiasm waned -- this was one of JFK's requirements, in fact. (See Logsdon, _The Decision to Go to the Moon_) That Nixon junked it when public enthusiasm *did* wane probably only made Nixon grateful that he'd been bequeathed such an easily-scaled-back program. But you can hardly call that Nixon's fault, under the circumstances. At its peak, Apollo was consuming around 5% of Federal spending -- and that's of the total budget, not of discretionary spending. Nixon himself, if you take his public announcement of the Shuttle program http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/stsnixon.htm at face value, bought NASA's party line that the Shuttle would reduce launch costs dramatically, and in some ways what he said in the speech is more visionary than any space program justification we ever heard from Kennedy. Kennedy said we're doing this because it's hard, with the understanding that the U.S. voter didn't like seeing their country upstaged by the Soviet Union. He was cheerleader-in-chief for a grudge match, to a great extent. Once the race was won, and over, however, votes won in that style wouldn't count for much. And JFK knew it. Nothing depreciates faster than political capital. 1971 had already brought the Oil Shocks and what amounted to a sudden external tax on the U.S. economy by OPEC. Nixon had enacted wage and price controls, previously unthinkable for a Republican except during a major war, because inflation was becoming a serious problem. But in a way, there was a major war -- and the costs of the Vietnam War were being seen as no longer worth the candle, yet no so easy to scale back. Against this backdrop of economic crisis, it's hardly surprising that Nixon asked NASA to come back with cheaper proposals. It's now pretty well documented, I think, that NASA, just to survive, simply lied about how economical the Shuttle would be, especially with a compromised design. Well, government agencies do that, don't they? It certainly doesn't make for good engineering decisions. But money on that scale, for such uncertain goals, has to come out of a political process somehow. So in some sense, it was inevitable in the immediate context. Now, I'm sure I've pissed off Republicans who still like Nixon, Democrats who still like JFK, Shuttle diehards, and maybe even those who are nostalgic for Apollo. But as I mentioned in the context of dreams of some phoenix-like reincarnation of Saturn V, but with reusability thrown in -- if you want to get some traction, it helps to have your feet on the ground. Take off your shoes, and stick your feet down into the mud of an unpleasant reality: in a democracy, the people get the national space programs they deserve. Being in the tiny minority who can see how it all might be done better doesn't entitle you to a better space program, any more than being right about anything else entitles you to anything. There's nothing in the Bible (AFAIK) about what must have been the hundreds of hours David put in on honing his slingshot skills. Get your facts down stone-cold, *and* your political instincts similarly honed, and life might just offer you a shot at making a real difference. Otherwise, you're just another voter, out of the loop. -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: Gary McMurtry [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 3:30 PM Subject: Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V Robert, Joe, et al., We've been down this road before. Even if the folklore (?) about the blueprints being stored in a trailer that burned is true, there is at least one Saturn V left--on display at Johnson Space Center in Houston, possibly yet another in Huntley, Alabama--that could be reverse-engineered. They were marvelous, flawless craft. That we have to go through so many contortions now to justify a probe to Europa is ample testimony that the technology they represented is sorely missed. Blame Nixon--he's the one that cancelled Apollo in favor of the Shuttle, on the dubious claim that they would make great launch vehicles for spy satellites, etc. Maybe they have, but I don't think so. Recall that Apollo was a JFK project, and Nixon was not one of his biggest fans. We all suffer now for the short-sighted views of a single, powerful man. Gary At 10:58 PM 9/5/2003 -0600, you wrote: Robert, The biggest problem is that even if you had the blueprints it still wouldn't work right. The techniques used in manufacturing the Saturn are forever lost. We have newer (and supposedly better) ways of building things. A lot of things have just changed too much. Now with that
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Michael, I do not pine for the old days of apollo - I just want the technology. The engines were fabulous and as pointed out could probably be reverse engineered. An HLLV would be a fantastic addition to our lift capabilities. According to my calculations, $250 Million divided by 100 tons equals $1,250 per pound. Given every other launch vehicle out there, this is dirt cheap. I'll take 450 pounds please. On the subject of feet on the ground, you better believe I understand the issues. The LAST thing I want is another government space program. I want NASA in the science business and not in the launch business. They need to buy payload capabilities, not create them. I say this because (letting the cat out of the bag) I am working on cheaper access to space. I have a rocket team that is devoted to lower launch costs. I started with an X-prize vehicle but realized I came to the table too late and the approach that was being taken to get that $10M prize money cut too many corners and would not produce a design that can be scaled upwards to orbital. I know personally the blood, sweat and heartache it takes to build a launch vehicle because I am doing it. One