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THE purpose of this program is to bring pork to Senator Shelby's state. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/16/editorial-no-trampoline-for-the-astrona

by vaadu 12y ago

THE purpose of this program is to bring pork to Senator Shelby's state. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/16/editorial-no-trampoline-for-the-astronauts/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/16/editorial-no...

hga 12y ago
His state is hardly the only one that will benefit, but it is indeed often called the Senate Launch System. But after Apollo NASA has been more a public works program than anything else, and for that matter one of the explicit goals of Apollo was to spend a lot of money in the South and "uplift" it. You can tell this is propaganda when you see garbage like this: "'The launch abort system (LAS) is a key reason that Orion is intended to become the safest spacecraft ever built. In an emergency it could activate to pull the crew module and the astronauts it will carry away from the launch pad and the rocket in milliseconds' NASA officials wrote on their Web site." The crew modules that preceded the Space Shuttle, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, all had one as well even when flying on inherently safer liquid fueled boosters; they're safer because you can turn them off. Look at the second paragraph of the link below about how the Air Force figured the Ares I SRB stack made crew survival impossible for an abort 30-60 seconds after launch; hopefully this system can vector the SRBs to the side in an abort, and their presence alone probably makes this system overall less safe than the pre-Shuttle ones. About the only thing I can say in favor of the SLS is that they dropped the Constellation Program Ares I idea of using a primary booster with a 5 segment SRB---and note those, and perhaps the SLS SRBs, were brand new wider versions, throwing away almost all the theoretical cost savings of reusing the Space Shuttle SRBs (look for when they talk about reusing Space Shuttle technology instead of hardware). That extra length version produced vibrations that could by themselves kill the crew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I#Analysis_and_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I#Analysis_and_testing), and the Orion capsule's utility was steadily decreased as they added vibration damping hardware instead of fixing the problem. I sure hope the 5 segment option in the SLS doesn't have this problem.

by vaadu 12y ago

hga 12y ago

His state is hardly the only one that will benefit, but it is indeed often called the Senate Launch System. But after Apollo NASA has been more a public works program than anything else, and for that matter one of the explicit goals of Apollo was to spend a lot of money in the South and "uplift" it. You can tell this is propaganda when you see garbage like this: "'The launch abort system (LAS) is a key reason that Orion is intended to become the safest spacecraft ever built. In an emergency it could activate to pull the crew module and the astronauts it will carry away from the launch pad and the rocket in milliseconds' NASA officials wrote on their Web site." The crew modules that preceded the Space Shuttle, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, all had one as well even when flying on inherently safer liquid fueled boosters; they're safer because you can turn them off. Look at the second paragraph of the link below about how the Air Force figured the Ares I SRB stack made crew survival impossible for an abort 30-60 seconds after launch; hopefully this system can vector the SRBs to the side in an abort, and their presence alone probably makes this system overall less safe than the pre-Shuttle ones. About the only thing I can say in favor of the SLS is that they dropped the Constellation Program Ares I idea of using a primary booster with a 5 segment SRB---and note those, and perhaps the SLS SRBs, were brand new wider versions, throwing away almost all the theoretical cost savings of reusing the Space Shuttle SRBs (look for when they talk about reusing Space Shuttle technology instead of hardware). That extra length version produced vibrations that could by themselves kill the crew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I#Analysis_and_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I#Analysis_and_testing), and the Orion capsule's utility was steadily decreased as they added vibration damping hardware instead of fixing the problem. I sure hope the 5 segment option in the SLS doesn't have this problem.