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Russia is suspending its space tourist program, for fairly obvious reasons. An NYT story notes that the obsolete but reliable computers driving the shuttle are to be examined as part of the inquiry. But most interestingly, a story in Aviation Week claims that a tracking camera trained on the shuttle detected damage to the wing prior to the breakup.
If Russia is canning space tourism, does that mean we're stuck with Lance Bass?
Ñ'
"Aviation week and space mythology"
As with the Challenger disaster, there are many smart people trying to determine the cause of the accident. In addition to the wreckage, there are memos, notes, films, and other media to review. Investigations take time, and regardless of the desire to find an immediate smoking gun,I anticipate NASA will release an official report no sooner than may. Right now we have several media "experts" offering their opinions.
I am me...I think
How so?
:(
I mean seriously...if the computing system is going to come under scrutiny, how is that trolling?
There comes a point where you have to step back and ask yourself what the best way to go about a problem is. Unix is old. I know, Linux is not Unix, but still...depending on who's calling the shots there, they could very well decide that a 20+ year old OS is too archain to be used on the shuttle.
Then again, the shuttle itself is pressing that age.
Who knows.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Hey,
That's a VERY long time that Russians didn't screwed up a rocket with men aboard (even if they lack of money too). If Americans are not good enough to ensure a minimum security in-flight, that should be their problem. Russian are really experts.
"We continue to recover crew remains and we are handling that process with the utmost care, the utmost respect and dignity," said Ronald Dittemore, shuttle program manager.
They died advancing science so we could all live better lives. Let's keep this in mind...
I wonder if NASA will start making in orbit inspections of shuttles part of the flight plan. While things like this are obviously rare they are real and deadly.
I wonder how long it would take an astronaut to correctly inspect a shuttle in orbit.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
It's not really obvious why they're doing it. The article implies, but doesn't state, that it's because they now need to put cargo where the third, "passenger" seat would go on a Soyuz capsule.
Some people have suggested they're doing it because "space is now unsafe", which makes absolutely no sense.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
It's probably overdue that the shuttle was updated, shame it takes something like this to make it happen. Personally I hope that manned space flight can continue, and get safer.
It seems unlikely that computers were to blame for this, but the kit in the shuttle is pretty old - if we're going to ask people to risk their lives like this we must give them the best kit we can.
I know I was shocked at the loss of the shuttle, and it should remind us of how brave these people are.
"Linux is not Unix"...
GNU isnt Unix.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The Columbia wasn't a Soyuz.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Russia is suspending its space tourist program, for fairly obvious reasons
I'm glad the airlines don't stop all planes when one crashes.
Seriously, though, I'm almost positive that anyone that signs up to be a space tourist signs some document stating that there is a chance of death, and the russians can't be held liable.
I don't think that its "obvious" they should stop it. Everyone is aware of the dangers of space travel. This isn't the first time an accident has happened in the space program (especially russia's).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Haven't yall?
I mean, we cut back a ton of spending for some of the most dangerous quests known to man, and then we're shocked when their systems are failing on a thirty-year-old shuttle.
What I would like to see is a new branch of the military take over the space program. Call it Space Force if you want to be cheesy, but at any rate, whenever the military gets involved in programs they get an incredible amount of financing. And for those of you who are concerned that if it becomes military we'll never see it again, think DARPA Net. The military is a great way to get things started, and then let blatant commercialism take a choke hold...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
The O-rings in use on the booster rockets for the Challenger (and previous shuttles) were rated for warm weather, which was acceptable since the launches were in Florida. It was a cold day when Challenger launched. The engineers warned admin that day that the boosters might fail. There had already been numerous delays, so admin launched anyway.
Interestingly (or suspiciously?), the ethics site's page is down, but the cache is here:Roger Boisjoly on the Challenger Disaster
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
There is no black box. This was a question at the first technical briefing on Saturday. While they do have various data recorders on board, they aren't hardened to survive a crash. For the most part, they aren't necessary, as all the relevant data is transmitted back to Mission Control in real time. Such information would only allow them to better reconstruct the last few seconds after communications were lost (some of which it turns out they did receive data from, only it was too low-power for them to process at the time). While that may be interesting, the useful information will be from earlier on in the flight when the problem first showed up.
Someone found this really cool article about the group that writes the shuttle software. I've always admired CMM level 5, having spent my entire career at level 1. ;) I wonder if they need more coders.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Yes the foam is light and delicate, so if it hit the wing, it wouldn't have caused damage that way (brute force). But imagine how much heat is around the shuttle as the rockets are firing it upwards. They say the foam 'dissintegrated'. What if the foam instead melted on it's way down, and melted right into the cracks between each of the heat tiles? I think this is a real possibility.
Then in space obviously the foam cooled, and expanded there in between the tiles. It could have expanded enough to dislodge some of the tiles entirely. Then when the shuttle re-entered, the foam goo in those cracks again heated up, and burned away at the insides of the tiles, burning away everything holding the tiles on to the craft. A lot of tiles fell off, the heat reached the inside of the wing, and the rest we know.
That Aviation Week article was the best recounting I've seen yet. I get so tired of that period of time between a catastrophic event and the time real information can be disseminated. Looks like I'm not alone
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
sPh
Of course people will continue to pay their way into the space station, as soon as they find out what the Russian gov't is receiving from outside sources per flight. Then, just beat that amount and you're up in space. The Russian gov't can't afford not to say yes, unless missions are now diverted to transporting top secret and military payloads for both US and Russia. Having them take some of our stuff to the space station while the shuttles are off-line could open a whole new can of worms.
It took them quite a while to put the pieces together, but these facts, I think, are a much better indicator of how things went wrong. It still doesn't give any clues as to what caused the damage to begin with though.
One can only hope that NASA will find the pieces (literally, but no pun intended) that show what damaged that wing. If and when such evidence is found we can finally can close this case. My personal hope is that whatever is found will further our advance into space, not hold it back.
All in all the best read I've had on the subject untill now.
Karma? What's that again?
I'm sure they'll be looking at the computers to determine if there was a software problem. While it seems obvious that the disaster was caused by physical dammage, the flight computers could have been a major factor. They were experiencing excessive drag. The flight computers were trying to compensate for the poor performance, and in doing so may have failed to factor in that the increased drag may have indicated a weakened structure. Hence, in trying to stay on course, the flight computers may have put too much stress on the dammaged wing.
Most likely, software changes could have bought them at most a few more irrelevant seconds, but they certainly should be looking at it in case someday those few seconds aren't so irrelvant.
This is a PPT, but hits the main points: Challenger Disaster. An ugly page that has an actual paragraph is this. But I finally found a real page here.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You don't get a whole lot more broke than burnt up in the atmosphere now do you.
I remember seeing a robot designed for use in the ISS that was essentially a basketball-sized computer and camera. It was controled by gyroscopes. Assuming it could handle the temperature and lack of pressure, there's no reason they couldn't send one out to inspect the underside of the shuttle.
Not that they've actually built it yet, but they could.
And for missions to the ISS, they can inspect it from the space station.
Well, the reasons for Russia to cease launching space tourists may be obvious if you know one major factor - the Soyuz is not reusable. Since the shuttle fleet is currently grounded, the Soyuz is the only link between Earth and the space station. The Russians don't want to waste a single-use mission on a tourist if they're going to run out of equipment before the reusable shuttle fleet comes back online - they want to keep them for station resupplies, crew changes, etc.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
If the computer is still doing its job, then why is it obselete?
There are also good technical reasons why NASA uses "obselete" computers on alot of their spacebound equipment.
I must have missed it, but did NASA ever comment on the photo shown in Israel of a crack, taken by a chance video shot from Ramon during his video conference with Sharon?
It turns out that it fell through the roof of a condo complex and totally destroyed the unit owned by a friend of my wife. She believes that if she were in the place at the time, she would have been killed.
They have hired a lawyer and are exploring their options -- most insurance policies don't cover falling objects from space.
Yeah, I know "friend of my wife" is rather FOAFish, and I will try to get more details (and perhaps pictures) if possible.
You could've hired me.
They were doing mach 18 during reentry in an atmosphere very filled with air particles. Meaning Reentry temperatures we can't even imagine. Accidents are going to happen, expect it, and move on.
I've heard the whole "we wouldn't be able to rescue them anyway" deal, but I don't understand why. We had 3 working shuttles afaik, and now 2. Why can't we send up a shuttle, with just a pilot crew, ie no researchers, to rescue them?
-shane
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Linux/Unix? What's that have to do with this story? Neither is used to run the Shuttle systems.
other. and no one is going to admit it is their fault. Admission of the fault, is very important to prevent this issue form happening in the future.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
It's interesting to read Richard's story of the investigation of the first shuttle disaster, and his realization that the process was political, not scientific.
He had a great deal of trouble, as an official investigator, just being *allowed* to investigate, and of course to release his findings he had to engage in what amounted to guerilla tactics.
The end fate of the Morton-Thiokol engineers who "blew the whistle" must stand as some sort of object lesson in this case as well.
One would hope that steps are being taken to prenvent another go 'round of this shabby and shameful incident in American space history.
KFG
THey have air and food for a couple of weeks. IT takes an ungodly amount of time to prep and launch a shuttle. Unlees we were willing to keep one of them waiting, with no cargo, on permanent standby, and even then itd probably take a week to get it up.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Like someone on slashdot...(I don't remember who) when NASA first came into be, they had to create the technology (i.e. Integrated Circuit) in order to accomplish any sort of space flight. That same technology is still sufficient to control systems on the shuttle and it is needless and unsafe to attempt to upgrade them. When NASA finds the need for more computing power (like the mathematics involved in creating a worm hole :) they will use current technology if its powerful enough or they will attempt to create it themselves.
