I'd settle for the average MPH for the internal combustion engine to be 50
Less gravity, MUCH easier to launch rockets into space. This is why I said, a moon station would ultimately make space travel A LOT cheaper. Think about putting satellites into orbit...or launching whatever mission...with much smaller, new type rockets, MUCH less fuel required etc.
It's the kiddie pool of space travel. You build a base on the moon and learn how to survive. You get in trouble the earth is only 250,000 miles away to send help. Then you move on to the deep end, Mars. The lessons you learned from the moon will help you to succeed.
As for the benefit of manned space flight, DrPizza and I have had this discussion at some length before. Unmanned space flight has a much better science bang for the buck than manned missions. Manned missions do return science but not nearly as much nor as cost efficient as unmanned.
The other main thing it provides is inspiration. Basically every engineer I knew in college became an engineer because they wanted to work for NASA or wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. Most obviously didn't go on to work at NASA. Instead they went on to work elsewhere. How much benefit does the US and the world derive from kids going into science and engineering because they wanted to be astronauts?
I think it's sad that instead of our greatest young minds being inspired by Nasa, becoming engineers or scientists and being our greatest asset that they've instead been inspired by our society of excessive greed into putting their gifts to use not towards benefiting man but towards undermining their fellow Americans in banking/wallstreet and finance.
Id like to see a citation of this. Dinosaurs were roaming the Earth as late as 65 million years ago. If the earth added 75 days to a year during this period it would mean 2 billion years ago a single day was 2 hours long, which is fucking nonsense if you think complex life is going to form under those conditions, much less the Earth even maintaining its atmosphere with that much centrifugal force applied.
Less gravity, MUCH easier to launch rockets into space. This is why I said, a moon station would ultimately make space travel A LOT cheaper. Think about putting satellites into orbit...or launching whatever mission...with much smaller, new type rockets, MUCH less fuel required etc.
We can go to the moon with our current tech.
Block II SLS has about the same up mass as Saturn V (140Mt)
Block 1 SLS/Orion will be doing an unmanned lunar flyby circa 2018 currently.
Is there something there that we need?
It's the kiddie pool of space travel. You build a base on the moon and learn how to survive. You get in trouble the earth is only 250,000 miles away to send help. Then you move on to the deep end, Mars. The lessons you learned from the moon will help you to succeed.
A space elevator would make more sense so we could start building a generation ship.
I was just reading about SLS this past weekend. I don't understand why if SLS is a successor to Saturn V, it's final variant only has about the same amount of thrust.
I was just reading about SLS this past weekend. I don't understand why if SLS is a successor to Saturn V, it's final variant only has about the same amount of thrust.
Only if there is a transporter which can send all the equipment to the moon... otherwise you are just launching stuff twice.
Due to what they call the "tyranny of the rocket equation" putting bigger and bigger things into space gets really crazily incredibly difficult. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html And the saturn V was indeed an incredible machine.
The other thing though is where you would want to go or what you would want to do. We have enough delta v in the current launch devices (falcon 9 1.2, atlas 5, delta 4 heavy, ariane 5, proton, etc) to put things into LEO or GTO/GEO 'easily' enough and that is what communications businesses and governments with spy satellites want to pay for. If you want to go to mars we have enough delta v to get there, although getting something to the surface and back is rather more difficult. For something bigger than SLS block II to make sense you would have to have a requirement for an extremely heavy mass you want to put on the martian surface or similar, and because of the nature of the mass fraction in rocketry it gets absurdly difficult if that mass has to only be a few percent of the overall rocket weight.
I do like some of the current ideas being looked into to tackle this though. spacex is shooting for reusability which would be awesome (see the waitbutwhy article for that), and if ULA's ACES actually comes online and works then the idea of getting a light mass into orbit, refueling, and then sending it on its way could perhaps give us a little more umph to branch out beyond LEO/GEO.
Appreciate the response, but I guess my question is why even develop the SLS if it isn't better than Saturn V. Why not just make more Saturn V's?
