Space Shuttle Replacement

images.google.nl...,GGLD:2005-07,GGLD:nl&sa=N&tab=wi

well the easiest thing is building the x-33 it was cancelled because its development became to expansive but all tech is there all ready they can revise it a little using some newer materials . the rest is there even the hardest part with which they had problems. the fuel tank. they can put it in mass production with i 2years or so with riight funding ect.

www.hq.nasa.gov...








[edit on 13-3-2005 by MarkLuitzen]

The X-33 was an odd one, not its looks, but the reason for canning it. The fuel tank crackedd durring rigurous testing and that was on top off delays and over budget. The Irony is I remember reading a couple of years ago that a composite fuel tank was made succesfully, not that I expected them to revive the program since that one problem was fixed. But the whole thing was a 1 stage to orbit system...of course it will cost a lot. Personaly I think the whole thing was going to succesful, and the USAF put pressure on Nasa to get it canceled. ( in other words: it went black)

and Richard...The reason they should put more time and money into there cameras is because pictues are the one thing everyone can understand, and since YOU the tax payer is payer for it you should be getting what you want. and i'm no buying the whole "old technology thing", the Mars Viking landers had better pictures then Huygens.

and pictures are the best scientific information we can get, you learn alot from just one picture versus 1 other device that only can accomplish one task.

I would still like to see hi res images of the moon in color, despite the majority of it it white-ish.

From what I recall, not only did the X-33 have fueltank issues, but the 1/3rd scale version was also massively overweight, and NASA was finding it hard to cut the weight down.

Originally posted by Murcielago

and Richard...The reason they should put more time and money into there cameras is because pictues are the one thing everyone can understand, and since YOU the tax payer is payer for it you should be getting what you want. and i'm no buying the whole "old technology thing", the Mars Viking landers had better pictures then Huygens.

You still arent getting it, are you? You can achieve 3 x the resolution with black and white, and colour gives you absolutely nothing more than publicity shots. If Im paying for it, I want actually usable data for the scientists involved, not money wasted on making people go 'nice picture!' inbetween them logging on in a morning and reading their email.

This isnt NASA, the ESA doesnt have to keep an US audience captive beyond their 3.5 second attention span in order to win funding. Plus a lot of ESA funding is from the private sector.


The Mars Viking landers did have better cameras, but they were a single type camera and days to send the data back. One of the reasons the Viking cameras returned such good resolution shots was because they could focus on a point for a long period of time, increasing the resolution of the image. Huygens had none of this.

Huygens was pretty much a unique mission and did some fantastically amazing stuff with what was available.

Let me quote:

The Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer crams six sub-instruments into a tiny footprint within the Huygens probe. The component instruments on DISR share space on one Charged Coupled Device (CCD, the most common kind of detector in digital cameras) and two linear indium-gallium-arsenic arrays (commonly used for spectrometry). The light that is gathered by DISR's optics is shared among all the instruments and the detectors through an ingenious system of bundled fiber optic ribbons, so DISR has almost no moving parts.

and

Since there has never been a mission like Huygens, there has never been a camera system like DISR. No spacecraft has ever had to capture and return all of its images within 2.5 hours while descending toward a surface on a spinning, swaying platform. On top of these geometric challenges, DISR was limited to a data rate of 4800 bits per second. Surface missions to Mars had the luxury of months to years to return images. The only other missions that faced anything near the engineering challenges that Huygens faced were the Venera landers, the Soviet missions to the surface of Venus. Those landers returned only one to four images apiece; Huygens returned more than 350.

Source: www.planetary.org...

So you are saying that you would like to sacrifice greater than 50% of the data gathered because you want colour images or images that look good to the general public? Do you mind me asking where you get whatever it is you are smoking?

I would still like to see hi res images of the moon in color, despite the majority of it it white-ish.

Grab a telescope and a camera - theres no point in NASA or ESA putting a colour camera for the moon - theres nothing to be learnt from colour shots.

Quite simply because 99% of it is complete crap until its been processed and the general public cant really process the data. A lot of the information has been released to the scientific community and you can ask the Huygens team for the data if you want it.

Sir Richard (new nickname no offense intended) is right I came across a site with some of the Huygens sounds ( the ESA site wasn't up had to go to a secondary site).

www.lpl.arizona.edu...

Check it out.

RichardPrice: on top of all those misssion requirements, let's also not forget that Huygens was designed and built over a decade ago. Pathfinder and co. were landed within a few years of construction finalised.

Originally posted by Lampyridae
RichardPrice: on top of all those misssion requirements, let's also not forget that Huygens was designed and built over a decade ago. Pathfinder and co. were landed within a few years of construction finalised.

That was my origional point Huygens is/was a fantastic achievement for the tech of the time.