Ok, they were in low orbit, travelling at Mach 18, and you want to send up a rescue mission. First of all i don't even want to get into the difficulties of transferring a crew from one shuttle to another, but lets talk about the impossibility of just sending up another shuttle at the last minute. NASA waits months for just the right weather conditions to send up a shuttle. You can't just hop in a shuttle and go up whenever you feel like it.
And Repairing the belly in space would be like trying to weld the hull of a ship at 30 knots while hanging on underwater.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Okay, I'll bite. I spend most of my time using FreeBSD and MacOS X. Most of the histories I've read state that Linux a much "like" Unix, on purpose in fact, but that it is not.
:)
I've an open mind to be corrected on that stance if I'm wrong. Linux is so Unix like in fact that I would not be able to tell the difference even as an admin dumped at a prompt anymore. If it's at the kernel level that makes it that different that's fine by me. Doesn't make *that* much difference.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Who knew that the shuttle was running on new Apple hardware!?!
Uh, have to go story digging, but my understanding was that recently Linux *WAS* starting to be used in space missions.
:P Wasn't even attempting to.
Man, had no idea I was trolling so badly.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Weren't some safety experts at NASA already fired because of the incident?
Just as a point of comparison: The 1675th Soyuz launch took place recently. There have been only two fatal Soyuz accidents, both over 30 years ago. I don't think the Russians have to apologize in any way for their safety record.
But at least one expert -- Richard Doherty, a consulting engineer who did research for a member of the commission that investigated the Challenger explosion -- questioned whether the computers onboard the Columbia had all the information they needed. After tiles were damaged on takeoff, Mr. Doherty said, NASA could have sent up a few changes in the software guidance program to adjust for increased drag on the left side of the craft.
The computer did compensate for drag on the left side -- but at some point physics catches up with you -- and it simply burns up. The shuttle basically flys the stall all the way down, it's not like they can "pitch for power - throttle for altitude". This person is an idiot."This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
ARE YOU INSANE...Space flight is pretty safe for what it entails, do you think they have just been slacking off and that is why this happens, jesus people, going into space is dangerous, hell the training is dangerous, astronauts know this, and quite honestly a shuttle crew of people dieing just doesn't hit me that hard, I mean sure it's a travesty, but they knew the dangers. Why do we raise such a cry over this, but no one seems to care about the 10 automobile deaths a day, or the like 50 handgun homicides a day, or the other thousand ways people die violently every day. It went up, it came down, people died, tear, tear, get over it.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
New computers would have several advantages:
1) They would weigh less. That is probably the most important advantage.
2) They could do more calculations. When trying to compensate for failing parts without going off course, spinning out of control, or overstressing the failing part, additional computation power might be helpful. (I'm guessing that the software may have failed to consider that a part that is not performing upto specifications is likely to have reduced structural integrity.)
If your homeowner's insurance doesn't cover it, NASA is compensating for damages caused by the disaster: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/spacenews/releases/200 3/03-041.html
This
With all the speculations going around about what happened to the space shuttle and now Russia is pulling back as well. How will the astronauts in the space station get their supplies if the shuttle program is sidelined. Will NASA start outsourcing to private corporations to get the supplies up there? The Columbia disaster was a tragedy but lest not forget the astronauts that are still up there.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
There's even a big jump between 'direct control of flight surfaces, attitute thrusters, etc.' and 'plotting the course before the mission leaves.'
Actually controlling the Shuttle's systems is a pretty specialized taks, but it wouldn't surprise me if Linux has been used to host applications for managing experiemnts, plotting missions, and normal server tasks.
During launch, I'm pretty sure the outside temperatures of the shuttle and fuel tank are normally quite low. There is some atmospheric friction as it launches, but nothing serious like with re-entry.
It seems to me that the building of winged reentry vehicles is more driven by a desire for Buck Rogers-style space adventures, not good, cost-effective engineering.
I have seen many reports saying that if NASA had actually done something to try to find out if there was any critical damage to the shuttle, there was still no way to save the astronauts.
Wasn't there?
I mean, are we so unprepared to handle emergencies in Space? Was it impossible to send one of the other shutles to a rendez-vous with Columbia? I thought there are 3 others...
What about Russian capsules? One was launched the they after the accident. Couldn't it be modified to bring in help to Columbia...
And if that is really true, why isn't there an escape pod in the shuttle? I know, lack of space, but still...
Finally, the idea that using spy satelittes was not good because we tried once and could not detect missing tiles. If this article is correct, there was a crack on the wing and it was detected on groud generated film...
May we learn from our mistakes so that it does not happen again, and if it does, at least let us be sure that we DID try everything at our reach to avoid it.
Cheers...
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
I don't think that any OS would be up to snuff for this, they need both real-time and almost absolute reliability. Don't get me wrong, I love my Linux and I'm being impressed with WindowsXP, but I don't think I'd trust either to keep me out of a flat spin at Mach 20.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Ok, I get really fed up with the people who are bothered that NASA still runs PDP boxes for navigation. These things are running code that HAS to be right --- a BSOD would really mean D and an OOPS from the kernel can leave you in a fire ball. Sure, with faster cpu you could do more calculations. But on the flip side, as you get faster the illusion that CPU's are digital devices becomes less opaque.
... they just work and keep on working. If the system you are interfacing with hasn't changed and the software in place spans the space of what you need it to do, why upgrade?
Moreover, the I/O bus interface to the various sensors in the shuttle critical. This is the kind of thing PDP's are good at. Hell there are PDP's still running parts of assembly lines around the world
anyone know what carbon-carbon is?
Maybe the reason isn't obvious, but here it is: Basically, the Russians are the only link between the space station and the world (NASA won't be flying any missions anytime soon). Also, Russia doesn't have reusable spacecrafts (they have one time use capsules - the space shuttle's brilliance was the fact that it was reusable), and they only have a limited supply of them. With a two year build time on their spacecraft, they don't want to "waste them" on anything other than what is purely necessary. Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko said, "Space tourism is not a priority. State interests must come first, then commercial interests."
Read fast, kids, this one is not likely going to survive long around these parts where foam, mini-meteors and 'old computers' rule the roost.
In reverse chronological order of appearance. .
Item number one: The below clipped from photos taken; orignal story here.
Item number two: From a channeling experiment in Florida. .
There. Now didn't that make your day more interesting?
You're welcome.
-Fantastic Lad
It's now that I've really gotten a grasp of how dangerous the whole space flight with the shuttle is. Let's assume that there was no foam that hit the space shuttle during take-off (whether this is the cause or not is still being debated). Let's assume instead that a small space rock or a piece of space junk hit the space shuttle while in orbit (it happens and that the speed the space shuttle travels while in orbit can result in serious damage). Well, if damage does occur to the craft and the craft isn't configured to go to the ISS, there is only a small chance and a big prayer then that the shuttle will survive the re-entry. That's the ultimate high-wire act without a safety net. It's also disturbing to hear that. I can understand that there isn't much that can be done during the launch. I can also understand that there isn't much that can be done during re-entry. These are after all the two most critical (and dangerous) parts of the mission. But there should be a contingency plan if the shuttle gets damaged during low orbit. Yes, this is written with tons of hindsight. Yes, a contingency plan that would involve reaching the ISS in a timely manner (and commensurate with the fuel the space shuttle has) would be a very difficult task. And yes, the shuttle in all these years didn't get hit too often. I realize all that. I'll be waiting anxiouly to see the results of the cause of the breakup of the space shuttle. If it was damage to the shuttle that was the cause of the tragedy, I just hope that a contingency plan is eventually designed and put in place to give at least a chance for the future astronauts to survive any kind of damage to the space shuttle (if caught prior to re-entry, of course).
There are comments after this and before this that really show a total lack of comprehension when it comes to writing (near) error free code. (The parent I'm replying gets it, but doesn't really expand too much on the SW side of it)
Just throwing in a "realtime version of Unix" because it is a "reliable and robust OS" will NOT mean the program running on it is reliable Or robust.
When I was doing my CompSci degree 12 years ago the SW Eng Prof was on sobatical to NASA to write some new code for the attitude jets so it could dock with Russian equipment. There were about 2 or 3 PAGES of code. It took them almost a YEAR to write it and verify that it was error free. And then, when he came back he said they estimated there was still one error for every 10,000 lines of code in the space shuttle program. Not only that, it was the MOST ERROR FREE CODE ON THE PLANET. Translation: More error free than any Unix/Linux OS or program.
And now people want to just throw in a newer chip with a newer OS?! WTF are they thinking? There isn't even any evidence that would make anyone think that the computers were to blame for the accident in the first place! Fix what isn't broken or even related to the accident... Briliant, only a clueless legislator could come up with something that stupid!
As the parent to this post said, the chips are working fine, they are not overloaded, and the program is tried, true and tested. Don't fix what ain't broke!
Agreed, there are very good reasons why they use older hardware with "known" problems rather than newer hardware with "unknown" problems.
James Tomayko has written an excellent book entitled "Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience". It appears to be available online - Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience.
