LIVE: CCDev-2 Awards and Decision Discussion - April 18

[Jim]

The inspection of DC at the ISS  with a RCS and a camera is a case I was wondering about, with the hundreds of UAV's in the world today of every size and shape where is the equivalent for the ISS.

Surely sombody could have put something together for them so they would not have to put that ald shuttle through so many Ester Williams Sync Swimming lessons for pictures every time it visited.

Where is the little EVEY doing the Ginger Rodgers with WALLE's Fred Estaire.

Is there a effort to make a simple inspection remote or is that to simple and someone is making a shuttle type all in one type remote that also does the windows and tightens loose screws and paints the siding.

Just wondering.

Shuttle inspection requirements are not applicable to other vehicles

[Jorge]

The inspection of DC at the ISS  with a RCS and a camera is a case I was wondering about, with the hundreds of UAV's in the world today of every size and shape where is the equivalent for the ISS.

There was one in development, called Mini-AERCam. It was canceled because the OBSS provided much better resolution for RCC inspection.

Surely sombody could have put something together for them so they would not have to put that ald shuttle through so many Ester Williams Sync Swimming lessons for pictures every time it visited.

Guarantee you that developing the Esther Williams maneuver (RPM) the shuttle did was a thousand times cheaper than developing Mini-AERCam.

Is there a effort to make a simple inspection remote or is that to simple

No, it's too complicated. An ISS crewmember watching the Esther Williams maneuver through a camera is much simpler and cheaper.

[10W29]

Hopefully a lesson well learned after the shuttle incidents.  Personally, I'd prefer seeing 3 - two capsules for most payloads and DC for delicate experiment return and medical or emergency evac.

Can DreamChaser stay docked to the station for six months?

Yes all ccdev craft must be able to do so.

Is there any concern for an astronaut who has been weightless for 6 months to land the DC?   

[pathfinder_01]

Hopefully a lesson well learned after the shuttle incidents.  Personally, I'd prefer seeing 3 - two capsules for most payloads and DC for delicate experiment return and medical or emergency evac.

Can DreamChaser stay docked to the station for six months?

Yes all ccdev craft must be able to do so.

Is there any concern for an astronaut who has been weightless for 6 months to land the DC?   

Anything that can be used for CRV must be able to land itself.

[manboy]

Let’s say commercial on line in 5 years. That means after 2016, ISS will have only 4 more years of operation. Unless the station is extended to 2025-2030, is the investment worth the mission left? I’m just looking at the big picture here for commercial.
Regards
Robert

I've thought about this a few times and I feel it needs to be discussed more often.

Hopefully a lesson well learned after the shuttle incidents.  Personally, I'd prefer seeing 3 - two capsules for most payloads and DC for delicate experiment return and medical or emergency evac.

Can DreamChaser stay docked to the station for six months?

Yes all ccdev craft must be able to do so.

I'm having trouble finding the requirements, can you link me?

The inspection of DC at the ISS  with a RCS and a camera is a case I was wondering about, with the hundreds of UAV's in the world today of every size and shape where is the equivalent for the ISS.

There was one in development, called Mini-AERCam. It was canceled because the OBSS provided much better resolution for RCC inspection.

I thought it was still in development just at very low level of funding.

Surely sombody could have put something together for them so they would not have to put that ald shuttle through so many Ester Williams Sync Swimming lessons for pictures every time it visited.

Guarantee you that developing the Esther Williams maneuver (RPM) the shuttle did was a thousand times cheaper than developing Mini-AERCam.

Is there a effort to make a simple inspection remote or is that to simple

No, it's too complicated. An ISS crewmember watching the Esther Williams maneuver through a camera is much simpler and cheaper.

It's just time consuming for the crew and wasteful of propellant.

[pathfinder_01]

manboy here:

http://commercialcrew.nasa.gov/document_file_get.cfm?docid=107

page 10

[Garrett]

I like seeing this kind of thing because certain posters also carry on about how shuttle was a failure, never lived up to its promises, etc yet I'm not sure if certain posters realize they are doing the exact same thing today. 

Fallacious argument. How can posters today be aware that they are commenting on a future failure?

It's ironic that hindsight gives people the all-mighty, holier-than-thou perspective to say why something is a failure or that something will be a failure when about the same level of detail is currently known.

Not sure what you're trying to say above. I think you were trying to say that people who think they know it all because of hindsight also falsely think they know it all for the future. It's true that hindsight does not make an expert, but hindsight gives people the possibility of learning from the mistakes of history. It may not give us an "all-mighty" perspective, but it gives us one that we never had before the Shuttle era.

[Jorge]

The inspection of DC at the ISS  with a RCS and a camera is a case I was wondering about, with the hundreds of UAV's in the world today of every size and shape where is the equivalent for the ISS.

There was one in development, called Mini-AERCam. It was canceled because the OBSS provided much better resolution for RCC inspection.

I thought it was still in development just at very low level of funding.

