FARK.com: (7071890) 50 years into the space revolution and the new engine NASA is testing is... a modified version of the engine that lifted the Saturn Ib. Where are our warp drives and space colonies with green slave women?

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		50 years into the space revolution and the new engine NASA is testing is... a modified version of the engine that lifted the Saturn Ib. Where are our warp drives and space colonies with green slave women? (phys.org)		78
		More: Sad, NASA, Saturn IB, J-2X, space colonies, SLS, NASA Administrator, Apollo program, launch systems

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2327 clicks; posted to Geek » on 26 Apr 2012 at 9:08 AM | Favorite | share:

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cretinbob		2012-04-26 04:47:53 AM

Still have 300 year til that subby

DjangoStonereaver		2012-04-26 07:32:08 AM

Yeah! Its not like internal combustion engines are pretty much unchanged
since the 19th century.......

Those Germans knew how to make rocket motors, idiotmitter.

InfrasonicTom		2012-04-26 09:10:51 AM

Where's your so much better design rocket-scientist-mitter?

Wicked Chinchilla		2012-04-26 09:15:27 AM

That would take lots of research and funding. Neither of which are being prioritized right now in a very hostile budget environment.

wippit		2012-04-26 09:16:18 AM

/not warp drive
//not subby
///still a good idea

FuturePastNow		2012-04-26 09:20:25 AM

Reliable, powerful, already certified to blast people into space... but it's *old*. You don't understand. We can't use old designs just because they're good.

-a peek inside stupidmitter's mind

heinrich66		2012-04-26 09:21:23 AM

Because celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson says NASA is awesome.

Jethro74		2012-04-26 09:23:46 AM

Came for green slave women...

Then I read the article

LDM90		2012-04-26 09:27:17 AM

What sad times we live in...when passing ruffians can say "ni" to old ladies at will.

the_innkeeper		2012-04-26 09:27:57 AM

Wicked Chinchilla: That would take lots of research and funding. Neither of which are being prioritized right now in a very hostile budget environment.

angrymacface		2012-04-26 09:29:17 AM

We should already have impulse-powered DY-100 sleeper ships, but Khan and his supermen apparently stole the plans when he took the Botany Bay.

LDM90		2012-04-26 09:32:31 AM

Generation ships are a bad idea. Just ask Sky Haussmann and his psychotic dolphin.

dittybopper		2012-04-26 09:34:39 AM

InfrasonicTom: Where's your so much better design rocket-scientist-mitter?

My, the NERVA of some people!

Mayhem of the Black Underclass		2012-04-26 09:35:10 AM

wippit: [web-japan.org image 300x393]

/not warp drive
//not subby
///still a good idea

i.dailymail.co.uk

Yours is good, no doubt, but I like space trains better, less of the cables destroying cities when they fall back to earth. A few miles of track launching off the Himalayas results in only crushed mountains, and we don't need to worry about the space platform spinning off into space when that cable snaps. That said, that would be a great start to an artificial moon ring around the planet.

Bhruic		2012-04-26 09:36:24 AM

Where are the Loftstrom Loops, dammit?

farkeruk		2012-04-26 09:37:52 AM

To be honest, we're probably doing the best research right now, which is to pour money into physics with projects like the LHC. You can fund that for a fraction of what it costs to send astronauts to play Angry Birds in the space station.

dittybopper		2012-04-26 09:40:29 AM

Perhaps this is a sign that we've pushed the conventional LH/LO₂ fueled rocket motors as far as they can go, and we *SHOULD* be looking for alternatives. I don't see any for the initial boost into orbit*, but there are plenty of designs, some we could build and launch with very little effort, that would open up the solar system to quicker exploration.

*Largely for environmental reasons. The only emission from an engine that burns hydrogen and oxygen is relatively benign water vapor

way south		2012-04-26 09:47:00 AM

Nothing wrong with chemical motors. They just need to be more reliable and mass produced. Cheaper motors means you can lower the launch costs, and start to run more kinds of businesses in orbit.

Once you get a few businesses going, they'll invest in better rockets and non-rocket ideas. The rest becomes a matter of waiting for the market to work out the kinks in space travel.
The benefits trickle down to the rest of us.

/So does the flaming debris.
/I'm inventing the flameproof Kevlar umbrella.

Cthulhu_is_my_homeboy		2012-04-26 09:48:43 AM

Big dumb booster for the win.

realmolo		2012-04-26 09:49:50 AM

There's no real reason for us to go into space, or go to Mars, or any other kind of manned mission.

There's nothing for us (humanity) to learn by going into space. It would be a neat engineering project, but the end result would be...what?

