[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4430

Looks like this bunch has the goods on NASA, in the form of its new internal documents on the major new problems. One proposed solution is to have the CEV hover at the L-2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point 66,000 km above the Moon's farside, while the LSAM lunar lander does all the work of descending into lunar orbit, then landing, and later blasting off all the way back to the L-2 point for its rendezvous with the CEV. "This unconventional technique leads to significant mass savings on the CEV, and surprisingly leads to the same mass on the LSAM. In this case, the CEV fits on the Crew Launch Vehicle [which isn't the case any more for the currently existing plan]; however, the LSAM is still too large for the CaLV [Heavy Lifter] -- though the L2 architecture is closer to meeting the performance limit than the baseline cases examined."

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?

[Stephen]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4430

Looks like this bunch has the goods on NASA, in the form of its new internal documents on the major new problems. One proposed solution is to have the CEV hover at the L-2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point 66,000 km above the Moon's farside, while the LSAM lunar lander does all the work of descending into lunar orbit, then landing, and later blasting off all the way back to the L-2 point for its rendezvous with the CEV. "This unconventional technique leads to significant mass savings on the CEV, and surprisingly leads to the same mass on the LSAM. In this case, the CEV fits on the Crew Launch Vehicle [which isn't the case any more for the currently existing plan]; however, the LSAM is still too large for the CaLV [Heavy Lifter] -- though the L2 architecture is closer to meeting the performance limit than the baseline cases examined."

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?

From itty-bitty changes do mighty screwups grow!

Sounds like NASA folks have been making all those changes of theirs (eg the removal of methane/oxygen propellants) without fully thinking them or their ramifications through. Now their totality is threatening to snowball into something rather larger and more serious (judging from the article).

Unless they ungrade the CaLV or reverse some of the earlier changes, then I guess you're right, Bruce: the next step will have to be to "down-scope" the LSAM and/or the CEV. But then isn't that the way of many a space mission, unmanned and manned? We start out with the grand vision, it gets used to sell the thing to places like Congress, after which the next few years are spent scaling back the vision to fit the budget and rocket available.

Voyager, Viking, the Shuttle, the ISS. They all started out bigger and grander than what actually ended up getting off the ground. Why should the VSE be any different.

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Stephen

[mcaplinger]

Sounds like NASA folks have been making all those changes of theirs (eg the removal of methane/oxygen propellants)...

Methane/O2 only has a small advantage over MMH/NTO in specific impulse, and storing cryo propellants is a huge pain, so I don't see how that alone is really harming system performance. The supposed advantage of the methane was always for ISPP at Mars, but if we're not going to Mars than why deal with the complexity?