Note: Only forum leaders may delete posts.
*HTML is ON *UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend
Smilies Legend
[i]The new spacecraft, called Orion, is a capsule and service module system designed to support both the station and lunar missions. NASA spent several years studying architectures and researching every available commercial rocket to find the design that could best accomplish those dual mission objectives in the safest, most reliable way. The conclusion we reached was that a space shuttle and Apollo derived vehicle was the best choice. Many have challenged this decision and still are advocating the use of existing commercial launch vehicles. Those have been studied extensively and fall short of our requirements for several reasons. First, existing commercial launch vehicles can lift only a fraction of the mass required for station and lunar missions in a single launch. Second, existing commercial launch vehicles have been designed and built to carry unmanned payloads; they would need to be heavily modified to meet our human rating requirements. A core goal of the Astronaut Office is that the next launch vehicle should be an order of magnitude safer than the previous vehicle. That's a goal the Ares-Orion architecture can meet. Current commercial launch vehicles, even if they could lift the mass needed, cannot meet that goal without extensive modifications in structural strength, the addition of new launch abort systems, significant alterations of flight termination systems, addition of cockpit command and control of systems, addition of manual control, addition of redundancy and robustness in several critical systems and subsystems, and an entirely new second stage to provide adequate lift and abort performance during ascent. In our final Exploration Systems Architecture Study, the shuttle-Apollo derived launch vehicle, besides being the only design that could meet our mission requirements, was the highest-rated for crew safety. In fact, it was about twice as safe as any other option. This option also proved superior to others in terms of cost and schedule.[/i]
Contact Us | The Source for Space History & Artifacts
Copyright 1999-2024 collectSPACE. All rights reserved.