The *fundamental* problem with space exploration is that we don't have anything better than rockets to push things around out there. Until that problem is solved, every other problem is pointless to consider.

theoblongs		2012-04-26 09:54:05 AM

indarwinsshadow		2012-04-26 09:55:05 AM

It's not just the engine though, right? Not an expert on anything in particular, but it would appear you'd probably need a massive amount of fuel to go faster than they can now, unless you want to build up speed over a long period of time. And then you get into shielding I suppose. The faster you go, the more radiation you'd run into along the way, so you'd have to beef up shielding. And then you'd have to compensate for newtons laws of motion, (acceleration, deceleration), and then there's the question of food, water, air, gravity. The list is endless. So far, I'd say the human race has done wonders. I'm not complaining. Everyone's in a hurry, but, consider how long it took to discover and colonize the new world and all the engineering that went into making it possible.

Bhruic		2012-04-26 10:01:41 AM

realmolo: There's no real reason for us to go into space, or go to Mars, or any other kind of manned mission.

There's nothing for us (humanity) to learn by going into space. It would be a neat engineering project, but the end result would be...what?

The *fundamental* problem with space exploration is that we don't have anything better than rockets to push things around out there. Until that problem is solved, every other problem is pointless to consider.

We didn't know what we'd learn in most human exploration. That's kind of the point of actually exploring in the first place. And the current space exploration has yielded large number of practical applications, most of which people don't realize originated there.

As for the "rockets" problem, that's less important - the rockets needed to get us into orbit are more worrisome at present.

akula		2012-04-26 10:03:51 AM

Given how the last 30+ years of space exploration have gone, I'd say getting back to the old Saturn designs is a damned good thing. Not that I have no love for the Shuttle- it was cool, but it was very limited. We never should have killed off the Saturn program.

I still think the plans are out there somewhere. No way in fark did they ALL get trashed. I know engineers- at least one of them grabbed a full set and has them stashed in a basement somewhere because hell, it's an awesome design. Just announce that whoever brings the plans in will get a ride into space for being awesome enough to see what the management couldn't- that getting rid of a fantastic heavy lift booster design was dumb as hell.

MuonNeutrino		2012-04-26 10:04:06 AM

DjangoStonereaver: Yeah! Its not like internal combustion engines are pretty much unchanged
since the 19th century.......

Those Germans knew how to make rocket motors, idiotmitter.

Internal combustion engines still run on basically the same principles, and have overall fairly *similar* designs today as they did back then, it's true. However, we're not still using slightly modified versions of the *specific* engine designs that were in use a century ago. Current cars don't have slight updates of model T engines under their hoods. That's the problem here - it's not that there's anything *wrong* with the j-2x engine, it's that you can't seriously expect anyone to believe that in 50 years we couldn't have developed something *better* if anyone had been (or was today) interested in spending the money.

Given the funding environment we're in these days and the research (or lack thereof) in developing new man-rated heavy lift engines over the past few decades, this approach actually makes sense. We're building on and evolving from the last solid program we had for human space exploration, which is a reasonable way to go about it. The sad part is that 40+ year gap - that this is such an old design and yet it's *still* the best starting point we've got. It's as if nobody ever bothered to build a better engine than the model T's for 40 years - in that case, it'd make sense to start from there, but it'd still be a damn shame to have wasted all that time.

mamoru		2012-04-26 10:06:46 AM

wippit: ///still a good idea

But, not going to happen until after there is a well established infrastructure in space. The cable needs to be built from space down. No way you can build it from the ground up. So, no space elevators until after we establish a real manufacturing and construction infrastructure up there. And all we have at the moment are rockets to haul all of that up there.

Still gonna be using rockets for quite some time.

Jubeebee		2012-04-26 10:11:18 AM

realmolo: The *fundamental* problem with space exploration is that we don't have anything better than rockets to push things around out there. Until that problem is solved, every other problem is pointless to consider.

It's actually really farking difficult to build an engine that can reach orbit that doesn't involve chucking a bunch of mass out the back at high speeds, which is essentially what a rocket does. We have lots of ways to move around once we're *in* space, but VASMIR, electric-ion engines, plasma drives, etc, are all useless at the bottom of a gravity well.

In fact, the only in-reality viable ways to reach orbit that don't involve rockets require engineering projects on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than anything ever built before. See the above-mentioned space elevators and Himalayan-based rail gun. We'd need to be sending multiple craft to orbit every day for decades before something like that became more economically viable than plain old rockets. And consider we couldn't even find a reason to make the 20 trips to orbit a year that would have made the Space Shuttle worthwhile.

