SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Let's just throw this old thing at the Moon and call it a day:
A cargo container that was built to fly on NASA's space shuttles is being repurposed as a prototype for a deep space habitat.
Lockheed Martin announced it will refurbish the Donatello multi-purpose logistics module (MLPM), transforming from it from its original, unrealized role as a supply conveyor for the International Space Station to a test and training model of a living area for astronauts working beyond Earth orbit. The work is being done under a public-private partnership between the aerospace corporation and NASA.
"We are excited to work with NASA to repurpose a historic piece of flight hardware," said Bill Pratt, Lockheed Martin's program manager for the deep space habitat contract, in a statement.
Donatello was one of three MPLMs that was designed to fly in the space shuttle payload bay to transfer cargo to the station. Built by the Italian Space Agency under a contract with NASA, two modules, Leonardo and Raffaello, flew on 12 shuttle missions between 2001 and 2011.
Also at Popular Mechanics.
Previously: NASA and International Partners Planning Orbital Lunar Outpost
NASA Eyeing Mini Space Station in Lunar Orbit as Stepping Stone to Mars
Related: Moon Base Could Cost Just $10 Billion Due to New Technologies
Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
Cislunar 1000 Vision - Commercializing Space
Forget Mars, Colonize Titan
Japan Planning to Put a Man on the Moon Around 2030
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 26 2017, @04:24PM
No, it's very relevant. In the nuclear industry, for example, they rely on (at least) redundancy, diversity and segregation for safety i.e. more than one, different makes and designs and physical barriers.
Diversity is useful in business as well because it provides more choice to the customer, but also because it reduces the tendency to stagnate if everyone's using essentially the same design to the point where the only innovations are tiny. For example, everyone's more or less using stick rockets today.
Yes, fail early, fail often. We call it Agile. It's a good thing when you are in control of your parameters, you have a good Design of Experiment so that you are measuring the right things and can feed back the information into your development cycle to make the next iteration more reliable.
I beg to differ. It's not fear of failure. It's lack of motivation. Going around in circles in LEO isn't terribly exciting but getting there needs to be made cheap and reliable. What is needed is proper leadership, ambitious goals, proper funding, commitment to follow through to completion etc. This isn't a problem of Private vs. Public, just one of vision. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. A lot of us do, it's just that he has the personal wealth to make it happen. He's a very shrewd and lucky man but he is not a god or a superhero.
I suspect the reason NASA continues to push SLS is because they keep getting kicked around by successive presidents for partisan reasons and are desperate to cling to something and see it through to a working product. I'd do exactly the same in their position.
Indeed they do, and mediocrity comes in many forms. I've seen a lot of it now, Vision and leadership are the lacking ingredients in most industries.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].