NASA fixes moonship shaking with shock absorbers

There's also the possibilty that the shaking will be so bad the entire rocket will be shaken apart.

Can't wait to see the next episode in human's history of phallus fixation!

That sounds like it will be complicated and therefore expensive :(

Why can't they use pressure waves within the fuel tanks to counteract the oscillations. Carrying dead weight eats into payload.

Why not just replace the solid rocket stage with lox/lh2 or rp1/lox stage?

I believe these wouldn't produce the jackhammer vibrations that solid rocket boosters produce (correct me if I'm wrong)

if they would go back to the original, proven Apollo rocket there would be fewer jobs for congressional districts, lower costs, more rapid development, and.......oh, dumb idea huh.

Apollo rocket was horrendously expensive and pretty unsafe. It was deemed okay to take such risks during the space race, but that's just not gonna fly, esp since the two shuttle crashes.

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.

The Saturn V rocked and it was built by one contractor. Rockwell.
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!

NASA had a much bigger budget during the Apollo program.

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.

Problem: we can't figure out how to get this large payload into space with reasonable safety/reliability.

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.

Why not make a few trips? One trip with an empty moonship, and one trip with all the gear/food/water and astonaughts? I thought that was what the Space station was for. Just put it up, dock it at the ISS and stock it with supplies/people from there.

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.

@ Lord_jag, that's prettymuch the plan already except for the whole leave it docked to the ISS.

@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

@CaptSpaulding, Agreed that there's probably far too much of the usual misreads. I've heard "Add 1,700 lbs to a 25,000 payload? Mad!", but that's weight that should be added to the payload and second stage, ergo less than 1%.

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..."