Of particular interest would be Chapter Four: Computers in the Space Shuttle Avionics System
Soyuz is characterized in the popular media as an aging, broken-down spacecraft, but the fact is that it is one of the most reliable and efficient manned spacecraft that has ever been produced. The Soyuz has a launch escape system which has been used once, in 1983, to blast the crew away from their exploding rocket (in the words of one site, "The crew landed close to the launch site, badly bruised after surviving nearly 20g acceleration, but they were still alive.") This is unlike the shuttle, in which escape is impossible for the first two minutes of flight, while the solid boosters (which can't be turned off) are firing. Soyuz has not had a fatal accident since 1971, and has had no major safety issue since 1988. Personally, given the choice between flying on the Shuttle and flying on Soyuz, I would pick the latter.
Spaceflight tends to reward simple and time-tested designs over new and complex. I have read at least one account suggesting that NASA resurrect the Gemini spacecraft for crew transfer to and from the ISS, since it was one of the most reliable spacecraft the US has ever flown.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I haven't seen anyone try and connect the "purple streak" picture and the break-up, so i'll post my theory references again and hope it gets considered.
The tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The roughtiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trailacted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused severe damage, enough to cause a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.
New image evidence shows damage to the composite section of the wing. An increasing reliance on composite materials in aircraft construction creates the potential for additional problems because the composites can allow a connection between lightning and airplane electrical circuits
"...confirmed by the independent investigation team"
There are a whole lot of incentives for a company to announce disturbing news that they know to be completely false in an attempt to attract publicity (EG the alien-loving human cloners).
Now I am not exactly sure what this article means by independent, but I'm thinking they have nothing to do with the government and whatever penalties they could incur for a stunt like the one I'm suggesting could be completely outweighed by some kind of profit incentive. Even a non-profit company -- don't be fooled by the term.
That said, take this with a pile of salt.
Check this out:
n ci d=753&e=1&u=/nm/20030207/sc_nm/shuttle_dc
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=570&
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Russia never has, and never intended to, launch a Soyuz expressly for space tourism purposes. Tito and Shuttleworth were sold permission to sit in the third cosmonaut's seat on ISS resupply missions.
As I noted in my original post, it seems likely that Russia now feels that they need the extra cargo room that would be freed up by not carrying a third human.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I haven't seen anyone try and connect the "purple streak" picture and the break-up, so i'll post my theory references again and hope it gets considered.
New image evidence shows damage to the composite section of the wing. An increasing reliance on composite materials in aircraft construction creates the potential for additional problems because the composites can allow a connection between lightning and airplane electrical circuitsThe tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The roughtiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trailacted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused severe damage, enough to cause a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.
My,My, Hey, Hey
If Americans are not good enough to ensure a minimum security in-flight, that should be their problem. Russian are really experts.
NASA never had any problems with conventional space capsules during re-entry, and never lost a crew. The Russians have continued to use a well tested, relatively simple spacecraft, which has served them very reliably. Comparing a Soyuz to a Shuttle is like comparing a calculator to a computer, you can do many of the same things on either one, but they are fundamentally different, and designed for different purposes.
The decision to use fragile thermal tiles for the Shuttle is one that has faced much criticism over the years. It is a decision that is at the core of what happened to the Shuttle on re-entry, whatever the reason that some of those tiles were damaged or lost. The vulnerability to tile damage was known, but NASA thought they had managed the potential issues in a way that assured the safety of the Shuttle. It appears they were wrong, and the problems were not controllable in the long term.
The amazing thing to me is the number of missions they flew before these thermal tiles became an issue. I think the thermal tiles are a fatally flawed system, both because of their susceptability to damage in flight, and because they require huge amounts of expensive upkeep between missions. The fact that NASA flew over 100 missions before this kind of problem occurred is a tribute to their dedication. The fact that this system was selected shows that NASA is not perfect.
The computers on board the shuttles are *not* obsolete. 1970's technology, yes. Old, yes. If you have a device which does what it is designed to do and there isn't a suitable replacement or even a reason to replace then it is not obsolete.
Even though there are faster processors available, the entire system must be considered. The software, hardware and system has been through extensive design, development and debug. Resistance to vibration and radiation and accelleration has been tested and was designed in.
Slapping in the latest gajillion Hz processor would not have provented the recent tragedy, it likely would have created more dangers. Certainly if designing a shuttle today, we'd use a processor with more horsepower, but by the time it got off the launch pad, it would look ancient by the standard of what's sitting on your desk.
For mission critical applications, I would take old slow reliable over new fast unproven any day.
Level 1: Initial or chaotic.
Level 2: Repeatable or reactive.
Level 3: Defined or proactive.
Level 4: Managed or predictive.
Level 5: Optimising or making process improvement a way of life.
jdavidb, repeat after me "Would you like fries with that?" ;)
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Mehercule! And Texas is a tiny place, too, far outside the space shuttle flight path! What were the odds!
If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it.
Yep, you've pegged it. Jove is angry at the Bush Administration. The proper rite of opening the Doors of Janus was doubtless not properly followed. I suggest a propitial lectisternia.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
most of the reasons people have said here from the delicate foam damaging the delicate wing to software problems you might as well say aliens did it. too much speculation is unhealthy. im sure nasa will find the (or a) reason depending if it was their fault or not. dont flame me because i am beautiful...
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
But then, whether you call it cynicism or realism, we accept a level of failure in all transport systems which is capable of killing people. We allow people to ride bicycles in motorised traffic. We allow manufacturers to build cars that are capable of traveling fast enough that a brake or steering failure can kill not only the occupants but anyone who gets in the way. We allow the construction of ships that break up in heavy seas, of railways where trains can pass red lights and crash. There is no public contract about this: we never actually get a chance to vote on the level of risk we want in our transport systems. What we do is react to disasters, and politicians have to decide based on that reaction whether to take some kind of action.
Sometimes they do, and as a result we have anti-lock brakes, double-hulled ships, crash barriers on freeways and autoroutes, airbags, automatic train protection systems, and a host of other technologies.
The Shuttle crews are unusual, superior human beings. But they should not need to be heroes, any more than someone who gets on a plane in LA to fly to a meeting in Tokyo is a hero.
Because if the exploration of space is ever to become commonplace, we have to get rid of the idea that this is a dangerous enterprise for heroes. We need to follow the same rules that apply to everything else. We need to ask nasty questions like "Why can't tiles be replaced in orbit, since we have had 18 years to think about things like this?" .
A WW1 biplane could keep flying after it had been shot full of holes, yet the Shuttle seems to have a number of extremely fragile technologies failure of any one of which could destroy it on re-entry. If that's so, why haven't we developed a better technology? Is it the mindset that needs to change as much as the design?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I'm sure both Linux and Unix are used (and rightly so) for development, planning, ground computers, and maybe even experiments. But it is not running the flight systems. Even if you could find a compelling reason to do so, would have to do some serious shoehorning to get a Linux kernel to fit, much less have enough room left to do anything. Not to mention, Linux and Unix (in their native forms) are NOT real-time systems.
And since when does old = broken? Unix is "old" but it gets the job done and it has changed a lot over the years. Windows on the other hand, is pressing 20 years old itself and it still is only questionably reliable. (Someone can argue that if they like, but ask yourself if you would want to travel Mach 20+ at more than 40 miles up in something run by ANY version of Windows.)
In short, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
(Note: Don't interpret this to mean I am anti-Windows. I feel that it absolutely has its place. I just don't think that place is in anything super critical.)
In Soviet Russia, Lance Bass is stuck with YOU!
The US air traffic control system is still many years behind on replacing all the computers from the early 60s. They kept coming up with prototype systems with magnitudes more processing power - and magnitudes more bugs. It looks like they're finally installing stuff that mostly works; but it's around 15 years behind schedule.
On a similar note, I know of a Fortune 500 corporation that was still running its accounting system on early-60s RCA mainframes in the mid 80s. It wasn't worth it to recreate the software - which worked fine - until financial execs who were starting to put PCs on their desks got too frustrated about not being able to access the data directly.
You can build an airframe requiring extraordinary processing power just to keep it stable in flight - our newest fighters are of the sort. But the shuttle's not. And maybe it shouldn't be - since if it was there'd be no possibility of a human pilot subbing for a down computer. In combat, if the computer's down, the craft's toast anyway.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
There is an article on Fox News that is blaming the disaster on the change to a more environmenntally friendly foam. Apparently until 1997 they used a freon based CFC foam that had much fewer problems.
Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if the shuttle itself was the unwilling participant in atmospheric electrical phenomena research?
... to the current reentry method are there? Can the descent be controlled more or is it fuel prohibitive? I googled but nothing came up.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
if in soviet russia we suspended our space tourist program, does that mean in america our space tourist program suspended US?
char *mySig;
Perhaps, but with some minimal planning for this eventuality it would have been simple to handle. Make sure one other shuttle is always ready to go within a week like Atlantis was, and bring some rope and stuff for the emergency people transfer.
The big issue seems to be that there is no way to look at the outside from the inside, or anywhere else. If you don't know that the hull is damaged all else becomes irrelevant. It seems like a simple thing to rig up some camera or whatever to look around the corners.
Food was a non issue. These were fit healthy people who could easily fast for a month with no serious health problems. As long as you have water, and you can recirculate that pretty low tech, if they don't do that already.
I expect something like this to be in place before the shuttles are taken in use again.
Looks like that option would've been extremely risky even if damage had been noticed.
Remember, it's still very possible that a meteoroid hit the wing during the spaceflight maybe even early in the re-entry.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Perhaps I am thinking to simply, but if they did not have enough information about the state of the shuttle, isn't it time for more sensors , hense more information. Autombiles now have sensor systems as extensive as the shuttles. How about a rfid transmiter (or induction proven heat resistant equivelent) attached the back of every tile? If 30 thousand dollar cars have nervous systems equivelent to the shuttle (minus a couple of gyroscopes) isn't time for more sensors?
