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The Future Of Rockets

14 Comments

Thoughts from Eric Berger, which I missed last week due to the funeral and the conference.

From my monograph:

NASA gave up on reusability a decade ago, when Mike Griffin selected Constellation, with its expendable launch systems, capsule, insertion stages and landers. It could in fact be argued that Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) gave up on it after it was given responsibility for it in the 1990s, which it turned into the failed X-33 program, which failure the center then used as an excuse to illogically claim that reusability didn’t work.

14 thoughts on “The Future Of Rockets”

    1. Sure they could have just replaced the chair for a fraction of the analysis cost, but would they have learned sumptin’?

      What are ya, anti-science?

      But seriously, science should often take a backseat to other considerations. For example, I assert that the first crew going to mars should not include any scientist. The whole purpose of the first crew on mars should be to make it possible for those that follow to live comfortably. They need to build habitats and farms; Storage tanks and a wide range of raw manufactured materials like plastic for 3D printers.

      Let the colonists rent a room to the scientists that come later. It’s not like they’ll miss out on any discoveries by the time they start working.

        1. Maybe add some technicians who can do a variety of tasks ordered by the crew of the orbiting station for science or other purposes.

      2. For example, I assert that the first crew going to mars should not include any scientist.

        But then how will things have the shit scienced out of them?

      3. You’ll need some science training in there. For example, I heard way back that there was the possibility for a high chromium content in Martian soil. That can poison and kill people, if you don’t deal with it. You need someone who can test for that and coherently communicate the testing to the people on Earth to sort through. There may be a variety of hazards such as landslides, cosmic ray bursts, heavy metal poisoning or highly reactive subsurface chemistry, flooding, extreme weather, etc which you need to know about in order for your colony to survive.

        This leads to one of the great ironies of this thread. Namely, that by far the most pragmatic and greatest demand for Martian science will come from Martian colonists.

        1. People trained in the relevant sciences should be on the crew, tempered by an eye for getting real world work done. I. E. engineers.

    2. These are the cretins who did an engineering analysis of a failure – on a 17 year old office chair

      While the motive for doing the engineering analysis has been left unsaid in the actual analysis, what is supposed to be the problem here? Engineering failures don’t happen on a regular schedule. Something like this would be an excellent training opportunity for the real thing. If they screw it up, no one dies.

      1. An engineering analysis on a 17 year old office chair sounds like something engineering students might do. Or government seat warmers with too much time on their hands. In the real world we know that stuff wears out.

      2. It was a 17 year old office chair…..the replacement cost of which was less than the gate meetings deciding on when to have pre-planning meetings….

        It was a stupid waste of taxpayer money, which sums up quite a lot of NASA since Apollo…..

        And NASA has quite enough failures to handle training requirements.

  2. A PhD outpost would enable scientists to efficiently operate rovers on Mars without the time delay from communicating with Earth.

    Anyone know the time delay off hand? (For current communications technology)

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