We can't just set all of our research sliders to "Warp Drive" and come up with a revolutionary technology in 10 turns. Space travel is a very, very difficult engineering problem, and ought to be treated as such. Work on getting the cost down, work on getting the volume up, work on increasing the demand, and continue taking incremental steps toward greater efficiency. Whining that we aren't living in Star Trek isn't going to get us anywhere.

ourbigdumbmouth		2012-04-26 10:14:25 AM

Enough is enough. Time to open up Area 51 and see what they have. Time to see the military space program.

Gough		2012-04-26 10:14:44 AM

I had a chance to to take a close look at the Saturn that was laid out in one of the exhibition halls at the KSC visitors center. What struck me was that the technology in most of the Saturn wasn't appreciably different from that of the V-2. I wasn't alone in that observation; several of the NASA speakers for our event alluded to that as well.

CrazedHatter		2012-04-26 10:19:53 AM

Eh, we have another 50 years to beat the Zephram Cochrane date.

fluffy2097		2012-04-26 10:21:56 AM

baby boomers gutted the NASA budget so we could have the TSA, and military attacking innocent civilians.

/Not that it's the soldiers fault for following orders.
//Oh well. CEO's have money. That's what counts.

TV's Vinnie		2012-04-26 10:32:27 AM

If only the Smithsonian didn't take all of those Saturn blueprints they got from NASA in the 70's and and trashed them. Nice jerb there, curators!

Great_Milenko		2012-04-26 10:33:34 AM

FuturePastNow: Reliable, powerful, already certified to blast people into space... but it's *old*. You don't understand. We can't use old designs just because they're good.

-a peek inside stupidmitter's mind

The problem is not we're using proven , older technology to get into orbit, the problem is we're not going any further than orbit.

Step one, double NASA's budget. Step two, fire administrator who works for NASA and bring in some fresh ideas.

TV's Vinnie		2012-04-26 10:35:46 AM

DjangoStonereaver: Those Germans knew how to make rocket motors, idiotmitter.

It wasn't easy at first. Von Braun tried to send rockets to the Moon, but he kept hitting London.

Felgraf		2012-04-26 10:38:45 AM

You know, there have been a lot of these space-threads recently.

And they used to attract a certain... um... belligerent poster like Bevets to an Evolution thread.

Did someone get banned?

groppet		2012-04-26 10:57:19 AM

Hey they keep cutting NASAs budget, so they are going with what works. So good for them.

meanmutton		2012-04-26 10:57:51 AM

Wicked Chinchilla: That would take lots of research and funding. Neither of which are being prioritized right now in a very hostile budget environment.

In the past 50 years, we've spent over $400 billion in actual dollars, $800 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars on NASA funding. We're currently spending around $19 billion a year, which is higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than any point other than during the Apollo program.

The US Federal government spends around $100 billion a year on research with US industry kicking in a $250-300 billion more a year.

No one else spend even remotely close to those numbers.

fluffy2097		2012-04-26 11:01:36 AM

Great_Milenko: Step one, double NASA's budget. Step two, fire administrator who works for NASA and bring in some fresh ideas.

So we would make NASA's budget 0.9% of the national budget instead of 0.45%?

The defense budget has 20%.
Social security is 23%
'Discretionary' spending is 19%

We pay more interest on our national debt by an order of magnitude, then we spend on NASA, even if we doubled NASA's budget.

meanmutton		2012-04-26 11:04:14 AM

farkeruk: To be honest, we're probably doing the best research right now, which is to pour money into physics with projects like the LHC. You can fund that for a fraction of what it costs to send astronauts to play Angry Birds in the space station.

LHC: Null results are still results, right?

meanmutton		2012-04-26 11:06:11 AM

Bhruic: realmolo: There's no real reason for us to go into space, or go to Mars, or any other kind of manned mission.

There's nothing for us (humanity) to learn by going into space. It would be a neat engineering project, but the end result would be...what?

The *fundamental* problem with space exploration is that we don't have anything better than rockets to push things around out there. Until that problem is solved, every other problem is pointless to consider.

We didn't know what we'd learn in most human exploration. That's kind of the point of actually exploring in the first place. And the current space exploration has yielded large number of practical applications, most of which people don't realize originated there.

As for the "rockets" problem, that's less important - the rockets needed to get us into orbit are more worrisome at present.

We didn't have robots for the overwhelming majority of human exploration. For the cost of putting a small group of humans on Mars for a week, how many hundred rovers could we fund to be there for years?

dittybopper		2012-04-26 11:07:54 AM

meanmutton: We didn't have robots for the overwhelming majority of human exploration. For the cost of putting a small group of humans on Mars for a week, how many hundred rovers could we fund to be there for years?