What is the most expensive part on a car the motor? The computer? The transmition? The body? Antilock brakes? Nope it's the wiring harness. Perhaps the shuttle is due for a sensor upgrade. No spacewalk needed.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
They shuttle could have stayed on orbit until Wednesday, and with careful rationing, they might have extended that another couple of days, but they would have run out of consumables (air, power, food, water) by the end of the week.
In-flight droid repairs.
We know NASA is already working on them... they just need to work on them a bit faster.
Besides, robots are getting smarter all the time, though I don't know if that particular article speaks better for or against the use of robots in dangerous situations.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
We had Roger come to our college in ~1994 to give a talk on the problems wit Challenger. I had spend much of the day talking w/ him about the design and testing of the Columbia. He told me all about the work on the o-rings, the aluminum skin and frame and various testing. As I recall, he wasn't too impressed with the continued safety of the fleet, and he considered there to be a 10% chance of failure on any given flight.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
...that the same wing was damaged slightly during take-off. Bob MacDonald is the host of Quirks and Quarks, and weekly CBC radio show. Since then I haven't heard much about it. Was it just pure speculation?
And what will it mean for our resolve to keep flying manned missions? Will public support suddenly turn against it, because people will perceive that space is just too dangerous, even when NASA makes zero errors?
I think after the investigation is complete, we'll see the following changes to the shuttle:
1. The foam insulation material on the External Tank will be changed back to the older formula, politically incorrect as it seems. The older material didn't flake off en masse like the newer material. Given that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen storage (MUCH colder than liquid nitrogen used by many commercial industries) will result in ice buildup fairly easily, going back to a material that won't flake off easily in the presence of heavy ice during the launch sequence is a good idea.
2. There will definitely be a switch to insulating tiles that are less vulnerable to damage by debris impact. The current insulating material is still too easily damaged by impact from any type of debris (hence the reason why when the shuttle is moved by airplane they never do it through any rainstorms). I know that NASA had been working on a new generation of insulating tiles that have more metallic material in them; it's also possible that the next generation of insulating tiles will use materials derived from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories' aerogel materials research.
They're cancelling the "Space Tourism" flights, because Russia is going to devote all Soyuz flights solely to resupplying the ISS while the Shuttle Fleet is grounded.
That means no Taxi Flights. The next Long Term crew will fly up in a Soyuz, and the current crew will return on the one already docked there.
This pattern will continue until the Shuttles are flying again, at which point the Shuttle will resume Crew Rotation duties, and the Russians will go back to Taxi Flights to replace the Soyuz "Escape Capsule", at which point they will then have an extra seat open to sell to Tourists, or to other Space Agencies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll hit you with a piece of insulation foam at only five-hundred miles per hour. You won't have a problem with that, right?
It's not Cargo room, and Soyuz flights aren't resupply flights.
Unmanned Progress Tugs fly resupply missions to ISS, they can carry 2.5 tons of supplies (food, clothes, fuel, water, oxygen, etc).
Soyuz flights were "Taxi Flights" Soyuz capsules have an on-orbit rating of six months. So that means that the Russians need to rotate the Soyuz "Life Boat" at the ISS every six months.
What they do is fly a fresh Soyuz capsule up. Two cosmonauts are necessary for the Taxi Flight, and then that Taxi Crew comes back down on the old Soyuz capsule. They used to fill that third seat through agreements they had with other nations space agencies, and have only recently begun selling them to space tourists.
They're going to kill the Taxi Flights while the Space Shuttle is grounded, and devote them to ISS Crew Rotation.
That means that the next Long-Term ISS Crew will fly up to the station on a Soyuz, and the current crew will return to earth aboard the Soyuz currently docked to the station, and due to be rotated out.
They will continue that pattern until the Shuttle's start flying again, at which point they will resume Crew Rotation duties, and the Soyuz flights will go back to being simple Taxi Flights again, at which point the russians will start selling the third seat again.
Let's compare: with wings, the Shuttle gets relatively high L/D (lift to drag ratio) of about 3.5 if I remember correctly. Ablative reentry systems (Apollo/Soyuz/Gemini/Mercury) get L/D of about 1.
Why this matters:1. More L/D means you can control descent rate better. You can control it somewhat by steering the Soyuz using the attitude control jets, but only to a limited degree. So the Soyuz generates about 8-9 G of acceleration during descent. The Shuttle only generates a comfortable 3-4 G.
2. Equally important: lateral control gives the Shuttle and other lifting bodies significant crosstrack steering capability. This means that precision landing is possible, and also offers far more flexibility for contingency landings. With Soyuz/Apollo style entry, you get a large landing footprint, which is why the Russians land in the relatively empty steppes and the Apollos landed in the ocean.
Those are the options that are available today for hypersonic reentry. Parachutes are only used for the latter portions of the descent (typically subsonic).
The recently mothballed X-38 uses both. For the high-speed reentry, the lifting body is used to control the descent rate and to provide cross-track steering. At landing speeds, the lifting body doesn't have much lift, so a parachute is used.
I would have at least wanted them to visual it from one of the satellites. I prefer to know my destiny. And if they would have said, "You guys are toast on re-entry!"... I would have leaped out of the shuttle in order to be a preserved frozen chunk in orbit. Think of how famous you would be for a while. Since this was just a near-earth orbit, you likely would come screaming in for burn-up sometime. But. If it is fame you are after... and a good unobstructed view of the earth for several seconds...
Need Another Seven Astronauts. Hehe, flamebait I know.
so says a couple news reports
One
and
Two
and
Three (yeah yeah, someone posted this last one above)
In other Columbia news, the government is searching for a box with "Secret Government Property" stenciled on the side.
I thought only bad guys in the movies were stupid enough to blatantly label the things they didn't want to fall into enemy hands.
Maybe it's time to go back to parachutes for reentry. In fact, there are some modern attempts. Those are the kinds of technologies we need for unmanned planetary probes anyway, and they are by far the most cost effective choice for sample return missions (where it may not be such a big deal if the parachutes fail).
It seems to me that the building of winged reentry vehicles is more driven by a desire for Buck Rogers-style space adventures, not good, cost-effective engineering.
The first news conference really showed an arrogance on NASA's part. They kept saying that nothing was going to happen.. yet it had already happened! Enthusiasm and dedication often considered positive qualities can lead to disaster, both here and in many other instances closer to home (and work).
Not a flame, but even if all of this is true it'd still be a bad idea. I write driver code (Linux/WinCE) for brand new CPUs. And even though it goes against common sense, sometimes new != better.
Or to put it another way, the last thing you'd want is for Intel to release an errata sheet while you're sailing along at 18kmph.
You need proven technology in that case. And new stuff has no track record, even if it is better. It's the track record that's important. That's what mission critical means. You can bet your life on it. Put it in a 747 or a pacemaker and go to sleep with a warm fuzzy feeling that you're not going to cause fatalities.
I blame marketing people for causing this distortion. They've even scooped up the phrase "mission critical" and used it so often that it's watered down now and kind of lost it's meaning. I'd love to show these people trying to sell mission critical sql servers or email delivery systems what it actually means. I propose a variation on Schrodinger's cat.
Dangle said marketing person out of a 20 story window in a straightjacket by a rope. Attach a dremel tool to the rope. Hook the dremel to their software product. If it crashes, the dremel turns on and cuts the rope.
The list of things you'd trust under those circumstances is very very small, and they are called mission critical. This is why track record is important.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Mod parent up. I'm an apple user and I can't stop laughing.
Even NASA spins its stories. Is management of public perception the largest business in the US today?
So, probably not.
He was a truly unique individual, and will be missed.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Some at NASA are focusing on reports that the giant space baby from 2001 is ticked off and swatting objects from the sky.
OK, Matey-O, this is completely off-topic but it's starting to annoy me. You say "Redundant is Always ;) metamodded as unfair. Check your timestamps people!"
in your sig. As a reader, if it's redundant I don't want to see it.
As for "check your timestamps", I will moderate the latest as redundant
if they are essentially the same, but if a later "redundant" post includes additional
info or is more interesting in some way I will moderate the earlier as
redundant. This is not a popularity contest, it is about presenting the
reader with the best possible experience. Could you explain the argument
behind your sig? And perhaps put it in your journal to avoid other OT posts
like this.
That's why the wings fell off!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Anyone has more info on it?"
Yes. It's not the wing and it's not a crack.
They've been launching 2 Soyuz a month for the last 69 years and 10 months? Might want to look that number up again, there's no way in hell they've launched that many missions.
Not to be overly nitpicky, but I wish you bloody Americans would stop writing things like:
18kmph
Now, I know you mean 18,000 miles per hour. But when you write it as 18kmph, I see 18 KiloMeters Per Hour. kmph of course being said abbreviation. And since 18kmph is well below the stall speed of the shuttle, no wonder it fell out of the sky.
That's relative. They were at the limit of what the technology of the time could achieve.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yeah, but even those post-causal symptoms can tell you a lot. Knowing just how the craft departed controlled flight (what roll, pitch, and yaw rates, changing at what rate, how those rates themselves change over time, and so forth) can be of great use in determining the configuration of the craft after the primary failure. Knowing that makes it easier to work backward to what the primary failure looked like.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
the san francisco chronicle is reporting the possibility of a sprite lightning strike.
/ 20 03/02/07/MN200326.DTL
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/SOR/3_5m_telescope.htm
It's a 3.5M adaptive optics scope used to track satellites in orbit. There are some nice pictures of other more typical astronomical targets on the website that demonstrate it's capabilities quite nicely.
