NASA's new CEV for returning to the Moon

[PeterB]

I was wondering whether anyone else has read the article at www.astronautix.com/craftfam/cev.htm about NASA's design for the CEV which will take astronauts to the Moon in 10-15 years time?

The author seems highly critical of NASA, for ignoring the plans and ideas of the various designs submitted, and instead jumping forward to the past, recycling the old Apollo design, and also for their decision to use EOR/LOR rather than take advantage of the Earth-Moon LaGrange point.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the article?

Cheers

[brotherofthemoon]

peterb said:

Does anyone have any thoughts on the article?

Cheers

Personally, I think Mark Wade should stick to providing us with reams of useful information, and knock it off with the cranky polemicism.

[LunarOrbit]

He goes from pointing out the flaws in the shuttle design to wondering why NASA isn't going with another winged vehicle... that seems contradictory to me.

The shuttle needs to be replaced ASAP and going with anything other than a well understood design like an Apollo capsule would take too long. Replace the shuttle now with something simple and then work on more advanced spacecraft later.

[JayUtah]

The space shuttle has taught us that the price-point of reusability is still outside our grasp. We can make a "fully-reusable" orbiter, but only by compromising safety and incurring unnecessary expense. The pending CEV design intelligently decouples that which can be reused from that which can't. It's the "middle of the road" design we should have had 10 years ago or more for certain missions. We know we can build spaceframes that are good for 10-20 missions. And the equipment in it should be equally robust. But we can't build reusable thermal protection systems that are also safe and cost effective.

Reusability drove the STS orbiter's TPS design. It had to be something that wouldn't require extensive rework or refurbishment between missions. That required the use of materials considered exotic for their thermal properties, but which brought with them problems in their mechanical behavior that we cannot solve even 25 years later. Expendable ablative phenolic resin heat shields are reliable, inexpensive, and present far fewer mechanical problems.

So the next generation of spacecraft should feature a bolt-on ablative TPS that can be changed out between missions. That is a better compromise among cost, safety, and performance.

There's nothing magical about wings. Great effort was put into the aerodynamics of the Apollo command module, proving that a blunt lifting body could be steered very accurately to a pinpoint landing.

The STS orbiter was primarily intended as a heavy-lift, heavy-return vehicle. In addition to commercial satellite deployment and recovery, it was intended to facilitate construction of extensive facilities in Earth orbit, both bringing assemblies to it and returning assemblies to Earth from it. That morphed somewhat into using the shuttle itself as the orbital facility and filling the cargo bay with modular habitable laboratories.

In any case, the wings were needed to satisfy the soft-return requirements of heavy cargo to a designated landing site. Where your needs are limited to the return of human crew and a small amount of cargo, the Apollo design is quite sufficient.