step at a time. One failure or success at a time. I want to send something to Europa, but it won't happen with just discussion, it takes work and I am working on it. The research it takes to accomplish this can be done inexpensively, but it takes more time that way. A weekend here, an hour or two there, all in the name of progress on a launcher that may yet get us to space without any government monies involved. We do need a launcher don't we? Please don't think I take offense by your comments, nothing can be further from the truth. I agree with almost everything you said. We do need our feet on the ground, but we have to have our dreams in the stars. The hard part is stretching far enough to do both. Joe L. On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 04:29, Michael Turner wrote: I am no fan of Tricky Dick, but his decision on funding a penny-wise- pound-foolish compromised design for future space transportation has to be put into political perspective -- I don't think it was simply a swipe at JFK's legacy. Apollo was, after all, planned with the idea in mind that it could be junked if public enthusiasm waned -- this was one of JFK's requirements, in fact. (See Logsdon, _The Decision to Go to the Moon_) That Nixon junked it when public enthusiasm *did* wane probably only made Nixon grateful that he'd been bequeathed such an easily-scaled-back program. But you can hardly call that Nixon's fault, under the circumstances. At its peak, Apollo was consuming around 5% of Federal spending -- and that's of the total budget, not of discretionary spending. Nixon himself, if you take his public announcement of the Shuttle program http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/stsnixon.htm at face value, bought NASA's party line that the Shuttle would reduce launch costs dramatically, and in some ways what he said in the speech is more visionary than any space program justification we ever heard from Kennedy. Kennedy said we're doing this because it's hard, with the understanding that the U.S. voter didn't like seeing their country upstaged by the Soviet Union. He was cheerleader-in-chief for a grudge match, to a great extent. Once the race was won, and over, however, votes won in that style wouldn't count for much. And JFK knew it. Nothing depreciates faster than political capital. 1971 had already brought the Oil Shocks and what amounted to a sudden external tax on the U.S. economy by OPEC. Nixon had enacted wage and price controls, previously unthinkable for a Republican except during a major war, because inflation was becoming a serious problem. But in a way, there was a major war -- and the costs of the Vietnam War were being seen as no longer worth the candle, yet no so easy to scale back. Against this backdrop of economic crisis, it's hardly surprising that Nixon asked NASA to come back with cheaper proposals. It's now pretty well documented, I think, that NASA, just to survive, simply lied about how economical the Shuttle would be, especially with a compromised design. Well, government agencies do that, don't they? It certainly doesn't make for good engineering decisions. But money on that scale, for such uncertain goals, has to come out of a political process somehow. So in some sense, it was inevitable in the immediate context. Now, I'm sure I've pissed off Republicans who still like Nixon, Democrats who still like JFK, Shuttle diehards, and maybe even those who are nostalgic for Apollo. But as I mentioned in the context of dreams of some phoenix-like reincarnation of Saturn V, but with reusability thrown in -- if you want to get some traction, it helps to have your feet on the ground. Take off your shoes, and stick your feet down into the mud of an unpleasant reality: in a
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Joe writes: I do not pine for the old days of apollo - I just want the technology. The engines were fabulous and as pointed out could probably be reverse engineered. An HLLV would be a fantastic addition to our lift capabilities. According to my calculations, $250 Million divided by 100 tons equals $1,250 per pound. Given every other launch vehicle out there, this is dirt cheap. "I'll take 450 pounds please." As would I, in a heartbeat. (A little short of cash this week, though ;-) And yet, each added Apollo launch cost about $3 billion by some estimates, but was only able to put some 40,000 kg (about 45 tons) into a lunar intercept orbit. OK, this isn't fair -- a lot of that $3 billion went into payload engineering and astronaut training and various odds and ends. But a lot went into launch alone. "$250 million to construct" is not the same as "$250 million to launch." An Atlas launch is 4,000 people on the ground, preparing for months. Boeing's Sea Launch is 1,000 people, preparing for months (and that's with cutting costs by sending those cheap Ukrainians back to their home country between launches. Their launch sequence is probably more automated than any other in existence, or in history.) Neither has broken any major new ground in reducing launch costs, though they do pretty well. Skilled manpower is still by far and away the biggest contributor to launch costs. The cheapest cost to orbit I've ever noted was a satellite launch from a Soviet sub. About $1800 per lb, if I remember right. Did they charge for the entire cost of the mission? Probably not -- it may have just seemed like a good way to earn pocket change on what was otherwise a routine patrol. Missiles? Gotta dump 'em anyway under the current arms limitations regime. Additional labor costs? The CIS can barely pay its army anyway, those guys were probably along for the ride just so they could eat a little better than they do at home. Not how I'd want to live. Would you buy a car for $200 if it cost $200 per mile