If it's location and abilities are well known there is no reason why they shouldn't release the shuttle pictures.
We keep hearing stories about photos that may or may not help make sense of the accident, but, the
pictures are not shown to us. In the hours after the accident, we saw all kinds of fuzzy images, such as the still of the insulation hitting the wing, and all sorts of video of the re-entry. So why all of a sudden don't we get to see the film? What's with the guy in California who apparently gave his camera, negatives, prints (I guess it was film?) to some spooks? Why are we supposed to accept a story claiming what "high resolution tracking cameras" captured, when we aren't allowed to see these images for ourselves?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Enough has been spoken about the guidance computers aboard Shuttles and their special differences and requirements.
This article talks about the necessary preparations to take laptops to space. You can't just use one from the box--our PCs need gravity or convection to continue working.
This is just a small example of why things must be complex when going to space.
My $0.02, especially with the USAF's new pictures: Columbia collided with that foam much harder and in a more sensitive spot than engineers could determine. Or, something smacked the ship in-orbit (unlikely since the astronauts, MSCS, Miss Cleo, the bunions on your dad's feet, and your sleeping cat would've noticed and recorded the event).
Another possibility is structural failure on liftoff--after the foam hit, the slipstream weakened the affected part, but the part stayed in place since the Shuttle was moving upward and out of atmospheric drag. Reentry tore it off altogether.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"Breaker" Morant was scapegoated. He did as he was ordered. When what he did became a political embaressment he was executed for having done it, those having issued him the orders having denyied them.
That is a scapegoat.
The Thiokol engineers were "whistle blowers." They pissed of their employer. Their employer fired them.
A scapegoat is one who is unjustly sacrificed to prevent or ausage public embaressment. The firing of the Thiokol engineers actually *added* to the embaressment because the cat was already out of the bag.
They weren't sacrificed. They were executed.
KFG
I'm going to assume you're British, since you're calling me a "bloody American".
when you write it as 18kmph, I see 18 KiloMeters Per Hour
The problem appears to be with your perception, not with what I wrote. Engineers say (k) as a shorthand when they mean 1000 of something. Anything - not just metric units. Your current link to the internet is probably rated in kbps.
And while I'm at it, we built the shuttle so we are going to measure it's speed in our unit system. The shuttle's speed is measured in miles per hour. A problem we wouldn't currently have if we had not started out as a British colony, I might add.
So please forgive me for not pulling out a calculator and converting the shuttle's speed into furlongs per fortnight or whatever for our more sensitive friends across the pond.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I concur- as a problem determination guy- since the actual problem occured much earlier and since mission control has a copy of all telemetry data, etc., it would be nice to have every piece of data ever imaginable, however they can take initial theories and work backwards.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
But of course the point is moot if they didn't know about the risk on re-entry. Or at least that the risk is much bigger than the one present on every space mission. I think shuttles are still amazingly safe for what they do. You have a bigger chance to get killed doing extreme sports that are way more conservative than trying to descend from orbit on a glider.
Please dismantle this idea at your leisure...
Would it be possible to put some type of shield on the heat-tile-wing surfaces of the Shuttle?
I'm sure such a thing would introduce weight and aerodynamic issues at launch. But, what sort of material could be applied or attached to that area to protect the tiles from foam, ice, space junk and other objects capable of damage?
I imagine the "material" burning off at reentry and perhaps during this burn-off contributing to the tiles' heat dissapating ability -- rather than turning into a flaming ooze spreading over the vulnerable parts of the fueselage and such.
Is this just completely unrealistic?
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
The logic behind NASA's statements that any damage to the wing was not followed up with land-based or ISS-based visual inspections because they could not have done anything about it is deeply troublesome to me.
One should not limit the aquisition of important safety data based on this type of thinking. You don't try to phone someone who lives in a burning building just because you are, at that time, unable to come up with a response to that situation.
As somone who went through a life-threatening situation (a fire), I can affirm that the mind can get pretty creative when it has to.
For example, the Progress vehicle could have been sent to Columbia while a rescue shuttle was prepared.
With only two EVA-certified individuals on board, and no docking clamps, moving supplies from the Progress vehicle to Columbia would not have been a trivial endeavor. And transferring untrained (for EVA) people between shuttles would have been difficult, at best.
Yet no one would have argued before a rescue attempt that the seven astronauts would have been better off if we had not known that the left wing was damaged.
Has anyone mentioned how much current a modern Athlon/Pentium IV can suck up?
As someone already mentioned, they kick out a hell-of a lot of heat which would need a more capable heat-exchanger. But your also looking at adding the addition mass of bigger APUs (used on re-entry)
Just a note on 486's; I once watched a 486 pc in an office car park get run over by a Range Rover. It flipped a couple of times and smashed into the kerb. There was a huge hole torn in the systems case and apparent scratches on the mobo.
After replacing the HDD, the machine booted and ran first time.
Now imagine trying that with a modern 'cough & you've bust it' PC.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it disgusting that something as complex and intricate as the space shuttle doesn't/didn't have very advanced monitoring systems to at least know there was significant damage to a major portion of the craft? It really gives me the impression that they have been flying this thing blind on only rudimentary data from an array of sensors.
.01% more chance of survival, which is worth it IMO.
Something that is traveling at such a high speed, with all the dangers and slightly problems that could arise, should have every square inch of every possible system under some type of either visual or as good as visual, or better, type of monitoring with all sorts of triple rudundancy.
True, the argument can be made that they wouldn't be able to do much if something did get damaged while in space, but still you would know ahead of time and that information is power -- power that could have saved these people's lives or given them that
I realize that the Shuttle electronics were 1970's era, and perhaps that kind of extensive monitoring wasn't available, but if they do decide to rebuild a shuttle based upon today's standards it would be well within the technical capacity to include an advanced monitoring system.
Also I resent the fact that the first article mentions a lot of software based upon today's technology is unreliable. ANY software is unreliable if not developed with proper design methods and tested with a proper testing methodology. This is science and math here, not some black magic or wine aging. The complexity or speed of a system is not relevant if the code and design of said system is developed under recognized and strict methods. I imagine the same design methodology for life support systems would be a good start -- and you don't see many advanced heart monitors running on ancient hardware.
It's also false about the quote in the article where you can't get more data out of the sensors. Of course you can get more data, use more precise sensors and more of them! Use 10x redundancy...this is people's lives we are talking about here. The real problem, and what the quote should have been, is their older hardware can't handle the extra precision and additional sensors.
It's amazing the lies these people will tell due to misinformation, trying to hide fault, ignornace, or some awful combination of all three. If it is determined that the wing structure was damaged and NASA did not know this quite significant information, I think NASA should at least recognize they were flying with inferior capability and an accident was bound to happen.
I mean, it's like driving your car on a flat tire and complaining when you get into a wreck...something so obvious should have been accounted for and known prior to attempting dangerous re-entry.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Anyone else know why someone would use this phrasing?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Columbia had no airlock aboard and no spacesuits. so once the craft is depressurized you can't go back. Also the orange suits are NOT space suits but low pressure suits. While you might risk transfering someone in such a suit most likely you kill the poor sap as they lack rad shielding and they are cumbersome to move in zero pressure situations.
There are no rescue abilitlies with space shuttles. Never have been.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Its a CONDO, which means they owned the space. Somebody has to fix the damange, and who should that be?
Since the person is probably of modest means, should they eat it because its "tacky to sue NASA"?
Think like a practical person instead of a 16 year old kid.
An NYT story notes that the obsolete but reliable computers driving the shuttle are to be examined as part of the inquiry.
Jon "Maddog" Hall's thoughts, as posted to my local LUG: http://mail.gnhlug.org/pipermail/gnhlug-discuss/20 03-February/002736.html
Starfire Telescope Shows Things Clearly
Atop a 6,000-foot peak in the southeastern portion of Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., is the Starfire Optical Range where the world's premier adaptive optics telescope is housed. Capable of tracking low-earth orbiting satellites, here is where technologies were pioneered that allowed astronomers to see space objects clearly through the distorting effects of the atmosphere.
Capabilities
Starfire Optical Range maintains a telescope with a 3.5-meter-diameter (11.5 feet across) primary mirror, which is protected by a unique retracting cylindrical enclosure that allows the telescope to operate in the open air. Using lasers, a sophisticated computing capability and adaptive optics, the telescope is able to distinguish basketball-sized objects at a distance of 1,000 miles into space.
This world-class optical research facility is the center for Air Force strategic optical research. Starfire's primary mission is to develop optical sensing, imaging and propagation technologies. It is a major component of the Air Force Research laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate.
Description
The lightweight, honeycombsandwich primary mirror weighs 4,500 pounds and has a one-inch-thick glass facesheet. The surface is precisely polished to 21 nanometers, or 3,000 times thinner than a human hair. There are 56 computer-controlled actuators behind the mirror to maintain its shape while the telescope is moving.
Unique feature
A unique feature of the telescope is its protective enclosure: Its "walls" consist of three 70-foot-diameter, 9-foot high cylinders, aligned on top of each other to resemble a large can. These cylinders retract - an operating mechanism that resembles an inverted collapsible camping cup. As the cylinders drop around the telescope, the telescope "looks out" through a 35-foot diameter shuttered opening in the roof.
This enclosure has two major advantages over conventional telescope domes that are equipped with narrow slits: the enclosure does not have to be rotated at high speed for satellite tracking, and it improves image quality by releasing warmer "trapped" air that could create optical distortions.
