Re: How to take a "free" ET to orbit.


"Craig Fink" <WeBeGood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13josuri0eh2scb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jeff Findley wrote:

ET's in LEO have been discussed to death in these newsgroups. Getting it
into LEO isn't necessarily hard. Your OMS burns need to be a bit bigger
than normal, but it's not really a huge problem. The real problems are
after you get to LEO. Your proposal has most, if not all, of the
drawbacks of those early proposals.

You're also making a bold assumption that you could actually use an ET at
ISS and that integrating it in with the rest of the station would be
easy.
It's likely not easy at all.

Nothing wrong with dreaming one last time, while it's still in the realm
of
possibilities. I know a bunch of sci.space.* regulars have discussed this
before, but actually having a Space Station, and one that NASA wants to
dispose of, plus a few more years of Shuttle access, storing and using a
few of the last ET would be a great challenge and a lot of fun. I still
think it's totally doable.

It's not possible. Too many problems which can't be overcome in too short a
time. Even if you could get these to ISS for free (you can't, at least not
without leaving part of your payload on the ground), where do you put these
things? Even if you could solve that, who's going to bring up all the extra
fuel you'd need to account for the additional drag on the station? That
would be a very steep "storage cost", so you'd better have a good reason to
store them in the first place.

Reminds me of people who store their junk cars in storage lots. After a
time, you've spent more on storage than the car is worth.

Integrating with the rest of the station. No, no, the idea is to integrate
with the Station as little as possible. Any integration with NASA is going
to be costly and eat into the profits. All the integration should be kept
to a minimum and as simple as possible.

NASA would never let you even think about doing this.

The ET has no grapple fixture on it for the RMS/SSRMS. Sticking one on
somewhere is a change to the tank design, which they're going to have to
approve. I'm not even sure the RMS/SSRMS is certified to handle the mass of
an empty ET. Is the RMS/SSRMS geometry of this even workable? You'd want
to be able to grab the ET with an arm before you detach it from the shuttle.
Could you even dock the shuttle to ISS with an ET still attached to it? Too
many questions, not enough years to solve the problems to NASA's high
standards.

Even if you have an ET with a grapple fixture, how to you attach the ET to
ISS? Where do you propose to attach it to ISS? Finding a place to stick it
that won't mess up the rest of the station is going to be a show stopper in
and of itself.

Which drawbacks are you talking about?

I left off all of the standard objections to carrying an ET to LEO. They've
been discussed to death.

Jeff
--
"When transportation is cheap, frequent, reliable, and flexible,
everything else becomes easier."
- Jon Goff


.

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