Shades of Apollo.

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_23_2012_p22-477250.xml

A testament to those engineers in the 60s. Bring em' out of retirement I say (or dig them up..oops..)..!

PS - That said..I'm also supremely impressed with today's engineers. I mean..the Mars Rovers accomplishments are truly phenomenal..

What is that, some sort of a tube?

Take a breath and lets see if the latest actually lands in a couple weeks. Hell of a gamble on the method they chose.

And Von Braun must be smiling somewhere.

I would actually go and see it fire to be honest. it seems we are headed backwards as far a space exploration goes.


Bullet

Just another indication of just how amazing the 1960's effort to go to the Moon really was...

A lot of people have been predicting the resurrection of the Saturn system...looks like a variation of it may actually happen!

I don't think we are heading backwards. I think we are simply building on top of what everyone knows that works.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you build a car so you shouldn't need to redesign a rocket
from scratch every time a new mission objective is set. The Saturn V rockets are proven design and using them
to power the new missions to the Moon and Mars is not only logical but cost effective.

Can I re-phrase Desert Eagle?

"Standing on the shoulders of giants."

It goes something like that..

I call it 'progressing backwards'.

The Saturn V is still the most powerful machine man has ever built.
Righteous!



The F-1 is a rocket engine developed by Rocketdyne and used in the Saturn V. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, which served as the main launch vehicle in the Apollo program. The F-1 is still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled rocket engine ever developed.[1]
Rocketdyne F-1

So I must ask this, what should be the next objective for space exploration? Landing people on the moon again just "because" or should there be some economic motive?

What about a manned exploration to Mars? Would a manned exploration be able to collect scientific data that unmanned probes and rovers can't or would the main point of a manned exploration to Mars be simply for the human aspect and to say that humanity finally landed people on Mars?

I think we need to go back to the moon as part of a manned Mars expedition. The moon is a more harsh climate than Mars, so you can bet that whatever works there will also work on Mars. If anything goes wrong we can have a rescue there in 3 days, assuming we keep a rescue vehicle in Earth orbit or perhaps docked at the ISS. Lastly, we'll be able to perfect manufacturing technologies needed on Mars on the moon, and have a much shallower gravity well to launch prepositioned supplies from. If we're going to branch out into the solar system, at a minimum we NEED to be able to manufacture fuel, building materials, N & O for the atmosphere, and some kind of soil for food production. We should be able to start all this on the moon.

Ya'll just don't know . . . I LOVE NASA stuff! Watching a Saturn 5 launch is like seeing the most fantastic sci-fi books I've ever read come to life.

I would definetely want to go Hear (Feel) that it has Frequency down to 0Hz..

I suppose I should be pleased as punch that Americans will no longer be having to beg rides from the Russians.

I'm not.

Has the American public education system failed our children so badly that we are having to dust off fifty-year-old designs because that's all we have left? That's all we know how to do? Recycle inefficient designs from our grandparents' time?

I'm so happy that we have an idea on how to get people back in space on American soil, but this is not the way to go about it. The Shuttle was the most efficient, economical, and ecologically-friendly method of space delivery, you could recycle almost everything on it but the BOT (Big Orange Thing).

Now what? We launch one vehicle, burn up a few billion in eight minutes, and we can reuse NOTHING.

As originally intended, yes.

In the real world, no.

The problem was it took more to "turn it around" for the next flight than a Boeing 737. It took months of efforts to rebuild it every flight.

You lost the tank, sure.

But you ALSO burned TWO giant solid rockets of polutants. Great for lifting, bad for environment, dangerous for humans.

Overall much more costly per flight, more logistically complex and limited. And you dont get enough orbiter use before they are retired to justify the effort. If we'd continued Saturn, scales of economy would make space cheaper.

The upside of the shuttle is America learned a lot, and got much more use from its uber expensive spy sattelites, cutting its price in half or less, when it really desperately needed them.

I think that the reasons for going to Mars are enough that we should use the Saturn 5 rockets so we can get to the planet and accomplish the missions we need to accomplish until we discover a more advanced propulsion method which will make long-distance travel as "green" as we want it.

With our current state of technology it's often more efficient to do it that way.
It most certainly is if all you want to do is get heavy payloads into space as you don't cut into that payload available with all the re-usable gear otherwise needed.

I don't know if I am excited about this or not. Would I be excited if the US Military unveiled plans for a building a 50 year old aircraft design?

The F1 still ranks on top after so many decades, in part because there has not been any mission that needed such power or more. It's a testament to the engineers of the era. If I remember right, the F1 went from a military requirement concept to a firing test piece in 7 years?

But that need is here again. Given that today we have computing power unthinkable in 1955, is it not possible to aim higher?

The physics of lifting a payload out of earth's orbit have not changed. We still must ignite chemicals to create a controlled explosion to lift payloads. The chemistry of the propellants required has probably not advanced much either.

For the time being, space exploration is still in Newton's world.

No doubt you could redesign the rocket motor, using different materials - perhaps. But that takes time and money and you may well end up in basically the same place as where you started, only it would be called the F1 mark II or something.

There's also Project Orion but it's a bit destructive when being launched.

In all honesty, their consideration of the F1 engine was to get 20 metric tonnes more. With present technology, it takes a lot.

And like Billzilla was alluding to, it is crazy, we should have warp power by now. I'm not kidding.
The boys & girls at CERN should be working harder imho.

Wow.
Thanks for that one, I never heard of it before. I love the section "potential problems."