The combined weight of the telescope, gimbal, optics, and support structures exceeds 100 tons. The telescope sits on a massive, steelreinforced concrete pier that weighs more than 700 tons and which is isolated from the rest of the facility and anchored
in bedrock with long steel rods.
Controlling temperature
Thermal control of the telescope and facility is essential to obtaining high quality images. A unique feature of the facility is the removal of heat by a closed-cycle water system chilled by a large "ice house" located a quarter-mile from the telescope. In the daytime, ice is made and stored in an underground pit for use at night. The pit, beneath the floor of the physical plant, can hold 4.5 million pounds of ice. Propane-fired boilers can generate up to 2 million Btus for hot water, which is also supplied to the telescope facility. Very precise temperature control of optical labs and equipment can be achieved by mixing the right proportions of hot and chilled water, which then conditions air and equipment in the facility. Unlike conventional air conditioning systems, this method prevents heat from being released into the air near the telescope. Total cost of the telescope, enclosure, laboratories, physical plant, and supporting facilities was $27 million.
The research and operations staff is comprised of approximately 80 military, civilian and contractor personnel. Included in the staff are physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, electronic and mechanical engineers, optical designers and technicians, sensor and computer specialists, laser technicians, meteorologists, electricians, plumbers, welders and machinists.
Garcia, Richard, AFRL Public Affairs. "Starfire Telescope Shows Things Clearly". Leading Edge. Air Force Materiel Command. Aug. 2000, pg. 16.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The Soyuz system is a veritable box of fireworks; since the 60's its been the principal launch vehicle for all Russian space missions and in terms of unmanned sattelite deployments it has in the past run to more than 6 launches a month.
Here's a link to a photo of the 'production line' it looks pretty busy.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Does anyone know where to find those pictures taken in California?
If you play with hardware long enough it breaks; if you play with software long enough it works.
I believe I heard this at NASA, when I was working on their cutting edge PDP-11 data collection system.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I've repeatedly been the _first_ person to make a point and had it modded down as redundant. If you have 30,000 chimps all hitting comments.pl at once, why should someone with a valid point be dinged because someone ELSE has the same idea at the same time? It doesn't make it any less valid.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Yeah, I'm sure it's harder than it seems, but hardly impossible. And the political pressure for it will be enormous before they'll let a shuttle up again. Yet another argument against government run space exploration, but that's a whole other topic.
You want a shuttle ready to go everytime? Ok. You just doubled the cost for every launch. Because keeping a shuttle ready is a huge expense.
A big expense, but hardly close to doubling the launch cost. Most of which I believe is replacing tiles and rockets and a zillion other things after each mission.
Having emergency supplies that keeps the crew alive for 3 weeks and keeping one shuttle ready to liftoff within 3 weeks in case it's needed can't come close to that. My uninformed but intelligent guess is around 10% more cost.
"The Software would have a larger potential for blame... I.E. the programmer did not make klaxons go off when sensors give bad readings, or there was any instance of throwing out data."
IMHO, there is no basis for this statement.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
It is strange to me that no one
...
focused his attention on why exactly
the communication was lost at 7:59 am
in the middle of a "Roger and b..."
sure there was some heating and drag going on
in the left wing but nothing really dramatic
had happened to the shuttle yet
anyone with some more knowledge
would like to elaborate that ??
giampy
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
This morning's San Francisco Chronicle is covering that subject all over the front page.
Dude, "Low Orbit" is space. They didn't die in "low orbit", they died on re-entry. In "low orbit", there is no significant air friction, haven't you ever seen a spacewalk? The key point you're missing is: Don't let them re-enter if their ship is damaged.
Then, you have time. Sure, maybe they can't launch a shuttle on demand. But, in this case, with a launch date of March 1 planned for Atlantis, how hard could it have been to bump that up two weeks? It's been said it's possible.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I really can't believe that it was both impossible to a) inspect and b) do something about it. Especially compared to the Apollo 13.
a) - Did they have any camcorders on board and a spacesuit to go out and slowly launch camcorder (it will rotate, but around the same axis). And then use engines to show the suspected wing and try to retrieve camera with the cargo bay? They could fail but one satellite (camcorder) would not harm. I'm sure they could think of something similar (maybe they had cameras with wiless link?)
b) Yes, definitely either Atlantis or Russian ship could help if the problem was found at once. And what about even trying to land unmanned Columbia? The first (and only) Soviet Buran (~=Shuttle) made it flight with nobody on board. Did they have more advanced electronics/computers?
I understand what you're saying, and you're right parachutes could potentially save lives, but not in this case.
Forget the fact that you'd have a hard time exiting an aircraft (the space shuttle was an aircraft when it came apart) that has lost one wing and is likely tumbling horribly out of control. No, alive or dead your body would probably be pinned to some interior wall, as the craft spins and tumbles.
Forget the fact that at Mach 18+ when a wing rips off the entire craft tends to disintegrate rather quickly.
So, suppose you were able to get out of the craft in one piece, with your parachute intact. I suppose you have never had the pleasure of experiencing a Mach 18+ wind. Neither have I, and I hope no one ever will.
OK. Suppose you survived the initial wind shock and were now outside the craft, traveling at Mach 18+. Wouldn't you be subject to the same 2500F temperatures that the craft sustained? How you gonna survive that? You're not.
Not to mention the need for oxygen due to the freefall time necessary to get to a safe opening altitude and velocity, and I'm not sure, but at 200000 feet you might need some radiation protection as well.
As far as I know, the world altitude record parachute jump was made by Joeseph Kittinger from 102,800 feet in 1960, and this was from a balloon, not a fixed wing craft.
So, in short, nice try, but it would never in a million years have saved anyone in a situation like the Columbia faced.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
It may be a minor correction, but it's easy to figure out what the weather conditions were that day, so any deviation from the norm (no matter how small) would have been recorded and should be analyzed IMO.
If the foam broke the wing and caused an edge to appear with sufficient drag so as to require thrusters to correct on re-entry, it should have caused a left yaw on launch which would need some sort of corrective action, yes? If that action took place, it would certainly indicate that the problem appeared there initially.
I don't believe the wing was damaged by space debris, since the crew would have heard or noticed an impact like that, and the course correction would have been absolutely necessary in space where there would not have been wind drag to keep it in line. So it either happened at launch, or was broken/substandard before it ever left the ground...
If you want to know exactly when a picture was taken, you need to sychronize its clock with real universal time. To do that, you need the camera's clock's current offset (which you can get now), and its rate of drift (which you get by taking a separate offset several days later).
The first order of business is not to have the vehicle disintegrate on reentry. Controling descent rate and precision landings are mere conveniences in comparison, as long as the descent rate is acceptable and the landing occurs in a "safe" area.
Those are the options that are available today for hypersonic reentry. Parachutes are only used for the latter portions of the descent (typically subsonic).
Of course, but you are missing the point. By giving up on controlling descent rate or lateral control and just relying on parachutes for the last stage, Soyuz/Apollo-style reentry vehicles can be made much simpler: there are almost no critical systems to fail and I would bet that the heat shielding is much easier to construct as well. And, on top of all that, they are probably cheaper to operate as well.
Compare what happened to Columbia, where people are discussing whether a single tile may have caused "critical control systems" to fail with what Volynov survived in Soyuz 5.
You'd think that a place which specializes in space flight would at least know that There is no tracking camera which looks at the wing.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
So, let us suppose that the conclusion of the post-launch analysis of the damage done by the foam chunk was that it was in fact fatal, with absolute certainty; what would you do when you were in a commanding position in Houston?
Would you tell the crew: "Sorry, your spacecraft is broken, we do not see any possibility for repair so you will certainly die during reentry?" I think that would have been absolutely horrible for the astronauts.
I don't know, but "given" the fact that nothing can be done about it anymore in such a situation, I think it would be a realistic option (after consulting silently any other appropriate authorities) to keep them and everybody else ignorant of the imminent disaster and let them have a good flight, let them enjoy it and let them die (almost) happily.
The most serious objection I would see against the latter decision would be of religious nature: for many religions it is very important to prepare for death, say prayers and so on (sorry for my clumsy phrasing, I am not religious myself). In order to respect this, the crew should have gotten a warning somewhat longer before the expected catastrophe.
Well, just a thought.
This has been rehashed several times in Slashdot alone, so skip on a couple of paragraphs where I draw conclusions.
One of the problems with modern electronic devices is that the scaling dimensions are getting down to the quantum effect ranges (where atomic force and effects of quantum mechanics become much more important than a comparible simple circuit made for wiring up your home with 20 guage copper.)
At these scales you need to seriously start worrying about the effects of cosmic rays, and other high-energy particles. These are very common in environments found in space, but not usually common to find when in your little cubicle at work. The general environment that space craft need to work in (including manned spacecraft) is extreamly harsh to say the least. Even simple devices such as DRAM chips don't work nearly so well, and it is still common to be using core memory modules, simply because they work.
Because some of these much more robust electronic circuits were commonly built even for consumer electronics back in the 1970's, the computers for spacecraft still follow some of the manufacturing standards that were common back then. It is a different environment, and has different requirements.
There are electronic manufacturing lines that release equipment according to "MilSpec" requirements, or expanded requirements for harsher environments. Just for example, consumer electronic specifications will typically require that the components are operated between 10C to 40C, with the "MilSpec" requirements more like -20C to 60C. Individual equipment requirements will vary, but the essential thing to remember here is that the requirements are much tougher for these devices. To send things into space requires even tougher requirements than this.
