http://www.space.com/news/050614_cev_nasa.html

I hope they can make this work and make it cost-effective.

Also, I always thought the E in CEV stood for excursion. As in, a short excursion to LEO. There ain't a whole lot of exploration going on at that particular location.

I'm pretty sure it was always exploration. 40 years ago, they dropped the excursion from the lunar excursion module because they said, that excursion sounded to frivolious.

Harald

__________________
"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

I think part of the idea is that the CEV might eventually go beyond LEO (to do some actual exploration). In some of the Concept Exploration and Refinement (CE&R) studies funded by NASA in the past year, teams have been considering whether the CEV might go to the Moon and even Mars. Of course, for Mars there would have to be an additional habitat for the long journey, but the CEV could be part of the descent/ascent stack to go to the surface.

It remains to be seen whether these possible uses will actually be kept in mind as the CEV is being designed. It seems to me that mostly the CEV teams have been focusing on a to-LEO-and-back sort of mentality. Which is disappointing.

thanks for the info. I wish they wouldn't complicate the damn thing! We need a taxi. Just a cheap, reliable taxi. You could use unmanned heavy lifters to put the components of a mars or moon ship into orbit. We just need a taxi to get people to and from those ships.

Why is that hard for NASA to understand? They could just buy the plans for Soyuz or design one to the same requirements.

The shuttle is expensive in large part because of its size. It's hard to get the kind of safety margins that they have to have on something that big. The shuttle is great though for exactly three purposes 1) building space stations - because you can dock the shuttle to the existing station and use the arm to put the new section into place. 2) repairing and retrieving satellites - I'm not aware of any other way to retrieve a satellite. You could do an EVA from a CEV to make a repair, but without that canadarm it's risky. And 3) testing a satellite before you let it go - meaning the shuttle can turn it on while it's still in the bay, if it doesn't work right they just bring it back to Earth. We can live without 2 and 3. Wouldn't it be great if all these years the shuttle had just been used for mission 1. Maybe one launch a year. We probably wouldn't have lost two of them.

Everything else that the shuttle does can be done by a cheapo CEV. But it always seems to me that NASA wants to make it complicated. Ugh.

Well, good thing they're getting rid of the space shuttle!

The CE&R studies I saw that used the CEV in more than one way were actually kind of trying to make things less complicated - by introducing modularity into the system. For example, using the shell as a generic ascent/descent vehicle and then tacking on a heat shield for the ones that descend to Earth. I think it would be fantastic if they could do that! But modularity only works if you consider the requirements of everything you want to use it for and I don't really see that happening.

Design choices may hurry humans to Mars
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7937
NASA Revives Apollo - While Starving Space Life Science
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1066
Where do we go from here? Making the Vision for Space Exploration a reality
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/458/1

FULL TEXT: NASA ESAS Final Report (DRAFT) October 2005: Section 13.0 Summary and Recommendations
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19132

Tumultuous 2005 for NASA ?
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/4857.html

http://space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_051017.html

The Northrop/Boeing team is competing against Lockheed Martin to design and build NASA’s next-generation space vehicle, which is expected to transport astronauts to the international space station, the Moon and eventually Mars. Northrop Grumman officials estimate the winning team will need to construct three to five CEVs in a year with different functionalities depending on how frequently NASA wants to fly.

and

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publ...on.html?412006

NASA pauses on CEV supplier selection
http://www.flightinternational.com/A...selection.html

There is a new CEV project manager coming, CEV will be one of the key elements of the VSE and Constellation. The CEV may come back down by parachutes and airbags and land much like the Russian retrieval of the Soyuz module. The CLV or Human Transport system is the launcer for CEV, the CLV is a smaller rocket than Saturn-V or smaller tonne payloads like the Titan-Centaur and Proton but it is going to be man-rated. The other much larger cargo launcher ( 100 tonnes ) would be a Saturn-V type lifter and would be named the Cargo rocket or CaLV or Ares-V.

Moved from Astronomy to Space Exploration.

Lockheed Martin Announces Plans With the State of Texas in Pursuit of NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/conws/3745936.html

As NASA officials this week begin examining the proposals from aerospace industry teams vying to build America's next manned spacecraft, state and Antelope Valley officials are hoping some of the work comes to California.
Sometime this fall, NASA will select either a team led by Lockheed Martin or one led by Northrop Grumman, with Boeing as its major partner, to build the crew exploration vehicle, which looks like a larger version of the Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon in the 1960s and '70s.
http://www.dailynews.com/antelopevalley/ci_3619030