jlf1961
Posts: 14840
Joined: 6/10/2008
From: Somewhere Texas
Status: offline
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Aside from being the person described in my tag line, I also happen to be a bit of a technogeek.
I have been following the NASA progress on the Orion Deep Space Exploration Vehicle, or the Edsel of space travel.
A few points that seem to be glaringly obvious to a non-rocket scientist that these brains seem to have not thought about.
1) The Orion capsule is basically an enlarged Apollo type, with a four person crew.
2) Long duration space missions cause all kinds of physiological problems, so a minimal mission to Mars means that the crew will be traveling for damn near a year in micro gravity. When they get to mars, they aint even gonna be able to walk around.
3) The cost of lifting a payload from the earth's surface is extremely expensive, even if you break it up from one big load to a lot of smaller ones, you still spend a shit ton (equate it to a woman on a shoe buying expedition with a astronomically large credit limit.)
NASA (like the shoe buying woman) will eventually realize they got a lot to carry at one time or they are going to go broke with a lot of trips.
Now, a really bright, although not listened to, rocket scientist, looked at the cost of building the ships featured in some of the recent "Mars" vacation Hollywood movies.
The ship from "Red Planet" would cost about half of the proposed plan, and of course would be built in orbit, and have a rotating hab module.
The Mission to Mars vessel was a bit more expensive, but still well below the current plan cost.
And finally, the ship from "Martian" is the most economical of all of them, even when you figure the cost of going back and rescuing the potato growing Matt Damon (who, for some reason, did not use any of those taters to make booze.)
Now, all of those ships were huge because they were dependent on chemical rockets.
Want to cut the cost down and still carry a big whopping payload, go to the current ION technology. Okay, this means you gonna have to put a small nuclear reactor on the ship (they buried a nuclear power cell in the Lets rescue the non booze making Matt Damon movie) which has already been done on some satellites (Russia been doing it for years.)
Using ION rockets, you dont need to build a new ship for each mission, you could build two or three and reuse the damn things.
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Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?
You cannot control who comes into your life, but you can control which airlock you throw them out of.
Paranoid Paramilitary Gun Loving Conspiracy Theorist AND EQUAL OPPORTUNI
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A giant step sideways, or how to spend a trillion dolla... - 
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