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ISS Airlock Installed
Dada writes: "The crews of the space shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station successfully installed the 'Quest' airlock to the ISS. The Canadian-built space station arm actually worked!"
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This is supposed to be an International Space Station. If everytime a module goes up we have to bash each other, or everytime a problem happens we have to single out what country made it, we're never going to get anything done. I'm really suprised rabid nationalism has lasted for this long. It really doesn't make sense in the 21st century for us to be constantly lambasting each other over the stupidest things. It's one thing to poke fun at each other for a good natured laugh but people actually take some of this shit seriously and harbor resentment towards other nationalities because of it. I don't have any problems with Canadians or any other country that isn't openly at war with my country. We're all states on this big blue planet... we really should learn to cooperate a little better than bickering children.
The X-38 hasn't been scrapped. It just had another very sucessful test flight.
s t. flight/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/10/X38.te
"It was an outstanding flight, probably the best one we had," said Alan Brown, spokesperson for NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. "It went off without a hitch."
Unlike the space shuttle, the X-38 flies without wings. Instead, it uses the largest parachute ever constructed, with a span of 143 feet and a total surface area of 7,500 square feet.
Until the X-38 is in place on the space station, Russia will provide a Soyuz space capsule to act as a crew-return vehicle for astronauts."
Because it didn't work and had to have software patches.
1 07 15fd4/
e .d elayed.02/index.html
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/stage7a/0
"After extensive troubleshooting, the most significant problem, one that intermittently affected operation of the arm's shoulder pitch joint, was traced to a glitch in a diagnostic circuit. Software patches were uplinked to mask out any such false signals and other contingency procedures were developed to handle virtually any arm problem that might develop."
As it was, it did work and NASA said as much.
""Those Canadians really know how to build great hardware, I'll tell you," Helms said of the Canadarm2 space crane."
There were some questions about the arm, so this one was special and it is new that it actually worked. The mission that is up there now was delayed because the arm was having issues.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/30/shuttl
"During tests by space station crew members, Russian commander Yury Usachev and U.S. astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms, a backup electronics box near the arm's elbow failed to work properly. Efforts to fix the problem with software patches uploaded by ground controllers have failed."
Now that they have the airlock, at least they can have a designated fart zone which they can later vent to outer space - problem solved!!
Geez, NASA thinks of everything! :-)
The Canadian-built space station arm actually worked!
Canadians have been putting robotic arms in space for YEARS. What made you think this one was so special that you had to single it out as "actually" working?
Though I'm sure if something screwed up, you would have been quick to "blame Canada".
-Vic
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!
What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
And do they get a discount if they use it more than 60mins a month?
it seemed to be only half about going to Mars. The other half seemed to be another diatribe against the space station. Maybe I didn't read far enough, but I haven't thrown the book away, only set it aside. Zubrin seemed to have as big an anti-space-station blindspot as those he accused of having a must-use-space-station blindspot.
My frequent watchword in my posts is, "Be careful what you ask for," and I invoke it here, too. If the space station is declared a success, and then de-orbited in less than 10 years, everyone will see the truth just like they saw that Nixon's "Peace with honor" was nothing but bugging out of Viet Nam. (I'm not debating what we should have done, just trying to properly name what we did.)
Whether you like it or not, we're into the ISS for a pile of money, and it's reputation is going to rub off on all manned spaceflight. Shutdown and deorbit the ISS in less than 10 years, and you may as well shut down manned space in the USA.
Some of you applaud that goal, thinking robot science is better. Well, there's little point in running a NASA-like organization for robot science. If NASA manned space is shut down, I suspect NASA itself would be effectively shut down, and then we'd wander for the better part of a decade trying to figure out a way to do robot space science. Not that it's that hard, but that we don't have mechanisms or organizations in place to do it.
Besides, you won't energize generations of kids to go into science based on robot missions.
I'd rather see us find more sensible missions for the ISS we have up there, and adapt it to them. For instance, why do we constantly fold our robot science probes up into tiny cylinders, and then get mad when they don't unfold right. (Antennas, anyone?) Imagine taking a standard B-size truss, bolting a standard outer-planet antenna on it, bolt one of a standard series of engines on, bolt on the custom science package, give it a dynamics test (spin-test for balance, essentially) and GO. Zubrin wanted direct launch to Mars, bypassing the space station. But it's THERE, and is no longer a serial expense, so why not use it? That doesn't mean orbital assembly necessarily. But I suspect we could go a long way toward assembling a Mars mission built out of a few smaller spacecraft docked together, using near-ISS as a staging place. Perhaps the ISS isn't the best orbit for this, but at least it's not polar.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle! Only, that the X-38 just completed a test flight. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/10/X38.test. flight/index.html for details. You must be confusing this with the X-33 that was cancelled... (Altough that may be picked up again by the USAF, as well).