If so, they're not even using the original project team. I know most of the folks on it and they've all moved on to either Orion or Morpheus.

Surely sombody could have put something together for them so they would not have to put that ald shuttle through so many Ester Williams Sync Swimming lessons for pictures every time it visited.

Guarantee you that developing the Esther Williams maneuver (RPM) the shuttle did was a thousand times cheaper than developing Mini-AERCam.

Is there a effort to make a simple inspection remote or is that to simple

No, it's too complicated. An ISS crewmember watching the Esther Williams maneuver through a camera is much simpler and cheaper.

It's just time consuming for the crew and wasteful of propellant.

It adds 18 minutes to the approach timeline and takes about 80 pounds of propellant. Guarantee you AERCam would have been more than an 18 minute hit to the crew timeline (due to crew monitoring requirements) and that the final AERCam assembly (including deployer) would have weighed in the neighborhood of 80 pounds, so the performance was a wash.

My point stands, the RPM is simpler and cheaper than AERCam.

[manboy]

Couldn't the AERCam just be controled by ground?

[Jorge]

Couldn't the AERCam just be controled by ground?

No, way too much latency and continuous comm is not guaranteed. The crew must be the "last line of defense" against collision.

[punder]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

[Jim]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

So what?  My point is still right.

It still isn't an X-37 much like the  B-52 is not a  B-47 but was still a derivative.

[yg1968]

Why would Boeing submit an alternate proposal to the CST-100? You are only allowed to be the main participant in one CCDev proposal.

[punder]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

So what?  My point is still right.

It still isn't an X-37 much like the  B-52 is not a  B-47 but was still a derivative.

Despite the fact that I specifically said in my post that it might have to be scaled up, and I never asserted it would called an X-37. 

Some people are always right, even when they're occasionally wrong.  Nice work if you can get it!

[Jim]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

So what?  My point is still right.

It still isn't an X-37 much like the  B-52 is not a  B-47 but was still a derivative.

Despite the fact that I specifically said in my post that it might have to be scaled up, and I never asserted it would called an X-37. 

Some people are always right, even when they're occasionally wrong.  Nice work if you can get it!

Wrong
I said no to a head start and for X-37b being scaled up from an early vehicle.  A scaled up X-37 is further away from flight than CST-100

[Prober]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

So what?  My point is still right.

It still isn't an X-37 much like the  B-52 is not a  B-47 but was still a derivative.

Despite the fact that I specifically said in my post that it might have to be scaled up, and I never asserted it would called an X-37. 

Some people are always right, even when they're occasionally wrong.  Nice work if you can get it!

the design scales real well with a doubling of the current size.

[punder]

I dunno, if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.  (And I think the X-37B is actually a scaled-up version of a previous design, no?)

No and no.

It was not designed to be manned

Well, how about that!  From Leonard David's report on the X-37 today:

"Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station."

So what?  My point is still right.

It still isn't an X-37 much like the  B-52 is not a  B-47 but was still a derivative.

Despite the fact that I specifically said in my post that it might have to be scaled up, and I never asserted it would called an X-37. 

Some people are always right, even when they're occasionally wrong.  Nice work if you can get it!

Wrong
I said no to a head start and for X-37b being scaled up from an early vehicle.  A scaled up X-37 is further away from flight than CST-100

From astronautix dot com:
The Boeing X-37 Space Maneuver Vehicle began as a subscale version of a proposed USAF manned 21st Century spaceplane. The smaller-scale X-40 tested some technologies prior to completion of the X-37A. The X-37B was the operational reusable space vehicle. Operational, first launch 2010.04.22

What I said: 
...if you have already flown (twice) a reusable winged spacecraft that can carry a payload into orbit, stay on-orbit for several months, maneuver in orbit, and land autonomously, you de facto have a pretty huge head start, even if you have to scale up the vehicle and add some life support.

What Aviation Week said today:
Boeing is studying scaled-up variants of the reusable X-37B orbital test vehicle (OTV) for potential delivery of cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS) and other low-Earth-orbit destinations.

You can continue to say "no" and "wrong" but I don't understand why.

[Ronsmytheiii]

What Aviation Week said today:
Boeing is studying scaled-up variants of the reusable X-37B orbital test vehicle (OTV) for potential delivery of cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS) and other low-Earth-orbit destinations.

You can continue to say "no" and "wrong" but I don't understand why.

  There is a limited pool of money to develop commercial crew projects.  Boeing is going to concentrate on a single project to assure that they will win.  CST-100 has had the most work and is much simpler to design and operate. Again , it is just probably an in house idea from a single shop, not the position of the entire company.

Edit:  Also the X-40 was only a subscale aerodynamic study craft for the X-37.  Any attempt to "scale up" the X-37 will face huge new development issues ranging from TPS ect.  You cannot simply make a spacecraft bigger, its size and density are extremely important.  Better to stick with a design that has been designed for crew size from the beginning.