What Screech said.I was just reading about SLS this past weekend. I don't understand why if SLS is a successor to Saturn V, it's final variant only has about the same amount of thrust.
Due to what they call the "tyranny of the rocket equation" putting bigger and bigger things into space gets really crazily incredibly difficult. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html And the saturn V was indeed an incredible machine.
The other thing though is where you would want to go or what you would want to do. We have enough delta v in the current launch devices (falcon 9 1.2, atlas 5, delta 4 heavy, ariane 5, proton, etc) to put things into LEO or GTO/GEO 'easily' enough and that is what communications businesses and governments with spy satellites want to pay for. If you want to go to mars we have enough delta v to get there, although getting something to the surface and back is rather more difficult. For something bigger than SLS block II to make sense you would have to have a requirement for an extremely heavy mass you want to put on the martian surface or similar, and because of the nature of the mass fraction in rocketry it gets absurdly difficult if that mass has to only be a few percent of the overall rocket weight.
I do like some of the current ideas being looked into to tackle this though. spacex is shooting for reusability which would be awesome (see the waitbutwhy article for that), and if ULA's ACES actually comes online and works then the idea of getting a light mass into orbit, refueling, and then sending it on its way could perhaps give us a little more umph to branch out beyond LEO/GEO.
Probably because contractors want pork. But it is at least a little more complicated
The original saturn V was also subcontracted out to a million different people, a lot of whom worked on the project, and many of whom are dead, so simply rebuilding more is apparently rather more complicated than simply following the blueprints (remember, very little was automated in the original construction of the saturn V).
That said, you want to try to calculate a cost comparison of saturn v vs SLS I'm pretty sure saturn V comes out ahead nicely. But that is based on the costs of building something then vs now, and even if you were to rebuild the saturn V you would have to rebuild all the infracstructure for it, which again would probably be more expensive now vs then. In which case, it seems silly to build the infrastructure for old technology when we might be able to do a better job with newer approaches.
If we really want a heavy lift vehicle the saturn V did a pretty good job, I think the real issue is that there just isn't a reasonable demand for one. But congress wanted to spend some pork and so here we are. For what its worth, Falcon heavy is slated to have about a third of saturn 5's capability to LEO and about a quarter to the moon, so they might make the entire SLS system unnecessary if they ever roll the damn thing out.
The F-1 engine from the saturn V itself might be getting reworked for application on SLS, see
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/
edit: but in case I came off as being overly negative on the SLS system, of all the ways we can spend tax money I think of space exploration, even things like this, as among the better avenues. Money spent here, even on seemingly pork projects, tends to have a far superior ROI than money spent pretty much everywhere else, so it really is an investment in future technologies, including those here on earth.
Probably because contractors want pork. But it is at least a little more complicated
The original saturn V was also subcontracted out to a million different people, a lot of whom worked on the project, and many of whom are dead, so simply rebuilding more is apparently rather more complicated than simply following the blueprints (remember, very little was automated in the original construction of the saturn V).
That said, you want to try to calculate a cost comparison of saturn v vs SLS I'm pretty sure saturn V comes out ahead nicely. But that is based on the costs of building something then vs now, and even if you were to rebuild the saturn V you would have to rebuild all the infracstructure for it, which again would probably be more expensive now vs then. In which case, it seems silly to build the infrastructure for old technology when we might be able to do a better job with newer approaches.
If we really want a heavy lift vehicle the saturn V did a pretty good job, I think the real issue is that there just isn't a reasonable demand for one. But congress wanted to spend some pork and so here we are. For what its worth, Falcon heavy is slated to have about a third of saturn 5's capability to LEO and about a quarter to the moon, so they might make the entire SLS system unnecessary if they ever roll the damn thing out.
The F-1 engine from the saturn V itself might be getting reworked for application on SLS, see
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/
edit: but in case I came off as being overly negative on the SLS system, of all the ways we can spend tax money I think of space exploration, even things like this, as among the better avenues. Money spent here, even on seemingly pork projects, tends to have a far superior ROI than money spent pretty much everywhere else, so it really is an investment in future technologies, including those here on earth.