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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the space-cowboy-neal dept.

On May 11, the critical design review of the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) kicked off in Huntsville, Alabama.

This new rocket will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. It is designed to be sustainable and evolve to carry crew and cargo on deep space missions, including an asteroid and ultimately to Mars.

Milestone reviews like the critical design review are just that -- critical. The critical design review demonstrates that the SLS design meets all system requirements with acceptable risk, and accomplishes that within cost and schedule constraints. It also proves that the rocket should continue with full-scale production, assembly, integration, and testing and that the program is ready to begin the next major review covering design certification.

In the critical design review, there are literally thousands of pages of documentation that are reviewed and every part of the system is put under the design microscope by the best minds and engineers at NASA and their contractors. According to the article, all the subsystems have already been gone over in their own critical design reviews, but this one is for the complete project.

This review follows the somewhat more exciting successful booster tests from early March and the first Orion flight test from last December.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:13PM

    by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:13PM (#183000) Journal

    Particle shielding can be a tricky business because you need to tailor your shielding to the characteristics of the particles you care about. For instance, you generally don't need to worry about neutrons flying around in space because free neutrons have a half-life of only like 12 minutes before they decay to a proton, electron and electron antineutrino. However, if you're not careful, you could design your shielding such that a high energy proton comes in, strikes your shielding, and kicks off secondary products (like neutrons) that come out the back side of your shield and rattle around your living quarters (this is essentially how a neutron monitor [udel.edu] works, except that it is using the atmosphere as the "shield" to generate secondary products).

    There are all sorts of fun and interesting technical problems that come up when talking about shielding for long duration space missions, which is why it is not an easy topic to ignore. It is also why I remain pessimistic when it comes to the feasibility of this topic, at least for the foreseeable near-term.

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