New NASA Shuttle Program "Doomed To Failure"

Heartbreak writes "In a recent press release, the Space Frontier Foundation warns that NASA's Oribital Space Plane program, its latest initiative to take the load off the aging STS (the 'Space Shuttle'), is essentially doomed before it starts. 'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?"

Comments

Re:Shame

[Wyatt Earp]

That's what pushed NASA and the Soviet program in the first place, and there is nothing wrong with using increased defense spending to fund technology. It's what drove pretty much every advancement in aviation, ships, cargo handling, communications, materials science, and aerodynamics in the last 100 years. And in the US intergration of the races in the military happened before the private sector intergrated. Military doesn't always mean bad.

All the early launchers were based on MRBM/ICBMs, getting a man in space simply meant you had the throw-weight to get a bigger fusion bomb to New York or Moscow. Back in the 50s and 60s fusion bombs were big.

Joint USAF/NASA work pushed technology in the 1960s. What became Skylab was going to be an Air Force Orbital Workshop. In Chuck Yeager's bio he talks about training pilots with F-104s modified to manouver with thrusters the same way that Dyna-Soars or X-15s would operate as they went to orbit.

The Soviets worked on the same sorts of military stations. Even MIr was designed to have a military application.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mir.htm

"The original Spektr design was to be armed with Oktava interceptor rockets and equipped with sensors to identify and track ballistic missile re-entry vehicles as well as discriminate decoys. In 1992, as directed by the Soviet Union's military and political leadership, all work on such projects was discontinued. The Spektr module was mothballed, then later converted into a civilian platform, partially funded by the United States."

"Minister of Defence Ustinov requested that the Americans be challenged. As a 'warning shot' the Terra-3 complex was used to track the space shuttle Challenger with a low power laser on 10 October 1984. This caused malfunctions to on-board equipment and temporary blinding of the crew, leading to a US diplomatic protest."

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/almaz.htm
http ://www.astronautix.com/craft/mol.htm
http://www.a stronautix.com/craft/speginal.htm
http://www.astr onautix.com/craft/usb.htm
http://www.astronautix. com/craft/terra3.htm

Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[LooseChanj]

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt, wrong answer. It wasn't cheaper, and it could put A HELL OF ALOT more payload into orbit. The real shame is that the Saturn V only had one production run, if they'd kept making them there would have been improvements, and who knows what we could have come up with to do with them?

Re:well

[LooseChanj]

The shuttles have IBM AP-101(S?)s. They *have* been upgraded since the ships were originally built. Hell, they even got rid of the core memory in '95! :-) And last I heard (ok, a couple years ago) they were working on getting rid of the tapes in favor of something a little more modern. Most stuff like payloads/experiments/whatnot use (gack) Win98 laptops.

Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[pfdietz]

You gotta wonder why NASA aren't cranking out Shuttles like Boeing crank out 747s. Any first year MBA will tell you that the key to funding any development that requires substantial upfront investment is to realize economies of scale in production.

The shuttle is expensive because of the army of people needed to operate it, not the cost of building the orbiters themselves. So mass producing orbiters is not a solution.

Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[JaredOfEuropa]

The sad part is that apparently one of the reasons they stopped the Buran program was a relatively minor glitch, and politics. The following story comes someone who has worked in the Russian aviation authorities and one of the design bureaus. It may be complete bollocks.

[rumour]
Apparently the Buran did a very short dive on the glide path to the runway, the quickly correcting itself. It was the Russian equivalent of the FAA that demanded to know why that happened before they'd approve Buran.

After an investigation they found that it was likely that one of the transmitters guiding Buran on an approach path, had failed. But no one could be sure, and apparently this report has circled offices and organisations for a while, with no one daring to sign the thing in cas ethe report turning out to be wrong. There was an attempt to have a whole department sign the thing collectively, but it came to nothing, and the project was delayed.
[/rumour]

Without this glitch they might well have continued the Buran programme, with success even. The basics of the Buran might have been copied from the US Shuttle design, but the overall design of the Buran is supposed to be much better, being the work of smallish groups of engineers and designers working closely together, rather than the gazillion design committees working individually on every Shuttle subsystem, leading to a horrible design. (Feynman wrote something about this in one of his books). Also, Buran was capable of lifting a far larger payload than the shuttle, and it could be piggybacked onto a Proton for an even larger payload.

By the way, the shuttle is almost completely automated as well.

Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[ek_adam]

There is a full scale production run for the shuttles. Unfortunately it isn't for making new shuttles. It's for practically rebuilding the shuttles every time they land. The turnaround maintenance for the shuttles is huge.

Re:Stop Building Trucks To Nowhere and Explore Spa

[reallocate]

Here are a few missions that we might task to NASA:

1. Permanent human presence on the Moon
2. Mission to near-Earth asteroid with an objective of eventual commercial exploitation
3. Develop space-only propulsion systems with the objective of "going faster", and capaable of sustained 1-G acceleration.

The third point is important. Earth-launched orbital, lunar, and planetary missions in effect have self-imposed speed limits of about 18,000 mph and 25,000 mph, respectively. That's as fast as they need to go to get the job done. Propulsion systems designed only to work in space ought not to be as constrained. If you're going to Mars, travelling at 100,000 mph is better than 25,000 moh.

Not: Re:The Shuttle is the best replacement

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No, the Shuttle is not the answer. The problems the Shuttle has are:

• lack of credible abort modes
• extremely long turnaround times
• use of solid rocket boosters during ascent
• use of bulky hydrogen during ascent to LEO
• use of expensive launch pad
• whole armies of people needed to maintain it
• extremely high cost of launch
• lack of full reuse
• main engines are too complex, too near to the engineering edge

Some of these are fixable with enough money; the boosters might be replaced by liquid engines, or hybrid engines, but most of them are pretty much inherent in the design. The main engines are gradually improving, and need less maintenance now, but the vehicle still is never going to be able to turnaround quickly; it's never going to launch every other day, or once per week. And that's what it would take to make it cheap.

NASA is also science, not just manned space flight

[internic]

Before you go calling NASA a glorified jobs program, remember that NASA also has scientific missions not directly related to manned space flight. These scientific segments, such as most of the activity as NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, do a lot of scientific work that is very valuable to the scientific community, obviously especially astronomers. Projects such as the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center provide invaluable reseach tools to scientists. Another example is the Laser Interferometry Space Antenna project, which will be invaluable to physicists in testing Einstein's theory of general relativity, cosmological theories, and possibly "theories of everything".

While I think there are some valid goals for manned space flight, and I think that getting man into space can also have positive social effects, many things like the Internation Space Station have very questionable scientific value. This is clear to many inside NASA as well, but in the case of the ISS this has more to do with the fact that budget cutting in congress cut out most of the valid scientific componants of the mission as to expensive. So, first of all, don't blame all of NASA for the failing of the manned space flight program, and second don't think that many of the people within NASA aren't just as frustrated as those on the outside.