NASA fixes moonship shaking with shock absorbers
August 19, 2008 BY SETH BORENSTEIN , AP Science Writer(AP) -- A space-age version of the rusty springs under old pickup trucks will help NASA fix the most pressing technical problem with its high-tech new rocket to send astronauts back to the moon.
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I believe these wouldn't produce the jackhammer vibrations that solid rocket boosters produce (correct me if I'm wrong)
In light f the growing complications with this Ares project, they might wanna consider modifying an already tested heavy lifter for carrying the manned orion capsule or perhaps even consider the Direct 2.0 proposal.
If they used that design and simply brought it up to current spec AND had some money to spend, we'd be on the moon by 2015.
We did it in less than a decade in the 60's! 2020 is an unbelievably long time given todays tech advancements.
This is all just bureaucract BS. We've turned chicken-shit!
In terms of rocket technology, there haven't been any huge advances since Apollo, so today's tech advancements have very little impact on doing it.
Most modern tech advancements have been the the area of computers and consumer electronics which don't do very much for space flight.
Solution: Reduce the size of the payload. Let's go to the moon in an SUV, not a Winnegago!
NASA, DOD and Russia are putting stuff up there pretty regularly. It is foolishness to suddenly demand that we must increase the payload requirements beyond reasonable technical limits.
In fact, make it a SPACE ONLY ship. When it gets back from the moon it can hang out at the ISS until the next time it's needed.
@Mayday, it's pretty much a Yaris at this point, much like the Apollo missions were.
Part of the problem is that they are designing this vehicle from scratch, and it will likely miss it's target dates due to initial reliability concerns, as has nearly every new rocket design has since it's inception. In todays terms, Apollo was ridiculously expensive. They are trying to design the rocket on majorly competing terms: cost and safety, and this almost always causes problems (remember the Ariene's first flight anyone?).
Go here and read, it should fix MOST of the eronious information floating around in the comments:
http://www.nasa.g...dex.html
Still though, adding a system to prevent a catastrophic failure of another system to me speaks of madness. What could go wrong!! "Well how was I to know that the change in Z on the stabilizer system at launch would cause an overflow error on this chip because the programmer used a double-long instead of a real which would cause a hardware interrupt that would stop processing on the primary guidance system that would..."