Jay

Redesign Is Seen for Next Craft, NASA Aides Say

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: August 2, 2005

For its next generation of space vehicles, NASA has decided to abandon the design principles that went into the aging space shuttle, agency officials and private experts say.



The Return to Space
With so much riding on the Discovery launching, critical changes have been made to the shuttle. Also, a look back at the history of the shuttle program.

Instead, they say, the new vehicles will rearrange the shuttle's components into a safer, more powerful family of traditional rockets.

The plan would separate the jobs of hauling people and cargo into orbit and would put the payloads on top of the rockets - as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.

By making the rockets from shuttle parts, the new plan would draw on the shuttle's existing network of thousands of contractors and technologies, in theory speeding its completion and lowering its price.

"The existing components offer us huge cost advantages as opposed to starting from a clean sheet of paper," the new administrator of NASA, Michael D. Griffin, told reporters on Friday.

The plan, whose origins go back two and a half years, is emerging at a time when it may help deflect attention from the current troubles of the shuttle fleet.

The Discovery's astronauts are to make a spacewalk tomorrow to fix a potentially hazardous problem with cloth filler on its belly.

Future missions have been indefinitely suspended while NASA tries to solve the persistent shedding of foam from the external fuel tank at liftoff.

The plan for new vehicles is to be formally unveiled this month. Its outlines were gleaned from interviews and reviews of trade reports, Congressional testimony and official statements. Some details were reported on Sunday in The Orlando Sentinel.

On Friday, Dr. Griffin emphasized the plan's safety, telling reporters that the new generation of rockets would have their payloads up high to avoid the kinds of dangers that doomed the Columbia two and a half years ago and threatened the Discovery last week when insulating foam broke off its fuel tank shortly after liftoff.

"As long as we put the crew and the valuable cargo up above wherever the tanks are, we don't care what they shed," he said. "They can have dandruff all day long."

Congress would have to approve the initiative, and many questions remain. John E. Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private Washington research group on military and space topics, said he wondered how NASA could remain within its budget while continuing to pay billions of dollars for the shuttle and building a new generation of rockets and capsules.

Alex Roland, a former historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who now teaches at Duke University and is a frequent critic of the space program, said the plan had "the aroma of a quick and dirty solution to a big problem."

But supporters say it will let astronauts move expeditiously back into the business of exploration rather than endlessly circling the home planet, and do so fairly quickly.

"The shuttle is not a lemon," Scott J. Horowitz, an aerospace engineer and former astronaut who helped develop the new plan, said in an interview. "It's just too complicated. I know from flying it four times. It's an amazing engineering feat. But there's a better way."

Dr. Horowitz was one of a small group of astronauts, shaken by the Columbia disaster, who took it upon themselves in 2003 to come up with a safer approach to exploring space. Their effort, conceived while they were in Lufkin, Tex., helping search for shuttle wreckage, became part of the NASA program to design a successor to the shuttle fleet.

The three remaining shuttles are to be retired by 2010 under the Bush administration's plan for space exploration, which is intended to return humans to the Moon and eventually Mars.

The new vehicles would sidestep the foam threat altogether, and its supporters say they would have other advantages as well. The larger of the vehicles, for lifting heavy cargoes but not people, would be some 350 feet tall, rivaling the Saturn 5 rockets that sent astronauts to the Moon.

The smaller one, for carrying people, would still dwarf the shuttle, which stands 184 feet high with its attached rockets and fuel tank.

The spaceships would no longer look like airplanes. Their payloads, whether humans or cargo, would ride in capsules at the top rather than alongside the fuel tank - standard practice until the shuttle era. Rather than gliding back to Earth, they would deploy parachutes and land on the ground in the Western United States.

More from here,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/sc...rssnyt&emc=rss

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Jay

NASA's New CEV Launcher to Maximize Use of Space Shuttle Components

Analysts have reviewed a wide variety of launch vehicle options for both manned and cargo-only versions of the NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and have settled for an all-solid booster configuration, according to sources close to NASA's Exploration Systems Architecture Study (aka the "60 Day Study")

But a year-long study initiated prior to the change in NASA Administrators and completed this spring gave an extensive review to both uses of a launch vehicle derived from the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) as well as a larger booster design using twin SRB motors flanking a derivative of the shuttle's External Tank (ET), mated with a large liquid upper stage. Studies also looked at growth options from the nation's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV) community.