Won't change the fact that there won't be *PEOPLE* there.

Some things you just gotta do in person.

Wicked Chinchilla		2012-04-26 11:08:41 AM

meanmutton: farkeruk: To be honest, we're probably doing the best research right now, which is to pour money into physics with projects like the LHC. You can fund that for a fraction of what it costs to send astronauts to play Angry Birds in the space station.

LHC: Null results are still results, right?

Null results can tell you more than positives sometimes, its all about the question you are attempting to answer.

Foundling		2012-04-26 11:13:03 AM

First Saturn 1B's used H-2 engines.

J-2 was the second and third stage of the Saturn V, and probably the second stage of the ASTP and Skylab Saturn 1B's.

// (serious nerd here)

Wicked Chinchilla		2012-04-26 11:13:44 AM

dittybopper: meanmutton: We didn't have robots for the overwhelming majority of human exploration. For the cost of putting a small group of humans on Mars for a week, how many hundred rovers could we fund to be there for years?

Won't change the fact that there won't be *PEOPLE* there.

Some things you just gotta do in person.

I agree with you, but disagree on the timing. Now is not the time for manned exploration (at a distance, anyway). Robotics is at such an advanced state that our probes can do quite a lot more than they used to. We need to get better and more efficient at the whole "getting from point A to point B" part of exploration before we expend massive amounts of resources on getting a person to do the same thing.

As crazy as it sounded I think Newts idea of a moonbase wouldn't be terrible to plan for in a decade or two. Send the robots to Mars and further while we figure out how to live on a completely hostile environment right here at home.

Reverend Monkeypants		2012-04-26 11:17:27 AM

NO NEW
FIX OLD

realmolo: There's no real reason for us to go into space, or go to Mars, or any other kind of manned mission.

There's nothing for us (humanity) to learn by going into space. It would be a neat engineering project, but the end result would be...what?

The *fundamental* problem with space exploration is that we don't have anything better than rockets to push things around out there. Until that problem is solved, every other problem is pointless to consider.

Yes, like there was no real reason for Marco Polo to do his thing, or the scads of Europeans galavanting aroung in the 15-1600s. Hopefully we'd at least find some indigenous lifeforms to enslave in the caves of Mars... something about minerals, blah blah human population expansion blah blah.

Also, you're an uninfromed fool for thinking that we've only used rockets to move stuff around in space... especially if you meant conventional rockets, which I think you did. I mean, hell, "Russian satellites have used electric propulsion for decades" (vikipedia) I gotta add here that Ion Thrusters have been in development since 1906 when Goddard himself thought of it.

One day, ONE fekking day, people will do a minute's research before opening their closed minded mouths.

Reverend Monkeypants		2012-04-26 11:23:06 AM

Sending robots to Mars to build a habitat and do some autonomous research is the best first step to go there and an inevitability. For real now, if some government doesn't do it then some rich dudes will make it happen for themselves.

Manned moonbase is an awesome "short term" goal... and by "short term" I mean 25 years or something and that's optimistic. Mining the asteroid belt? Not on my list, unless they find an asteroid of pure gold or something useful like neodynium... or some place where the Heechee hung out.

...

RDixon		2012-04-26 11:23:29 AM

Iran says we are developing the heavy lift rocket so we can weaponize space with nuclear weapons.

Demands the program be dismantled.

SacriliciousBeerSwiller		2012-04-26 11:28:43 AM

TV's Vinnie: If only the Smithsonian didn't take all of those Saturn blueprints they got from NASA in the 70's and and trashed them. Nice jerb there, curators!

Why the hell would NASA hand over blueprints they didn't have copies of? Retards.

fluffy2097		2012-04-26 11:36:05 AM

RDixon: Iran says we are developing the heavy lift rocket so we can weaponize space with nuclear weapons.

Demands the program be dismantled.

LOL.

Why do we need heavy lift rockets for nukes? Nukes aren't comparatively heavy, and we already have them in rockets that can reach anywhere on the planet and launch from anywhere on the planet.

/May as well say we need to stop making cruise ships because they could be used as troop carriers.

Prospero424		2012-04-26 11:42:30 AM

Foundling: First Saturn 1B's used H-2 engines.

J-2 was the second and third stage of the Saturn V, and probably the second stage of the ASTP and Skylab Saturn 1B's.

// (serious nerd here)

Yeah, and here I was thinking maybe they were bringing back the F-1.

/only very slightly disappointed

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