Seven ships. I think his odds for Orion are too high.
21 thoughts on “The New Space Age”
Somehow I knew that’s how you’d feel about Orion.
As described in the article linked, I disagree. Unless, that is, NASA has an FTL drive tucked away. It’s described as being interstellar.
Apart from that, the problem isn’t that Orion won’t work. It’s that it’s too damn expensive to fly it more than a few times per decade, even if and when it actually gets finished.
Funny, CST-100 didnt show. I think it has better odds than Orion.
There is an element of friendly competition. One can have a favorite vehicle. IMO, the Dreamchaser looks the coolest. But that doesn’t mean I am fearful or want to destroy the other companies. It would be silly to claim these companies are not competeing with each other. SpaceX has a leg up on the competition right now and no, it isn’t Dragon-baiting Dreamchaser or Orion fans to mention that.
Yeah, as I’ve said before, “I hope they all succeed.”
There’s another piece of Orion that isn’t happening either….Interstellar?
Orion Type: Interstellar manned stretch capsule
Who: NASA/U.S. Congress
Launching: 2021–2025
Destination: Asteroid, Mars
The Odds: Even
It also shows an Orion configuration I have never seen…. A massive space station sized crew cabin inserted between the service module and the command module???
Is “Interstellar” supposed to be a name, or a description? Because asteroids and Mars aren’t interstellary, they’re intrastellar.
BTW, I dunno if you can do anything about this yourself, Rand, but it’s crazy that your comment box lets people enter the bold and italics tags, but not the underline one. (and no, em and strong aren’t subsitutes; they tend to just map to italics and bold, respectively.
“intrastellar” means “inside stars”.
Into the sun’s corona, and beyond!
Yeah, I think the word they’re looking for is interplanetary.
With the SLS Block IIIB, due to enter service in the 2070’s, we’ll be able to launch an evolved Orion capsule on interstellar missions of up three months duration. The idea is to put the Orion on a trajectory that will intersect a straight line between our sun and Alpha Centauri, thus becoming “interstellar” and have the crew take images of both stars from a point directly between them, though obviously not equidistant from both. This difficult goal will require launching the Orion far outside the ecliptic, ruling out all but a lunar slingshot trajectory, and will mark a major milestone in human spaceflight, the first time humans were actually in between two stars.
Huh, i thought Block IIIB was supposed to be the final HST rescue mission that will attach a pair of ATKs advanced solid boosters to the aging telescope and boost it closer to the things its trying to see.
Block IV4B is a Shuttle derived heavy Sodium retrieval mission, intended to take a big sample the sodium tail of the moon and bring it back to International space station. Combined with a commercially delivered chlorine, the 2-man crew will have enough salt to last forever !
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow. They’d have enough salt to last forever.
— Top Secret
LOL for “reader”
The author at Popular Mechanics is probably just a bit fuzzy about the difference between interplanetary and interstellar.
Though there is the possibility that he expects a monumental cock-up on a flight to Mars
We lost one of the early Mars ships, the Ares IV, when it fell into a graviton ellipse and ended up far out in the Delta Quadrant, where it was recovered by the starship Voyager in season 6, episode 128. So yes, given an unfortunate encounter with a space anomaly, the Orion could go interstellar.
I was thinking more along the lines of a rough AI controlling the ship and using the propellant to stop at Mars and come back to carry on outwards, but a graviton ellipse, or uncharted wormhole works too.
Your memory is frightening.
In the biz, we usually call that a negative space wedgie.
Elon Musk’s tax-farming approach makes the most sense: do something cheaper; win the government contract. Also the one proposing a revised space-plane design sounds at least doable. The rest is bunk (Space tourism? Please.) the prize for which goes to NASA for the proposed manned trip to an asteroid. What knucklehead dreamed that up?
“Space tourism” would work just fine… if someone actually started flying already.
Somehow I knew that’s how you’d feel about Orion.