to run it? On the subject of feet on the ground, you better believe I understand the issues. The LAST thing I want is another government space program. I want NASA in the science business and not in the launch business. They need to buy payload capabilities, not create them. In an ideal world, perhaps, but the reality is that among the paying space applications we've seen (comsats, mainly), many of them probably wouldn't exist, or would see rapid replacement by terrestrial or long-term upper-atmosphere solutions, were it not for the government subsidies to various launch programs. Governments will very likely remain by far the biggest customers for launch services. Their favorite launch service, counted by number of vehicles produced, has been a non-launch service: ICBMs. Governments are loath to surrender to foreign control any industry that is militarily strategic, whether it's agriculture or rocketry. This psychology has helped to make launch services a very distorted and unnatural market indeed. But what other significant market is there, at this point? I say this because (letting the cat out of the bag) I am working on cheaper access to space. I have a rocket team that is devoted to lower launch costs. I started with an X-prize vehicle but realized I came to the table too late and the approach that was being taken to get that $10M prize money cut too many corners and would not produce a design that can be scaled upwards to orbital. I know personally the blood, sweat and heartache it takes to build a launch vehicle because I am doing it. One step at a time. One failure or success at a time. Hats off to you -- I'm a big fan of the X Prize, and of the notion of space tourism as the eventual way to go. What a concept: get people into space by exploiting ... their desire to go into space! Why didn't someone think of this sooner? (Well, they did, but why it didn't start sooner is a long story, in which the above line of argument plays a big, and sad, role.) I want to send something to Europa, but it won't happen with just discussion, it takes work and I am working on it. The research it takes to accomplish this can be done inexpensively, but it takes more time that way. A weekend here, an hour or two there, all in the name of progress on a launcher that may yet get us to space without any government monies involved. We do need a launcher don't we? Europa strikes me as precisely the kind of thing that shouldn't be undertaken by the private sector alone, for the simple reason that there's no money in it. Of course, private companies will play a part, because private companies have always played a part. (True,
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
I seem to recall that in the wake of the Challenger accident, Hughes was working on something called a Jarvis launcher http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/jarvis.htm, which used components from the Saturn V. this would be very difficult if the tooling and blueprints were destroyed.Michael Turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We've been down this road before. Even if the folklore (?) about the blueprints being stored in a trailer that burned is true, there is at least one Saturn V left--on display at Johnson Space Center in Houston,possibly yet another in Huntley, Alabama--that could be reverse-engineered.They were marvelous, flawless craft. That we have to go through so many contortions now to justify a probe to Europa is ample testimony thatthe technology they represented is sorely missed. Blame Nixon--he's theone that cancelled Apollo in favor of the Shuttle, on the dubious claimthat they would make great launch vehicles for spy satellites, etc. Maybethey have, but I don't think s! o. Recall that Apollo was a JFK project, and Nixon was not one of his biggest fans. We all suffer now for the short-sighted views of a single, powerful man. Gary At 10:58 PM 9/5/2003 -0600, you wrote: Robert, The biggest problem is that even if you had the blueprints it still wouldn't work right. The techniques used in manufacturing the Saturn are forever lost. We have newer (and supposedly better) ways of building things. A lot of things have just changed too much. Now with that said, if the Rocketdyne people kept anything about howthe engines were built, then we could design a HLLV (heavy lift launch vehicle) that could lift significant! ly more than the Saturn did. Wenow have lightweight and strong composites. Even if the craft were not reusable, at $250 Million a launch the craft would be cheap. Joe L. On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 16:55, Robert J. Bradbury wrote: The recent release of the CAIB report has caused both hearings in Congress as well as lots of speculations, e.g.:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/05/1731237mode=threadtid= 134tid=160tid=98tid=99 I have heard that the Saturn 5 blueprints were destroyed -- does anyone know if this claim is valid or an u! rban legend? If these claims are true, does anyone know who is most directly responsible for the termination of the knowledge of how to build a Saturn 5 -- and whether they are still alive -- because I'd certainly like to contact them and give them a piece of my mind. (A related but slightly different conversation vector is whetheror not Russia still has the ability to build the Energia since it is the most recently flown rocket that might be considered to have heavy lift capacity.) Robert Sincerely James McEnanly Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
The true colors of Europa
A very interesting look at the Galilean worlds in their real appearances to our eyes: http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/HIIPS/EPO/gallery.html Larry
