The absurdity of this program knows no bounds. I feel terrible for the NASA and industry managers who have to go through the kabuki of pretending any of this makes any sense.
6 thoughts on “NASA’s Upper-Stage Problem”
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The absurdity of this program knows no bounds. I feel terrible for the NASA and industry managers who have to go through the kabuki of pretending any of this makes any sense.
Comments are closed.
It would be a lot simpler and cheaper to simply delete the upper stage and fly the center core almost all the way to orbit, which would also solve the problem of not having nearly enough payload mass with just an Orion to justify launching the SLS. Of course then you’d have to mate Orion directly to the center core, which would take ten years of design studies and a couple hundred million dollars to modify the tower, but heh, it’s what they do.
I’ve never understood the “interim upper stage” concept, especially for manned flight. For just one thing, a while back their plan was for making the first flight of the “exploration” upper stage a manned flight (thus violating their own rules). And not just a manned flight, but requiring a TLI… I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I also don’t see why this is a concern at all, because every single worthwhile mission planned or proposed for SLS can be done with the interim upper stage, thus saving billions. Likewise, those same missions could be equally well served by an inert mass simulator in place of the upper stage, thus saving billions more. (IMHO, NASA could probably cobble together a mass simulator for a mere billion or two).
Likewise, those same missions could be equally well served by an inert mass simulator in place of the upper stage, thus saving billions more. (IMHO, NASA could probably cobble together a mass simulator for a mere billion or two).
Or we could do the whole missions in CGI. Even cheaper!
The sad thing is this actually makes sense. The whole program is a huge mistake.
And then there’s the monolithic Orion heat shield which, after a magnificently successful test last December, is being scrapped in favor of a new, 180-block design. ASAP noted that with interest in its May meeting, and I’d imagine the topic will be coming up in the next NASA Advisory Council confab.
http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asap/documents/ASAP_Second_Quarterly_Meeting_2015.pdf
The Panel was very interested in the details on the heat shield redesign from Avcoat integrated with monolithic honeycomb structure to Avcoat blocks (approximately 180) that are individually bonded to the vehicle. This new design presents some challenges with regard to verifying the bond between the blocks and the spacecraft. The Program is working through these challenges.
…the monolithic Orion heat shield which, after a magnificently successful test last December, is being scrapped in favor of a new, 180-block design…
This is definitively interesting. So they went full circle from one piece to a zillion little pieces. The certainly sounds expensive. I guess those extra million dollars Congress granted to SLS have found a home paying for the meticulous hand labor for this brilliant new design.
It’s a little early to be sure, but the new 180-block Avcoat design sounds suspiciously like the ca. 200-block PICA design that lost out back in 2009. One of the reasons for that was that all those blocks implied around twice that many gaps, and that made people nervous. Perhaps the state of the art advanced sufficiently since then that gap-filling is no longer as much of a concern.
BTW, Lockheed first started talking publicly about going from a monolithic to a block design back at the start of October last year. For that to have happened, lots of things had to have been going on behind the scenes for a good many months beforehand.
See
http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/11/05/engineers-recommend-changes-to-orion-heat-shield/