Orion demonstrates new technologies

[steve82]

Ajboc had a post on the new self-reacting friction stir welding technology used on the Orion. It was in the wrong category thread and was locked, though, so I thought it was appropriate to reintroduce here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Orion-Spa ... l?x=0&.v=1

Now that the design is more well-defined, a lot more information about the processes and exotic materials is starting to come out. This is definitely not Apollo redux. In fact if I were being directed to explore new technologies that could lead to beyond-earth-orbit spacecraft, I'd take a good hard look at what they are doing with Orion. Those folks at Michoud doing the welds really know their business. There are some youtube videos out there of the welding process I'll look for.

 

[vulture4]

Interestingly, both SpaceX and ULS also use friction-stir welding and also suggested it was their innovation. But friction stir welding was actually invented by TWI in the UK in 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_stir_welding

The National Center for Advanced Manufacturing http://www.ncamlp.org/ is supported by NASA but isn't part of Constellation. It is part of the Michoud Assemby Facility and seems to have originally been concerned with the Shuttle ET.

NASA still relies for public support on the largely mythical concept of "spinoff", the claim that new technology somehow only happens as a "free" byproduct of human spaceflight. In reality the significant advances in technology NASA has made (and there have been a few) were generally not directly related to human spaceflight and were funded directly as projects to develop the new technology. Development of the Da Vinci surgical robot, for example, was supported by a NASA SBIR grant, but it is highly unlikely it could ever actually be used in space since it depends on virtually instantaneous communication between operator and device and even in LEO the communication lag would be too long. Unfortunately it is very difficult to get even a few dollars to develop new science or technology, even if it has a major benefit to people on earth, unless one can "prove" it's essential for human spaceflight. This project, for example, lost even its minimal funding: http://research.siri.org/alz

 

[steve82]

Yes there are two kinds of friction stir welding and it has been in use for a while, most notably on the Eclipse 500 and mroe recently on Falcon and the Shuttle ET's, but this is the first large-scale application of self-reacting friction stir welding. It is way ahead of anything else out there.

 

[samkent]

Is that why Russia with their ‘old’ technologies can produce a substantially cheaper rocket?

Look at it another way. For Orion all you need is:
A shell that holds up to 14psi. Why do you need new welding for 14 psi?
Avionics will be new as they don’t make the old stuff anyway.
Heatsheild. What’s wrong with the old Apollo style?
Thrusters. What’s wrong with the old Apollo style?
Parachutes. Same answer.

What they do need is a ‘dump overboard’ toilet for the longer missions.

 

[vulture4]

Yes there are two kinds of friction stir welding and it has been in use for a while, most notably on the Eclipse 500 and mroe recently on Falcon and the Shuttle ET's, but this is the first large-scale application of self-reacting friction stir welding. It is way ahead of anything else out there.

But self-reacting friction stir welding was announced by Marshall as a new development in 2004, before Constellation started. http://www.techbriefs.com/component/con ... ticle/1055 This is a friction-stir tool which has a flange on the far end of the tool to provide reaction force against the back of the workpiece, avoiding the need for a bucking tool or, in theory, for access to the back of the weld. It's a useful advance, but it would hardly cost the billions of dollars spent on Constellation to promote it. Why not fund fabrication and testing of demonstration aircraft structural members instead and work with the FAA to develop design certification standards for using the technology in aircraft, reducing the major obstacles to manufacturers of cost and risk of applying the new technology? Why not develop tools for welding steel, if it's possible, which would widen applications?

 

[steve82]

Orion never claimed to have invented it and I don't think SpaceEx made that claim either, only that they used it as a state of the art and, in Orion's case, an advancement in the state of the art in its application. Orion keeps getting rapped for being old tech and Apollo-era but it isn't and it is using the technologies it needs to perform it's BEO mission requirement along with some real advances in fault tolerant avionics architecture. People were also beating up Orion for not being all-composite, but the 787 experience, along with a lot of the new alloys of Aluminum that have come out over the last few years bear witness that composite just for the sake of being composite is not necessarily the way to go. Anyways, I think it's cool stuff. When I first heard of friction stir problems on the Eclipse, I thought it sounded like a dumb idea, but then I picked up a weld sample coupon from Michoud and knew this was going to be something.

 

[vulture4]

I don't knock tech for being old. In fact I don't knock the Shuttle. However the Constellation program was sold on the basis of using "existing, man-rated" components like the SRB.

The primary technology of Orion, however, is an ELV with a solid-fuel first stage, promoted as being "already man-rated". This design is responsible for an extremely high ground processing cost in comparison to Delta heavy or SpaceX. The segments and the booster are very heavy, hazardous throughout the processing flow, and require stacking procedures which are expensive in facilities and man-hours and high in risk and require maintaining the entire VAB, MLP, and crawlers.

But the fundamental difficulty I have with Constellation is the issue of cost versus benefits. I love space, I have spent most of my life working for it. But when the space program has a researcher who has discovered the cause of a major disease, and can't even the minimal resources to provide critical evidence that could save thousands of lives, I would like to see some evidence that Constellation, with tens of thousands of times more money, is producing something at least half as important.