The documentary project has a trailer out, and a new Kickstarter to complete and release it. It seems to have evolved considerably (and usefully) from the original project.
4 thoughts on “Fight For Space”
Comments are closed.
The documentary project has a trailer out, and a new Kickstarter to complete and release it. It seems to have evolved considerably (and usefully) from the original project.
Comments are closed.
Well that didn’t inspire me at all. No mention of commercial efforts. Sounds like have the government build a big *&^$## rocket and a big (*&#$)(# space program again….
Well, you should comment over there.
Agreed. I like the graphic of a rocket being weighed down by the government. But the solution is for the government to cut the chains and just let go. Any continued involvement by the government is just going to hold us back, and I’m concerned that that’s exactly what this project will advocate for.
I think the current environment for space development is a lot better than it used to be. To a large degree this is thanks to the efforts done by SpaceX in making the launches cheaper. If they succeed in making the launchers reusable economically it will open up near space for human development and colonization.
NASA really needs to focus on investments into ISRU technology and on-orbit assembly. This is not the 1960s anymore. You could do a Moon mission with currently existing launch capacity if you wanted to. I will give you one example. The Russians had planned at one point to do a Zond manned lunar flyby with a Proton in the 1960s. Delta IV Heavy and Falcon 9 Heavy have similar or larger launch capacity than the Proton rocket. At the time there were plans for doing a Moon mission with multiple launches. In the end it got discarded because they had enough funding to develop a whole new rocket and at the time automated docking technology was so horrible that they decided to send the whole thing in one package from Earth. This is no longer an issue. Not with modern computer technology.
If NASA wants to go to the Moon just think of the payloads and missions and fit them into the current launchers. It may require developing some standards for adapters and things like that. They may need to do some missions to test on-orbit assembly. Developing a new launcher is a waste of time.
As for the movie I agree that it was sad to see the Saturn hardware thrown away like it was. But at the time there were no economically viable payloads that needed that much capacity and the proposals to reuse the engines in a smaller rocket went nowhere because everyone thought the Shuttle would be the next biggest and greatest thing and would render the Saturn obsolete. IMO the problem with the Shuttle is that it needed a spiral development model which should not have ended once the initial vehicles were done. The Shuttle suffers a lot from what we call the second system effect in software. The Shuttle is a bloated piece of hardware where the designers tried to do everything they could not do in the Saturn and they ended up going a step too far.