Ley's Launch window for this mission has passed. Anyone got the software to plan the next available launch window?

More sensibly, we could bury the astronauts living quarters on Eros, and that would protect them from the primary cosmic rays. Use Eros as a bus.

Sometimes, it is a positive advantage to be over fifty.

A cluster of Shuttles–with all the space in the cargo bay for extra fuel and landers–could mount an expedition to the moon.

I always thought this was the secret agenda for the shuttle–built as the Apollo program was destroyed.,

We could also follow the original idea of the Russians
and use the international space station as a place to assemble a fleet of non-streamlined spacecraft
( hence lighter) to go to the moon.

I read that idea ( which goes back to the early 20th century in Russia) in "Conquest of the Moon" by Wiley
Ley and W. Von Braun—back in the 1950's.

As to the shuttle: The shuttle is 1960's technology. TIme for something better, such as an airbreathing hypersonic engined ship that gets 90% of the way to space without
using heavy oxidizer–and then uses a small liquid fuel engine to get the rest of way.

That's worth designing. I recall the plan for this project being discussed in a 1970's issue of Aerospace Week–as a European project.

What I loathe about NASA is its tendency to go forward with
glacial speed–forty year old shuttle tech, and the Aries
project wants to go back the 1950's tech of Apollo ( launched in the sixties, but 1950's tech).

There are two ways to get humans to mars:
1) Use an atomic engine to make the trip FAST.
2) Use solid and heavy shielding ( put up slowly in stages
by the shuttle) and use an atomic engine to drag this heavy ship to mars. Assemble it all in orbit.

Ion engines don't have enough force to drag the shielding in a reasonable time—unless the crew is put in suspended animation using the new hydrogen sulfide method discovered at NASA.

We have a test ban treaty that bans atomic reactors in space and that was the death of the original project Orion, which would have gotten humans to mars in the 1970's.

No atomic engine–no mars trip for humans.

Better to make it a museum and send it off to be a "Good Will Ambassador" to outer space.

beowulf2700 Says: "the shuttle could be used as a 'space only' vehicle"

Let us not forget that not the shuttle itself failed on January 28, 1986. Any other spaceship would rarely have survived the explosion of the strapped-on fuel tank.

But if one has left the right path once then it is hard to come back. Consequently, the use of the same auxiliary tank caused the next extermination of one of the shuttles.

And so the component with the smallest complexity caused the most serious damage to the most sophisticated spaceship design mankind ever owned!

Keep the shuttle in orbit!

have in one of the cargo bays a landing module and launch from the shuttle to surface… we then redock with shuttle before leaving planet… Lo and behold Humanitys first landing on another planet. the shuttle could be used as a 'space only' vehicle… with rockets like the ares ferrying personel to the ship..

A comment here containing a link is object of anti-spam policy. So blanks are a mean to prevent a comment with including links from being prevented.

And here is propaganda with a climpse of truth.

www .youtube .com /watch?v=NWefw976CYM

So if the shuttle program would not have been a significant part of the Cold War conflict then the cooperation of the the space agencies of Russia and The States might have spared us this tragedies. The Russians used the Energia launcher for their own Buran-called shuttle successfully. With the Energia connected to Columbia and Callenger to heave them into the skies no damage from external components would ever have occured to them. The Cold War was the ultimate reason for the real mistakes of the shuttle program! We should finally realize this.

The shuttles itself are incredibly marvellous.

Eric Knight is an entrepreneur. Therefore, economical factors have a meaning for him, in contrary to the managers of some federal agencies.

He is also founder and CEO of UP Aerospace, Inc. Therfore, he has good expertise.

Kevin said: "More April Fools day material."

It is too late to save us, but it is the only positive solution I have seen to the poplulation explosion. Gigadeath is coming.

Did I oversleep a couple of months?

Have you already read the following article from Mrs. Atkinson?

"The Mars Landing Approach: Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of the Red Planet", 17th July 2007

It is claimed that large vehicles cannot be brought to the Martian ground safely with the means of parachutes.

Define "little."

Likewise Jason said "that the shuttles were only designed to operated within the protection of earth's radiation shield. They do not have enough shielding on them to withstand the radiation on a trip to mars."

What is not just a shuttle specific problem but a still unsolved problem which could doom every manned deep space mission. A gleam of hope emerged a view weeks ago when Ian O'Neill reported that British scientists invented a "mini-magnetosphere" to protect astronauts during solar storms. ("Ion Shield for Interplanetary Spaceships Now a Reality", 4th November 2008, filed under: Physics, Space Flight).

Maybe in five years this mechanism would even allow you to fly through a solar storm in a Vostok spacecraft.

Just leave the shuttles attached to the truss for the whole mission and it can remain in orbit of Mars, like the command module of the Apollo missions to the Moon.
The truss could even carry extra fuel tanks, or extra decent modules for the LEM like vehicle.

Actually, as i read it, the original article was posted more as a thought experiment to explore why space missions are the way they are. It costs something like $1000 dollars to get 1 Kg to low earth orbit. The further you go, the more it makes sense to make something light and custom-built for the purpose.

Back when the space shuttles were originally designed, the working temperatures of aircraft alloys with fancy names like Asterite or Stellite were rising. There were serious hopes back about 1970 that compounds could be made with the stiffness and high temperatures of ceramics, and the toughness of metals. The space shuttle design could have gone for a shallow re-entry with a large wingspan and conventional alloys – something more like an aircraft – but they went in the direction that materials research at the time was pointing. Unfortunately, just as the shuttle was designed, the progress in such materials suddenly stopped dead. It became clear that there was no cross-breed between metals and ceramics, and the shuttle was never going to be as good as people hoped. I often wonder whether we could have gone back and made a large wing vehicle with a much shallower re-entry to keep the surface temperatures lower. When they retired the Concorde fleet, I wondered whether any of them could have been made space-worthy with oxygen injection for the engines as you leave the atmosphere. Okay, that is another silly idea, but maybe someone will get it to work. See for example…

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/