***Conclusions***
In many ways, I think it may eventually be necessary for NASA or the various private groups that are building space vehicles to start running their own fab lines, or find some specialty electronics manufacturing company that is willing to run component lines for these tougher requirements. Of course, this is going to make $100,000 CPUs and $50,000 memory modules typical, because these are going to need to be special runs.
Only when commercial space travel is common will prices on electronic manufacturing for these requirements start to gain economies of scale to drop their prices. If the current space shuttles get rebuilt with new electronics (as BTW the Columbia was the most modern shuttle of the entire fleet with a completely redesigned piloting console compared to what Truly and Engle first flew in STS-1).
I'll have to agree with your assessment that it is amazing just how little it seemed that NASA even cared about the astronauts. They only wanted not to repeat the Challenger disaster, and sure enough, they didn't repeat the Challenger disaster...they just got some other new problem.
At least they aren't trying to rescue a doomed crew from the other side of the moon like they did wtih Apollo 13.
Check out that Washington Monthly article ("Beam me Outta Here Scotty!") written back in 1980. The Shuttle's design is such a compromise that saving even 100 lbs. by omitting a "Black Box" isn't worth it. Certainly every gram is accounted for each and every launch, but the Shuttle can lift very little weight compared to it's own. This is a vehicle that seems to take 8th grade ant colony experiments into LEO every other month. They aren't going to skimp on a bullet-proof tape deck if it's helpfull.
More confirmation and information related to my theory of events in this article which describes a blue jet being created by a meteor, and a research balloon being destroyed by an electric bolt at over 100,000ft. The odds of a shuttle passing through a sprite or jet was estimated at 1 in 100.. seems pretty accurate.
There was a lot of research done on that.
The airbags might be a little bit rough for people but they could save lives.
Anything that could be used here?
More confirmation and information related to my theory of events in this article which describes a blue jet being created by a meteor, and a research balloon being destroyed by an electric bolt at over 100,000ft. I have been posting this for a few days, and all the new information keeps confirming it as a real possibility.
Let's consider some other aircraft:
The SR-71 could do mach3.3 (2200mph), and it's titanium skin temp routinely got up to 1000F, well above the melting point of the shuttles aluminum skin. (melting point aluminum 600F, titanium 3000F).
The exhaust outlet temp of the SR71 engines is around 3400F, so we know there are materials available for aircraft manufacture that can take some pretty high heat even when they are taking a pounding.
The SR71 was designed long before the shuttle and flew routinely up until the 1990s without incident.
How about the MIG-25. It can do Mach 3.3 or so also, and its airframe can withstand 25G! I don't know what the design specs were on the shuttle, but I know it never experienced more than 3 G, and I would guess that 10G would rip it apart.
If I were going to slap a spacecraft together, I'd give it the airframe specs of a MIG-25, make it out of titanium, and instead of tiles just bolt on a piece of disposable titanium covered with teflon for a heat shield. It could probably be used a bunch of times too before it had to have a new coating put on it if the teflon coating were thick enough. Heck, there's so many new frying pan materials out there that would probably do 10 times better than teflon too.
Such a spaceship would have weathered what destroyed the shuttle with little more than a tiny dent.
You mean to tell me that with $500 million per FLIGHT (!) that piece of junk was all they could come up with? It was half disintegrated before it ever left the ground. Tiles so delicate you could not touch them? WTF? That's like some kind of sick joke. It's almost like they're making it up. They designed a winged aircraft that is supposed to use aerobraking for reentry and made it out of aluminum instead of titanium?
Hell, I have a whole set of frying pans that are more advanced.
Lots of folks are getting screwed here people: Astronauts and taxpayers to name a few.
With only the launch video for information the analysis was 90% WAG (wild ass guess). At best the analysis would have consisted of: "We think the foam is this big, and since we assume the foam is this big we assume it weighs this much, and since it weighed this much, and it looks like it hit around here, so it shouldn't have caused any serious damage. And plus, it was okay the last few times this happened." If I were in charge of a no fail safe system (the exterior hull of the Shuttle) and I hear that kind of bullshit, the first words out of my mouth would be, "Clean out your desk, you're fired for incompetence." What about possible ice? Why did the foam fall off? Could it have been wet? Did they analyze the retrieved tank's foam? Did they measure the missing foam? What was the weather before launch? There were too many unknowns and more information was needed before a proper analysis could have been done. And ANY pictures would have added a whole dimension to the data available for analysis.
Face it, they bet the shuttle on that WAG. And they lost big. This is an exact repeat of the complacency and lack of paranoia that led to the Challenger disaster. People in charge of spacecraft should be paranoid assholes who insist on things being done as perfectly as humanly possible. And "It was okay the last few times" is not a statement that people like that make.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I have been posting this possibility for two days. Now the evidence mounts. please check my website for my proposed chain of events and references.
It goes: tile damage makes debris on reentry, debris makes plasma trail, plasma ion trail makes lightning rod through atmosphere, atmosphere makes lightning, lightning damages composite, composite fails, etc.
The original design that NASA were gunning for was for a vehicle that would come in steeper and then glide over a limited range to its target with two real wings. The advantage being that the vehicle would only be exposed for a short period of time to the heating effect. The shuttle would also land a lot slower with this design.
The USAF needed a longer glide range to operate from Vandenburg, so they could always get back to land, even after a single orbit. They pressed for a delta wing which allowed them to glive for about 2,500 miles. This disadvantge is that the shuttle must fly through reentry (rather than a controlled stall, that NASA wanted). This meant that reentry took a lot longer, with much greater exposure to heat.
See my journal, I write things there
"Even so, what do you do then? There's no way to "dock" two shuttles and Columbia didn't have jetpack suits onboard, and I don't believe everyone was rated for EVA. You can make a "jump" from one ship to another, but that's trickier than it sounds... fortunately if you do it right and have the supplies on board then only one person has to do it - you can tether the ships together, as long as their orbits are precisely matched and close enough together. The precisely matched bit is the hard part really - it's going to take several hours to transport crew from one shuttle to the other.
"
it seems to me the atlantis crew would take a jet pack, and other needed equipment with them, and then 'fly' from the atlantis ship to the challenger, then rig up a tether.
If the choice is "take this incredible risky jump where you might die", OR , "stay here and definatly die", which would you have done?
"
It'd probably be an effort on the level of Apollo 13."
so you're saying its doable?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dude, the Apollo program did not use parachutes for re-entry. The capsules had heatsheilds. A parachute would be instantly incinterated!
Once reentry was complete and the capsule was back in the atmosphere, the parachutes were used to to bleed off the last bit of energy so that the capsule could land in the water.
The "wing vs parachute" question has nothing to do with reentry. It's a question of how the spacecraft gets to the ground after reentry is complete.
er.. case of wing damage
Does anyone know of what a comparable Saturn V type rocket would cost per flight nowadays compared to a shuttle?
... is not so much that it is 100 km higher up, but that it is on a completely different plane (inclination). Changing the orbit plane to match that of IIS would requires several orders of magnitude more fuel than just increasing the velocity to lift the orbit from the roughly 270km of Columbia to the roughtly 370km of IIS. Even though 100 km sounds like a lot, it's actually not a huge different in velocity change required (roughly the same as the decrease in velocity for the de-orbit burn, which can even be performed with the RCS thrusters if the OMS engines fail to work for some reason).
When does the ISS next need an orbital adjustment? This is the critical issue as the Soyuz engines aren't really suitable.
See my journal, I write things there
That is true. However, there are known areodynamic design and construction techniques that basically cause an object to assume the most drag-efficient position relative to an airstream within a short period of time, usually by causing it to spin. So in theory the black box would require sufficient shielding in all directions to allow the object to assume it's best position: where a great deal of heat shielding would then be used to deflect the heat around the contents of the box.
The final design problem would be to figure out how to transmit all of the data into the black box via a very limited number of connectors without introducing a burn through point.
By the way, the reason this doesn't work for manned craft is that a certain spin rate for more than a brief amount of time is fatal to humans anyway, because the heart can't supply enough blood to the brain against the force of the spin. Not to mention the g-forces encountered while the object is getting to the optimal position.
Thoughts anyone?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The New York Times has done a great job of bungling the Columbia story completely. First it was their lock-on to the foam theory, which has been all but discounted by NASA over the past couple days. It could still resurface, but if NASA's engineers with all their sophisticated computer modeling don't believe it, I don't believe it either - and I certainly don't believe the Times' journalists are more capable engineers than NASA's are. Now it's all this talk about Columbia's "outdated" computers - the implication being this thing was too old to fly, and that technology has passed it by.
Problem is, Columbia has been overhauled three times in the past twenty years, most recently in 1999, when it had a brand new glass cockpit installed, its heat shielding and many other components upgraded, and every inch of its wiring inspected. This in addition to the upgrades during the two previous overhauls.
In reality, this was probably the newest shuttle in the fleet. Its computers, avionics, and heat shielding were second to no other shuttle - only the Atlantis, which is the only other shuttle to go through this latest overhaul, matched Columbia in technology. I therefore have a hard time believing the computers were responsible for this accident. I have a hard time believing the heat shielding was responsible for this accident too. These were not old tiles, and this was not outdated shielding technology.
My feeling is this will come down to human error, as most of these things do. From what I understand, one of the new parts installed on Columbia in 1999 was upgraded heat shielding on the leading edges of the wing. Who's to say there wasn't a microscopic crack in this new shielding that was not detected and failed after a period of time, similar to what caused the UAL DC-10 crash in Sioux City a while back (a microscopic flaw in an engine part went undetected for more than 10 years before it finally failed in spectacular fashion). Who's to say this shielding wasn't installed or maintained improperly? (I have a difficult time believing this, but then most accidents of this magnitude are the result of difficult-to-believe events.) Who's to say there wasn't a *software* bug in the *new* flight systems, which only a particular set of peculiar events brought out on this particular flight? (Say, a bit of yaw, which the system over-compensated for and led to an oscillation that eventually ripped the ship apart.)