As described in the article linked, I disagree. Unless, that is, NASA has an FTL drive tucked away. It’s described as being interstellar.
Apart from that, the problem isn’t that Orion won’t work. It’s that it’s too damn expensive to fly it more than a few times per decade, even if and when it actually gets finished.
Funny, CST-100 didnt show. I think it has better odds than Orion.
There is an element of friendly competition. One can have a favorite vehicle. IMO, the Dreamchaser looks the coolest. But that doesn’t mean I am fearful or want to destroy the other companies. It would be silly to claim these companies are not competeing with each other. SpaceX has a leg up on the competition right now and no, it isn’t Dragon-baiting Dreamchaser or Orion fans to mention that.
Yeah, as I’ve said before, “I hope they all succeed.”
There’s another piece of Orion that isn’t happening either….Interstellar?
Orion
Type: Interstellar manned stretch capsule
Who: NASA/U.S. Congress
Launching: 2021–2025
Destination: Asteroid, Mars
The Odds: Even
It also shows an Orion configuration I have never seen…. A massive space station sized crew cabin inserted between the service module and the command module???
Is “Interstellar” supposed to be a name, or a description? Because asteroids and Mars aren’t interstellary, they’re intrastellar.
BTW, I dunno if you can do anything about this yourself, Rand, but it’s crazy that your comment box lets people enter the bold and italics tags, but not the underline one. (and no, em and strong aren’t subsitutes; they tend to just map to italics and bold, respectively.
“intrastellar” means “inside stars”.
Into the sun’s corona, and beyond!
Yeah, I think the word they’re looking for is interplanetary.
With the SLS Block IIIB, due to enter service in the 2070’s, we’ll be able to launch an evolved Orion capsule on interstellar missions of up three months duration. The idea is to put the Orion on a trajectory that will intersect a straight line between our sun and Alpha Centauri, thus becoming “interstellar” and have the crew take images of both stars from a point directly between them, though obviously not equidistant from both. This difficult goal will require launching the Orion far outside the ecliptic, ruling out all but a lunar slingshot trajectory, and will mark a major milestone in human spaceflight, the first time humans were actually in between two stars.
Huh, i thought Block IIIB was supposed to be the final HST rescue mission that will attach a pair of ATKs advanced solid boosters to the aging telescope and boost it closer to the things its trying to see.
Block IV4B is a Shuttle derived heavy Sodium retrieval mission, intended to take a big sample the sodium tail of the moon and bring it back to International space station. Combined with a commercially delivered chlorine, the 2-man crew will have enough salt to last forever !
Doctor Flamond: You see, a year ago, I was close to perfecting the first magnetic desalinization process so revolutionary, it was capable of removing the salt from over 500 million gallons of seawater a day. Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the earth?
Nick Rivers: Wow. They’d have enough salt to last forever.
— Top Secret
LOL for “reader”
The author at Popular Mechanics is probably just a bit fuzzy about the difference between interplanetary and interstellar.
Though there is the possibility that he expects a monumental cock-up on a flight to Mars
We lost one of the early Mars ships, the Ares IV, when it fell into a graviton ellipse and ended up far out in the Delta Quadrant, where it was recovered by the starship Voyager in season 6, episode 128. So yes, given an unfortunate encounter with a space anomaly, the Orion could go interstellar.
I was thinking more along the lines of a rough AI controlling the ship and using the propellant to stop at Mars and come back to carry on outwards, but a graviton ellipse, or uncharted wormhole works too.
Your memory is frightening.
In the biz, we usually call that a negative space wedgie.
Elon Musk’s tax-farming approach makes the most sense: do something cheaper; win the government contract. Also the one proposing a revised space-plane design sounds at least doable. The rest is bunk (Space tourism? Please.) the prize for which goes to NASA for the proposed manned trip to an asteroid. What knucklehead dreamed that up?
“Space tourism” would work just fine… if someone actually started flying already.