Rico's rants: Hot spacecraft for 2014

29 January 2014

Hot spacecraft for 2014

Jeffrey Kluger has a Time article about NASA's future:

It’s hard to know when to take NASA seriously anymore. In the past, if the big brains at the space agency said we were going to the moon, well, pack your bags, because we’re shipping out. These days? Not so much. As Time has noted, one of the best ways to tell if any planned mission described in any NASA press release has a chance of actually flying is to use the Count the Conditionals Rule: the greater the number of references to what a spacecraft could achieve or when it should be flying, the less chance it’s going anywhere at all.
For years now, the manned space program has been drowning in conditionals. We were building spacecraft that could take humans to Mars— then we weren’t; we were committing ourselves to a new program that would have us back on the Moon by 2015— and then we broke the commitment. But slowly, the manned program appears to be getting back on track. Real hardware is being built again, real firing tests are being conducted, and a first test launch of a new deep-space vehicle is scheduled for September of 2014. If (and that’s a planet-sized if), funding stays in place, White House policy doesn’t change, and general fecklessness doesn’t prevail, the US could at last be finding its way back to its once-dominant role in space.
NASA is making its current push with two new machines: a crew vehicle dubbed Orion (photo) and a rocket that is better known better by its acronym— SLS— than by it’s decidedly prosaic name, which is Space Launch System. But anything the machines lack in marketing sizzle they make up in engineering ambition.
Orion’s design DNA runs straight back to the old Apollo spacecraft, which is a very good bloodline. Like the Apollos, it’s a two-part ship, with a conical command module that houses the astronauts, and a cylindrical service module for batteries, oxygen, fuel cells, engine, and more. The Apollos’ 210 cubic foot habitable space accommodated three astronauts. Orion’s 316 cubic feet is designed for four. The crews will need that extra elbow room. The longest Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, lasted just under thirteen days. In its current configuration, the Orion is intended for missions ranging from 21 to 210 days.
The SLS is similarly descended from earlier NASA hardware— both the shuttle and the Saturn V moon rocket. Its main stage engines are upgraded shuttle engines, and it carries strap-on solid boosters, also based on the shuttle’s. The new rocket’s upper stage engines are based on the design of the old J-2 that powered the second and third stages of the Saturn. The SLS also gets its looks from the Saturn— a NASA nod to the public relations value of the new rocket conjuring up images of the biggest and best one the space agency ever built.
While the Orion comes in just one size, there will actually be two models of the SLS: one capable of lifting 154,000 pounds to low Earth orbit; and another than can loft 286,000 pounds. The smaller version will stand 321 feet tall, just shy of the Saturn V’s 363 feet. The bigger one will exceed its grandaddy’s stature, measuring 384 feet.
That, of course, is assuming any of this machinery ever sees a launch pad. At the moment, the outlook is best for Orion, which at least knows what it feels like to fly, if only a little. In 2010, the launch escape system— the small cluster of rockets that would lift the command module up and away from the SLS booster if a Challenger-type problem occurred during the early part of flight—was tested in White Sands, New Mexico. The motors took an Orion mock-up six thousand feet high before a parachute descent.