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Space shuttle replacement |
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Space Shuttle Replacement Ten months of trade studies has steered NASAs $4.8-billion Space Launch Initiative (SLI) away from an all-cryogenic next-generation reusable space launch vehicle toward a smaller vehicle that uses hydrocarbon fuel in its first stage and liquid hydrogen in its second. ... SLI managers at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center will continue to refine their views of how best to replace the space shuttle, drawing on data generated in architecture studies by Boeing and Lockheed Martin under the first batch of SLI contract awards, and by a Northrop Grumman/Orbital Sciences team added late last year. ... While cryogenic engine work will continue, the switch to a hydrocarbon first stage will deemphasize the big new reusable cryogenic first-stage engines based on the Space Shuttle Main Engine that Boeings Rocketdyne unit and an Aerojet/Pratt & Whitney team were developing (AW&ST Aug. ... ” Doug Young, director of space programs at Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems in El Segundo, Calif. ... ” The reusable launch vehicle (RLV) that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) wants to put into operation by the middle of the next decade will mark a departure from the closed-system avionics architectures of the past, including extensive use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sub systems, says Joel Levinthal, vice president for advanced systems and business development at AlliedSignal Government Electronic Systems in Teterboro, N. ... , and heads a team of eight AlliedSignal divisions responsible for the new space vehicles avionics, electrical, and mechanical subsystems. ... The whole project has a single objective: driving down the excessive operating costs of todays Space Shuttle. ... The Shuttle is not a fully reusable vehicle since the propellant tanks for the mare engines are jettisoned and the solid rocket motors must be recovered from the ocean and refurbished. ... On the first day of February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia started its return to Earth at the end of a sixteen-day mission. While the mission had apparently performed "without a hitch," the shuttle suffered a series of failures in the last minutes of reentry, followed by a cut-off of communications with Mission Control around 10:00 AM (CST). Forty miles above Texas, the shuttle exploded and killed its crew of seven astronauts almost seventeen years to the day after the Challenger disaster, an incident high in the minds of those looking on. In the wake of the Columbia crash, observers asked whether human space flight was worth the risk. ... The truth was that in the eyes of pundits and the public alike, human space travel had become a luxury, a stunt, a boondoggle rather than a legitimate field of endeavor, let alone the door to the future. ... Space travel, like so many of the technologies that preceded it, will also go on to redeem itself. There will be a future in space--one for human beings rather than just their machines, which is contrary to what scientists, futurists, and pundits since J. ... The reasons why the appeal of space has palled are well worth exploring in any serious consideration of the future of space activity, if only to avoid repeating past errors. ... This short-term outlook is inherently at odds with the extreme long-term perspective in which progress in space must be considered given the environments extraordinary technical demands and the sheer largeness of the task. The conquest of the space could never have proceeded so quickly as some of its enthusiasts once imagined, but the approach to space has also not been as sensible as it should have been. For all its possibilities, the space program began as a stunt and the high points in the history of space flight look like little more than a succession of stunts. ... It succeeded only too well, and a stunned United States replied with a stunt of its own, firing Explorer-1 into orbit and beginning the space race in earnest. The Soviet Union sent Yuri Gagarin into space, but American astronauts Alan Shephard, Virgil Grissom, and John Glenn shortly followed him. ... The program having come to an end, and the moon apparently unoccupied, the Soviets--who had just launched the worlds first space station, Salyut-1--seemed on the verge of making a real effort to establish a lunar colony by the end of the decade. However, the United States development of a space shuttle placed political pressure on the Soviet program to produce the equivalent, forcing to it abandon the lunar mission. The international space Station (ISS), today built by the United States with Russian help, had initially been presented as a free world counter to the Soviet lead in space stations. ... Leib wrote in his essay, "Entering the Space Station Era" (which appeared in the 2002 collection of Space Policy in the Twenty-First Century), the ISS "even had a good Cold War name, Freedom. ... China, which could easily be the next country to put a human into a space, promises to be no different; its plan to put a human in space in 2005 and travel to Mars simply screams of another stunt. ... The space shuttle, far from taking humans to the moon again, is restricted to an orbit of no more than a few hundred miles above the Earth. ... shuttle program jeopardizes the future of the ISS. ... However, it must be remembered that the stunts produces their share of useful spin-offs and held out the promise of something more to be accomplished, and space programs have had some meaningful and lasting successes. ... One would suppose that such sights and discoveries would have increase the enthusiasm for space projects, but to date this hasnt been the case in any measurable way. ... ) In addition, space has become an area of practical activity. Certainly, visions of asteroids mining and space industry havent come to pass, and even space tourism, excepting the occasional tours of Dennis Tito, hasnt been a serious proposition. Yet the communications, navigation, and Earth-monitoring satellites girdling the globe are a major part of the modern worlds infrastructure and the commercial space sector is large and growing. ... The space activity that thrives today is an annex of the super-information highway. Todays pertinent space efforts look in at the Earth rather than out to the rest of the solar system, let alone beyond it. At some point, the Space Age simply gave way to the Information Age, and it has seemed in recent years that the final frontier wasnt outerspace but the virtual terrain of the Internet--a change visible even in fiction. ... space program has withered, describes humankinds establishment of posts all over the solar system by the early twenty-first century. ... Tom Wolfes The Right Stuff is often credited with capturing the spirit of the space program in the 1960s. ... Indeed, future generations may well laugh at the degree to which the displacement occurred--the promises pinned on networks of computers, and the expectations not of what space exploration might help to accomplish in a century or a millennium but of what their mere existence would bring about now. Certainly, other enthusiasms are waiting in the wings--nanotechnology to name one--but the lull makes it all the more imperative to think seriously about the future of space flight. ... As a conduit of information, space has become a cornerstone of U. ... military superiority, and defense ministries around the world are in serious discussion about going beyond this to the weaponization of space. Space-based weapons can play a role in ballistic missile defense schemes, assist militaries in pursuing "information dominance" by controlling the enemys ability to use satellites for gathering communications and intelligence, and even transport troops or attack targets on Earth from orbit. ... The requisite technologies arent so exotic or farfetched as they may seem, a fact obscured by the extreme difficulty of the ballistic missile defense mission offered today as the principal justification for the weaponization of space. As science fiction author Larry Niven observes, anything worth doing in space could be a weapon. Designs for armed satellites, spacecraft, and space stations date back to the earliest years of the Space Age. ... Consequently, the militarization of space is only in its beginnings and its long-term course is still very much in question given the real technical and political problems it raises. ... However, the debate is ongoing, which is more than can be said for civilian ventures in space, even though this could prove to be the key to making space a zone of peace. The dangerous tendency today is that security is becoming the sole consideration of national policies on space, and the sky is viewed as little more than military high ground. |
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Title: Space shuttle replacement
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