Our space shuttle fleet is awful!

How is the Orion pathetic? Is it just because it's a capsule design? At present, the capsule is the best and most efficient design to use for traveling outside of Earth's orbit. You can't go to the Moon with a Shuttle or Shuttle-like design. Too much useless mass (wings, tail, landing gear, etc).

After the Nasa went to the moon they wanted manned missions to mars. But Congress cut nasa's funding. So that stopped nasa in its tracks. But to go to Mars or any other planet Nasa had to learn how to live in space for long durations. So they modified an apollo rocket and made spacelab.

Spacelab was plagued with problems and was burnt up in the atmosphere. Congress durrinbg the last mission to the moon approved the space shuttle. which was only designed to travel to low earth orbits.

Only one shuttle was built that could safely reach 300 statute miles the orbit of Hubble and that was Atlantis. and by time Atlantis reaches that orbit it has used half its fuel. The shuttles cannot carry enough fuel to reach the moon. If Columbia would have survived its last trip more than likely Nasa wouldn't be retiring the shuttles in 2010. and The Constellation Program would not be developed to replace the shuttle.

As for other Countries shuttle programs, the only other country that built a shuttle was russia. It made 1 flight into space and was canceled. It was largely copied from nasa's Shuttle with minor exceptions. 1 of which some of the ones that were built had jet engines installed on them next to the tail so they could return to the landing site under power and not unpowered.

now getting back to the Constellation Program and the choice to use capsules. Nasa says that future space flight will be cheaper for them to return to the smaller option.

Capsules by design are designed to be used once and thrown away, Nasa is taking parts of the shuttle program and modifying them to work with Constellation. they will continue to use the same launch pads and crawler, they will redesign the external tank and the solid rocket boasters. they are going to increase the size of the capsule to accommodate a crew of four

That is incorrect. All of the shuttles are capable of reaching the orbit of HST......

STS-31 Discovery (launch of HST)
STS-61 Endeavour (HST service mission 1)
STS-82 Discovery (HST service mission 2)
STS-109 Columbia (HST service mission 3)
STS-125 Atlantis (HST service mission 4; launch delayed until May 2009)

ngchunter;

Thanks for the reply. I had no idea it was that complicated. Then again I have problems with 2+2. All kidding aside, what about the o2 mixture?

reply to post by capgrup

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I honestly hadn't heard anything about their O2 mixture yet. I don't give too much weight to History's Universe show though, I've seen them get pretty basic astronomy wrong before. I suspect they got this wrong as well. According to this article back in september, Orion will use an oxygen-nitrogen mixture at lower pressure than apollo, not higher, though I assume they mean the partial pressure of oxygen, not total pressure.
www.space.com...

[edit on 18-11-2008 by ngchunter]

Actually, I missed one. The correct list is as follows.....

STS-31 Discovery (launch of HST)
STS-61 Endeavour (HST service mission 1)
STS-82 Discovery (HST service mission 2)
STS-103 Discovery (HST service mission 3
STS-109 Columbia (HST service mission 4)
STS-125 Atlantis (HST service mission 5; launch delayed until May 2009)

Actually those jet engines were placed there to allow the Buran shuttle to fly itself to the proper altitude to conduct the glide tests for landings.

The Buran would have landed just like the shuttle does, unpowered.

reply to post by ngchunter

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Considering Orion will dock with the ISS, I would assume they will use the same pressure/mix as the Shuttle does. I haven't heard anything about the need for an airlock between the ISS and Orion that would be required if the pressure wasn't the same.

reply to post by nataylor

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I'm not sure but perhaps it's possible that the atmosphere will be set to pure oxygen for ISS missions, but a mixed atmosphere for lunar missions. That's bringing some dead weight with you on ISS missions, of course, but it's not like they'll be using orion to haul the amount of cargo that they do right now with the shuttle.