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Since we are speculating here, I would like to ask: Would a Space Elevator pay for itself in the end? http://www.highliftsystems.com/ Some day we are going to look back at rockets and think how utterly crude and dangerous they were as a means to leave Earth. Larry- Original Message - From: Michael Turner Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 10:23 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V Joe writes: I do not pine for the old days of apollo - I just want the technology. The engines were fabulous and as pointed out could probably be reverse engineered. An HLLV would be a fantastic addition to our lift capabilities. According to my calculations, $250 Million divided by 100 tons equals $1,250 per pound. Given every other launch vehicle out there, this is dirt cheap. "I'll take 450 pounds please."As would I, in a heartbeat. (A little short of cash this week, though ;-)And yet, each added Apollo launch cost about $3 billion by some estimates,but was only able to put some 40,000 kg (about 45 tons) into a lunarintercept orbit. OK, this isn't fair -- a lot of that $3 billion wentinto payload engineering and astronaut training and various odds andends. But a lot went into launch alone. "$250 million to construct"is not the same as "$250 million to launch."An Atlas launch is 4,000 people on the ground, preparing for months.Boeing's Sea Launch is 1,000 people, preparing for months (and that'swith cutting costs by sending those cheap Ukrainians back to theirhome country between launches. Their launch sequence is probablymore automated than any other in existence, or in history.) Neitherhas broken any major new ground in reducing launch costs, thoughthey do pretty well.Skilled manpower is still by far and away the biggest contributor tolaunch costs. The cheapest cost to orbit I've ever noted was asatellite launch from a Soviet sub. About $1800 per lb, if I rememberright. Did they charge for the entire cost of the mission? Probablynot -- it may have just seemed like a good way to earn pocketchange on what was otherwise a routine patrol. Missiles? Gottadump 'em anyway under the current arms limitations regime.Additional labor costs? The CIS can barely pay its army anyway,those guys were probably along for the ride just so they couldeat a little better than they do at home. Not how I'd want to live.Would you buy a car for $200 if it cost $200 per mile to run it? On the subject of feet on the ground, you better believe I understand the issues. The LAST thing I want is another government space program. I want NASA in the science business and not in the launch business. They need to buy payload capabilities, not create them.In an ideal world, perhaps, but the reality is that among the payingspace applications we've seen (comsats, mainly), many of themprobably wouldn't exist, or would see rapid replacement by terrestrialor long-term upper-atmosphere solutions, were it not for thegovernment subsidies to various launch programs. Governmentswill very likely remain by far the biggest customers for launchservices. Their favorite launch service, counted by number ofvehicles produced, has been a non-launch service: ICBMs.Governments are loath to surrender to foreign controlany industry that is militarily strategic, whether it's agricultureor rocketry. This psychology has helped to make launch servicesa very distorted and unnatural market indeed. But what othersignificant market is there, at this point? I say this because (letting the cat out of the bag) I am working on cheaper access to space. I have a rocket team that is devoted to lower launch costs. I started with an X-prize vehicle but realized I came to the table too late and the approach that was being taken to get that $10M prize money cut too many corners and would not produce a design that can be scaled upwards to orbital. I know personally the blood, sweat and heartache it takes to build a launch vehicle because I am doing it. One step at a time. One failure or success at a time.Hats off to you -- I'm a big fan of the X Prize, and of the notionof space tourism as the eventual way to go. What a concept: getpeople into space by exploiting ... their desire to go into space!Why didn't someone think of this sooner? (Well, they did, butwhy it didn't start sooner is a long story, in which the aboveline of argument plays a big, and sad, role.) I want to send something to Europa, but it won't happen with just discussion, it takes work and I am working on it. The research it takes to accomplish this can be done inexpensively, but it takes more time that way. A weekend here, an hour or two there, all in the name of progress on a launcher that may yet get us to space without any government monies involved. We do need a launcher don't we?Europa strikes me as precisely the kind of thing that shouldn'tbe undertaken by the private sector alone, for the simple reasonthat there's no money in it. Of course, private companies willplay a part, because
Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
