The Future of Aerospace (1993) / Chapter Skim
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The Future of Manned Spaceflight
The Future of Manned Spaceflight
Pages 15-28
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From page 15... ...
This milestone offers an appropriate vantage point from which to review the lessons of the past and to offer an assessment of how the future might unfold for this very visible, public enterprise of research and exploration on the space frontier. After more than three decades of space exploration, America's spacefaring enterprise has evolved steadily to new levels of maturity and expertise in manned and unmanned operations on the high frontier.
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From page 16... ...
that new ocean, the manned spaceflight community, in particular, is moving toward a space-based infrastructure in which a permanent presence in Earth orbit, habitation of the moon, and exploration of Mars will be possible. Making use of the unique environment of space is a hallmark of this planning effort, comprising a host of new technology applications to take advantage of the microgravity and ultravacuum conditions of space, as well as the abundant resources that await us on the moon.
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From page 17... ...
. Today we have in the active inventory of strategic weapons subsonic and supersonic turbojet and fanjet bombers, supersonic cruise missiles, and liquid-fueled and solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles.
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From page 18... ...
There is, on the one hand, the purely technical consideration consisting of that which you can do and that which you cannot yet accomplish. On the other hand, there is the political process, which in the case of staging a program for human exploration of space, consists of that which you have the necessary national resolve to undertake and the appropriate political coalitions to accomplish.
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From page 19... ...
That is a tall order, given the nature of the debate over spaceflight. Media coverage of the Space Shuttle Program, for instance, tends to concentrate on whether a mission departs five seconds or five days late, whether there are any aggravating technical glitches, and whether or not the flight crew is feeling well.
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From page 20... ...
That is probably the single most compelling reason why, from a technical standpoint, we need a space station. But before considering the construction of a destination, a place to go in low Earth orbit, let us first consider how we get there.
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From page 21... ...
One application is in the field of medicine and involves recent advances with a device called the rotating wall vessel, also known as the "bioreactor." Originally developed to take advantage of the microgravity environment aboard the Space Station, the device has shown tremendous promise on the Earth in helping to understand and emulate tissue growth. Today,
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From page 22... ...
The Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center, working with NASA, is now preparing for the first flight of its Wake Shield Facility aboard the space shuttle next year. The goals of the program are to produce new electronic, magnetic, and superconducting thin films both in space and in terrestrial laboratories.
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From page 23... ...
This isotope, which is quite rare here on Earth, has in laboratory tests shown great potential for future fusion reactions with deuterium. The energy produced from such a reaction has been comparable to those produced by reactions using tritium, but the by-products using helium-3 are completely harmless.
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From page 24... ...
Thirty years ago, Wernher von Braun envisioned a super booster called Nova, which would have dwarfed the mighty Saturn V, and would have been able to loft half a million pounds to low Earth orbit, one quarter of what we need to get just one team of explorers to Mars. Many of the other critical variables we face today in preparing for such endeavors grow out of such requirements and out of the options we will choose from to meet those requirements.
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From page 25... ...
It affects space travelers at the cellular level, and we see changes in the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the blood vessels, the hormone-secreting glands, and the bones. Muscles lose protein, bones lose calcium, and metabolic processes such as the production of hormones, red blood cells, and white blood cells may be altered.
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From page 26... ...
Some programs are turned off and on like a light switch for years before they finally achieve any sort of stable funcling. By the same token, NASA must develop a better track record of meeting cost commitments if we are to enjoy congressional support in the future as these more costly and more ambitious projects are being debated.
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From page 27... ...
THE FUTURE OF MANNED SPACEFLIGHT 27 It was the year that Bell Telephone gave transistors their first commercial application in a new long-distance, direct-dial telephone service; the year that Chrysler first installer! power steering in 10,000 Crown Imperial sedans; the year that CBS began broadcasting in color; and the same year that a new coaxial cable carried the first transcontinental television broadcast.
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