First warp ship?

[Timo]

What would be difficult about the landing? The front pod looks like it's the landing section: it's got the aerodynamics, it's got what looks like heat tiles, and it's got what looks like boxes that would deploy parachutes. Just fly the entire vehicle to LEO, then either perform a braking burn and separate the pod, or separate the pod and perform an aerobraking, and then deploy the parachute. And then fly to a nice three-point landing at the launch site, which even today's steerable parachutes easily allow for. The 1960s space capsules only required aircraft carriers because the engineers were being ultraconservative with their terminal braking techniques and technologies; a direct landing on the lawn of Kennedy Space Center (or the White House if that looked better) would always have been an option, too.

Such a sequence might take something like fifteen, twenty minutes. Vulcans would surely procrastinate about First Contact for much longer than that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Flashover]

Is there a sketch somewhere of the Phoenix module? I want to take a stab at figuring out the internal layout of the engine guts.

My take on it... A small extremely powerful polywell fusion engine "spiked" by a very small amount of antimatter. The plasma is then tuned and accelerated to high velocity by a series of accelerator coils, and injected into the nacelles. There may be a smaller secondary gas-core fission reactor as well to provide electrical power to bootstrap the fusion reactor and provide supplemental power

The nacelles... The "field generators" are made out of a ceramic material coated with a very very thin layer of some ultra-exotic material... perhaps an element synthesized via particle accelerator. The coils themselves are small, maybe the size of 50 gallon drums. The rest of the nacelle volume is packed with sensor and telemetry equipment for verifying the flight and gathering real world data on the flight. That's what the red domes are... sensor windows for recording data on the flight.


That's all you'd need for a test shot.

 

[sojourner]

There's currently in work a high-energy propulsion system that's due to tested on the ISS within the next couple of years. I believe that it's liquid-based and would look similar to a Titan or Shuttle engine. It will supposedly make a round trip to Mars take only one-sixth the time.

Your thinking of VASIMR which is really just an advanced ion engine. High impulse, low thrust. Good for space but useless for trying to get off the ground.

 

[Captain Rob]

^^ Thanks; I forgot the name. I'm sure that Obama will cancel it too. Killing off the US manned spaceflight program will be one of his legacies. "Private industry can do it cheaper and better." is his mantra. The local news lastnight did a story on the end of the Shuttle program and the Virgin Galactic Spaceport being built in New Mexico. It's amazing how many people can't tell the difference (including Obama) between a suborbital pop-up flight and a long-term orbital mission of the Shuttle. I grew up on the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs (just like alot of us) and the current state of NASA turns my stomach. Especially considering the relatively tiny amount of money they cost compared to all of the bailouts we've seen recently.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, Bush killed Constellation, not Obama. That's the way Bush designed it: launch a program, then provide no funding for it, and see it collapse out of sheer unviability - conveniently during the presidency of the next guy (or gal). Bush also killed the shuttle, although the death throes have extended to the Obama adminstration.

OTOH, perhaps killing the shuttle was a good thing. At the very least, it has forced people to start designing more sensible rockets (mainly the EELV pair). And while the suborbitals may have nothing to contribute to actual space exploitation, there are ballistic capsules under development that will do practical work, plus new space stations that will make use of those capsules. If that doesn't work, then I guess space is not worth doing, period...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[sojourner]

It's amazing how many people can't tell the difference (including Obama) between a suborbital pop-up flight and a long-term orbital mission of the Shuttle.

Your just following the wrong private company. Virgin Galactic is a gimmick and not on Obama's (or NASA's) radar. SpaceX is the horse they are backing and SpaceX is going orbital.

 

[Captain Rob]

^^ Just Googled SpaceX and read up on them. It seems like they may have their stuff together. I would have liked to have seen the Shuttle keep going until a replacement system was up and running. These Shuttles were designed for 100 flights and the oldest, Discovery, has less than 40. I just see capsules as a throwback to the 60's way of doing things. We'll always need to put people and cargo into space. So I would have liked to have seen a 21st Century Shuttle-like spacecraft with heavy-lifters used to put up bigger items like space station segments. We could get more stations built faster. ISS just took too damned long to complete even if you factor out the Columbia stand-down. Bush did cancel Constellation but Obama killed off Orion, with only one to be produced as a ISS lifeboat. To be fair, I didn't like either one. Spacecraft that is.
We need a real spacecraft built in orbit out of segments put up with heavy-lifters that we can park in lunar orbit at length to do some real work. Then bring it back and add more segments and go to Mars with it.

 

[MikeS]

We should unite as a species to invest in getting off this rock and colonising space. It is the only way we will survive any global disaster.

 

[KJbushway]

thats never going to happen soon.

 

[AstroSmurf]

KJbushway you seem to be on a roll resurrecting old threads all over the board today. DO NOT do this again or you will be warned. If you have something new to say about a particular topic I would suggest starting a new thread.

They're coming to get you, Barbara! I am putting a bullet in the brain of this zombie thread in 3... 2... 1...