Ok, the best information I been advised of at this time (from what I would call semi-authoritative sources) is that the blueprints for the Saturn V are preserved on microfilm. However they would be insufficient because apparently there were on-the-fly modifications made by the engineers/assemblers of the rocket stacks that were not documented. With respect to the lack of ability to make the F-1 engines in Stage 1, there is the problem of tooling. However the RD-170 engines that powered the Energia have slightly more thrust than the F-1 engines did, though they have not been tested as much as the F-1 engines were. So we might still have the ability to manufacture engines that can do the job. The RD-180 engines that power the Atlas V are in production and are a scaled down version of the RD-170 engines (roughly 2/3 the capacity). So one might be able to get a Saturn V 1st stage capacity with something like 8 RD-170 engines instead of 5 F-1 engines. As pointed out on several lists -- we have composites and higher strength aluminium alloys now so one might be able to put together a significantly lighter stack. On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, LARRY KLAES wrote: Would a Space Elevator pay for itself in the end? http://www.highliftsystems.com/ This remains to be determined. It might be a great way to get humans into space but still might not solve the heavy lift problem. I don't know what mass the proposed elevator designs are capable of handling. While we do now have what can be called bucky-fibers they are still expensive to manufacture and aren't continuous molecular structures thousands of km in length -- so I don't know how this would impact the capacity of a space elevator. There is also the significant problem of where to put one, what happens to the bottom levels during a tropical storm and the problem that all hell breaks loose if the cable snaps at any point. I suspect I'd lean towards a mass-driver + small rocket combination before I'd go with a space elevator. The nice thing about robotic missions is that they can be hurled off a mass-driver at much higher velocity (due to higher G-force acceleration) than can be done with human missions. On the other hand something like some of the X-prize approaches would seem to be much better for simply getting humans up there. Looks like it is a question of using the right tool for each specific job. I've never seen to date any estimates for what it would take in terms of a mass driver that could launch 100 tons with the velocity of a Saturn V 1st stage but I would like to know. Apparently the Saturn V 1st stage puts out enough power to power NYC for several minutes so one would probably need several nuclear reactors to power the mass driver. Robert == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
mass drivers for earth-to-orbit cargo lift (was Re: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V)
Robert (or maybe Larry) writes: I suspect I'd lean towards a mass-driver + small rocket combination before I'd go with a space elevator. The nice thing about robotic missions is that they can be hurled off a mass-driver at much higher velocity (due to higher G-force acceleration) than can be done with human missions. I've never seen to date any estimates for what it would take in terms of a mass driver that could launch 100 tons with the velocity of a Saturn V 1st stage but I would like to know. Apparently the Saturn V 1st stage puts out enough power to power NYC for several minutes so one would probably need several nuclear reactors to power the mass driver. A rocket launcher has very high short-term energy expenditure in part because it's mostly lifting its own fuel for most of the burn. A terrestrial mass driver is pushing little more than the payload itself, which makes a huge difference in the energy requirements. One of the more elegant (but, it turns out, somewhat persnickety) gun-type launch systems I've looked into, the ram accelerator, stores all its fuel in the launch tube itself. It's a fair amount of fuel (various mixtures at pressures on the order of 40 atmospheres) in a long launch tube, but the total energy requirement is quite modest. Energy isn't really a cost issue for launch -- it's said that the Shuttle could power a medium-size town for the minutes that it's burning rocket fuel. That sounds impressive, but if you do the math, you come up with a dollar amount that would cover the costs of an only-mildly-lavish wedding reception. This is not how all that money is being burned. If there's a serious energy cost component in the Shuttle program, it's more in the gasoline used to fuel the cars of its employees, and the industrial fuels that make western-style affluence possible. Engineering a mass driver to push 100 tons to orbit is rather pointless, actually -- the chief advantage of mass drivers is the potential for massive throughput, not high payload mass. If you can launch 200 lbs to orbit at $200/lb, every few days, many problems simply go away. On-orbit construction of 100-ton packages is mainly held back by the cost of putting construction equipment, teleoperators, and people into orbit. Putting people up will always be expensive (until gizmos like the Space Elevator come along, anyway), but when you look at how much of a human being's space-survival infrastructure outweighs the person, and think about how it might be redesigned to survive very high accelerations, the arguments for going multimodal in space transportation (if other, much cheaper, non-man-rated modes can be made to work), appear very compelling. Also, with mass drivers and space elevators, it's not an either-or proposition. Mass drivers, used to get a bootstrap quantity of carbon nanotube ribbon up geosynch orbit, may in fact end up being a prerequisite technology more than a competing one. In any case, the capital requirements are daunting, and there's the question of market. There are lots of ideas for how to make space transportation much cheaper, in some very long run -- take my plan and add $50 billion. As Gerard O'Neill pointed out, until you squeeze all the technical risk out of these proposals, it hardly matters that you might ultimately be able to produce clean power from space more cheaply than any energy technology on Earth. The Panama Canal was just a big digging project; the main technological breakthrough that made it possible was the discovery of quinine as a treatment for malaria. Space transportation faces much more serious challenges, in both technological and market terms. -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