Internal NASA documents detailing the review, which was completed in late June, were obtained by the authors. A second, related study has reviewed heavy lift options using the same shuttle-derived elements

......
Shuttle-Derived Crew Transport

According to sources familiar with the launcher section of the so-called 60 Day Study, the future U.S. manned and heavy lift launch vehicle architecture will be based on two configurations of shuttle-derived vehicles. Both vehicles will launch from Kennedy Space Center. Existing launch pads and associated facilities will undergo extensive modifications and upgrading to accommodate the new designs, according to a semi-final version of the study.

Cargo vehicle studies using Space Shuttle ET and SRB hardware focused on two major variants: so-called "side-mounted" and "in-line". Side-mount designs hang cargo and/or crew off the side of a large external fuel tank as is currently done with the space shuttle. In-line designs place the cargo (or crew) directly atop a lower first stage as did Saturn launch vehicles.

Budget pressures have intensified due to the grounding of the shuttle fleet after last week's foam and debris shedding. This grounding and a possible hiatus before flights resume could lead to increased pressure to develop a side-mounted shuttle-derived heavy lifter similar in overall concept to the Shuttle-C launch vehicle proposed in the 1990s.

This side-mounted launcher would allow many existing shuttle facilities to be used either unmodified or with slight modification since the shuttle orbiter would be replaced with a cargo carrier and use the same 'footprint' as does the current space shuttle. The costs required to transition to such a new system would be less, and current cargoes (ISS components) could be integrated in a fashion nearly identical with how they are launched in shuttle orbiter cargo bays. The larger, more capable in-line shuttle-derived systems that have been studied would require substantial modifications to launch pads and ground support infrastructure.









More info can be read here..Courtesy of SpaceRef
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1055

hello

Why don't they just use Saturn 5? Whatever happened to Venturestar?

Parihaka

The shuttle boosters and engines are far more efficient and are in current production, so no expensive re-design and re-tooling.

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ZFBoxcar

I'm sure the new vehicle will be great and everything...but its ugly as hell.

Parihaka

so were the LEM's and they proved to be one HELL of a spaceship

leib10

It was only a matter of time before NASA finally had it with all the shuttle's problems. Hopefully these new ones will be safer than their predecessors.

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TopHatter

It's a shame really.
As ZFBoxcar said, they were smart, sharp looking craft that people could be proud of. Even the Russians copied the exterior for Buran.

But "pretty is as pretty goes"......handsome craft with a glass jaw

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hello

Are these things reusable? Or are they splashdowners?

hello

The Lunar landers were ugly but great spacecraft. Same with the ISS, which is even uglier than the LEMs but is the only spacecraft in which humans have lived in for long amounts of time.

dalem

The plan is to do reentry capsules and splashdowns.

-dale

highsea

The SRB's would be recovered and reused, just like we do now.

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EnigmaNZ

The biggest problem with the shuttle is it's systems are so fragile in weather extremes (the O-ring failure), and so prone to catatrophic failure from minor damage (a piece of foam causing severe damage to the strongest part of the wing). Mind you, when the shuttle was designed, it's computing system had all the capability of a commodore 64, Battlestar Galatica had those nifty bridge computers with the green displays and 3 inch letters hehehe, and people wore bell bottom trousers and sported long hair.
The new idea seems logical, use existing shuttle hardware in a tried and tested layout. There is no reason they couldn't go with a mini shuttle for manned missions, but put on top of the booster like the French Hermes design.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/hermes.htm

highsea

The O-ring problem on the SRB was fixed long ago.

The area on the wing that was damaged on Columbia was a leading edge section made of RCC. This is an extremely brittle material, used there because it has very high resistance to the heat of reentry. But it is anything but strong.