In any case, the NY Times is on the wrong track with this, and the whole idea of the Columbia containing all this obsolete technology needs to be dropped. The Columbia had leading-edge technology where it needed it, reliable and proven technology elsewhere. That's the same combination every new aircraft or spacecraft built today aspires to have. There's nothing anyone could complain about with regard to Columbia's technology.
NASA's afternoon press conference today produced the Air Force photo and a helpful series of slides mapping the sensor failures over time.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
Oops. Missed the closing italic tag. Sorry...
I have read elsewhere about space tourism trips where you do everything Thompson does here, plus things like training in the Russian equivalent to NASA's "vomit comet", riding in a centrifuge, plus some of the basic cosmonaut training that Tito got, but no actual flight.
I havn't read any thoughts in this area but it strikes me that with a bit more retro burn and a flater trajectory the descent could be made a lot slower.
I do see the descent taking a lot longer to do it this way. Is it 2 hours now? I'm thinking 16 or more. Sure that means more fuel.
Maybe a lower thermal load over a longer time doesn't help, but it seems odd that the 'doctor it hurts when I do this' analysis hasn't had much coverage.
with the budget the coders alone have, they could spec and have the chips made. Even a fab plant would easily be within the budget of Nasa. Not that they need too - nobody is using the older fab facilities anyways.
Alot of shuttle stuff is one off - it's not like they bought the shuttle computers down at the corner computer store.
I think we should buy at least 5 Soyuz ships + rockets from the Russians, and keep them in storage, but ready to go, if needed. Before each shuttle re-entry, a robotic EVA camera device could examine the shuttle exterior and if anything is found wrong, send enough Soyuz ships up, remotely piloted, for the shuttle crew to get home in, leave the shuttle in orbit, hopefully with enough fuel and remote controls to be kept in orbit, until a repair crew can be sent up on the next shuttle mission to try to repair the first shuttle. Bring the repaired shuttle back down via remote control only, just in case the repairs didn't hold. The Russians flew their shuttle completely by remote control many years ago, surely we ought to be able to modify all of our remaining fleet to be flown completely from orbit to a runway landing just the same.
Seriously, half the complaints are
why wasn't it made out of titanium?
why wasn't it made out of stainless steel?
why wasn't it made out of adamantium?
what weren't there little cameras flying around to tell them what's up?
why wasn't everything octoplex redundant?
why didn't they carry a spare shuttle?
I'm pretty sure all that stuff would have been fairly heavy and complicated.
Air Force imagery confirms Columbia wing damaged...
but that photo looks like a giant penis. !
Well, that's all well and good but:
1.) The shuttle can't retrieve the vast majority of satellites either. Unless they're in LEO, not destabilized, are designed to be retrieved, and can be refolded to fit in the shuttle bay, NASA has to pass on the job.
A robot "space taxi" of the sort that was supposed to be a complement of the space station in the earlier designs (ion engines powered by micronuke or solar, multiple grasping arms, remote operation from ISS) would do the job better, cost far less, and provide dozens of other useful capabilities. Use the taxi to bring the troublesome unit to ISS, if possible, repair it there, if not, wrap it in a disposable shell and drop it to earth.
2.) Repairs? See above.
3.) Building things in orbit? Again, see above. In addition, small mobile robots would do the job better and faster, work all the time instead of just during the brief intervals that the shuttle is up, and bring the ISS closer to being self-supporting and self-repairing.
4.) Satellite launches? Rockets work just fine for less money. Cheaper per pound, can go direct to more orbits, and are far more flexible.
5.) A soyuz-type craft cannot carry as large a crew. But tell me, so what? Is there some reason that one can't just launch more small ships? Keep in mind, btw, that launch facilities are currently being built in Brazil and Tonga, while Guyana keeps being put in play. Add facilities at the European's sites and we could have launches every week or so, year round.
6.) No, the ISS is merely in orbit *all the time*! Personally, I am nervous at having all of our eggs in the ISS's one basket. But for far less then we're paying now, we could use a disposable launch system to put up two or three Skylab-scale stations in different orbits, connected by a "space tug". By boosting up a small SPS or a few outrigger microreactors, the fuel needs would be minimal and a few tugs could be available at all times, charged and ready to go. Also don't forget that with robot-based missions, time in space just doesn't matter that much. Combine that with the moon's much smaller gravity well, and getting a few tons of moon rock up to the ISS for use as shielding is nowhere near as big a deal as one would think. Just use super-efficient trajectories (who cares? a five month trip is perfectly acceptable to a robot) and the only seriously messy bit is getting down to the moon's surface and back up to space.
People with more time then me have worked out plenty of systems where the robot miner never goes back up again, but just shoots little bits of rock up with a mass driver, where they are intercepted and brought back to the station.
7.) It's true, a Soyuz is not reusable. So? Why does this matter? The shuttle uses an awful lot of disposable gear for a supposedly "reusable" launch system. Frankly, all that I care about is cost, safety, and how much usable mass is left in space when a mission is completed. The shuttle loses on all three.
8.) A Soyuz cannot boost something like spacelab and return it. Again, so? Skylab seems to have done just fine with 1970's technology. With the tens of billions we're spending on shuttle work we could come up with some mighty fine one-time-drop systems for large payloads. In fact, NASA started research years back and has had increasing success with what is basically a huge parafoil that can drop a payload to earth far more gently then the shuttle.
I've said it before and I'm saying it again. The shuttle is a white elephant. It's past time to move on.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
You know it's fun to let the mind run wild and play "what if".
The most interesting thing I found by following these links is what Defense Secretary Cohen said about terrorists who are working on electromagnetic weapons that can trigger earthquakes and volcanos remotely.
I mean, did the guy forget his medication or does stuff like that exist?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I think it was the Daily Show that said more or less.
It would suck if the space program had to be canned because a boy band member couldn't pay his bill.
This is referring to the Russian program having deep financial troubles and Lance Bass not being able to pay the agreed upon $20M for him to go into space.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
While the SR-71 is a remarkable craft, I'm not sure I'd characterize 20 crashes in 30 years as "without incident".
"No matter what the investigations show, there are no apparent credible crew survival options for the failure Columbia experienced."
I've heard many aerospace engineers I respect disagree and say that, although perhaps difficult:
1. Ground-based and/or space photos should have been taken from day 1 to day 12 to determine if there was damage to the underside of Columbia's left wing. The committee looking into this clearly were not the "best and brightest" if they discounted this option. They, made the additional mistake of claiming the photos were not considered as nothing could have been done to save the astronauts lives anyway (see above). Many engineers I've spoken with disagree. The astrounauts had cameras on-board which perhaps could have been configured on a boom, rope or projected out (set on automatic to take 100 photos or so) while dangling and perhaps some would catch the right angle. If not, reset the flashram and try again. These were brilliant astronauts and if they knew there was potential life-threratening damage, they would probably be creative enough (as those in Apollo 13) to take pictures to held save the day to supplement ground and space-based photos, if necessary.
2. If photos determined Columbia potential structural damage was serious there was still plenty of time to launch the shuttle already on the pad which was widely reported that could be ready to launch in an emergency in 7 days or less to rescue the Columbia crew. Obviously, with just two of NASA's best command pilots. Some naysayers have said there is too much risk having two shuttles in such close proximity. However, I suspect most Americans (including knowledgeable aerospace engineers) would disagree. Also, although different than usual communications with two shuttles in orbit at the same time is not impossible. The communications link to the ISS (or military, SAMSO) could be used temporarily, if necessary.
Just imagine if we Americans (via NASA) could have rescued our Astronauts. That would be such a boost to NASA that perhaps the budget would be increased substatially.
I hope the inquiry board determines:
1. Why pictures were not taken?
2. Why there was no remote-controlled camera to examine Columbia's wing.
3. Why a rescue mission was so quickly discounted?
Also, I hope they recommend or require:
1. No launch takes place without plans for ground and space photos once orbit is achieved. This is more important as the shuttles age. It should also be easily for astronauts to take photos of their shuttle wing and elsewhere. A remote controlled camera in space controlled by small aerosoll puffs would be quite effective and could be cushioned so as not to conceivably damage tiles in any way.
2. No shuttle is launch unless a contingency for rescue is in place (either a US shuttle or Soviet craft)
Wouldn't this be one of the best legacies we could give our 7 Columbia heros.
NYTimes story contradicts this
(and who do you trust more: Fox TV News or the Times):
Excerpt:
But NASA officials said there was no possible relationship, for several reasons. The foam was looking less and less like the cause, they said, and they still use it on the shuttle fleet. They said the piece that broke off and hit the wing of the Columbia was probably the old foam, not the new, more trouble-plagued material.
When it had trouble with the replacement foam, NASA applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for an exemption from the CFC ban, saying "no viable alternative has been identified."
It gained the exemption in 2001, and still uses that foam in a few spots on the shuttle fleet.
The money should not be spent on getting a craft to LEO, spend the money when you are there. I wonder if the Russians will sell us the plans and tech to build the Energia heavy lift rocket that launched the one-flight Soviet Buran Shuttle? The Soviets built Buran with onboard engines that could work in the atmosphere so that the shuttle could do a powered landing. They also wisely cancelled the program after one unmanned flight as it was a huge waste of money. You can see one of the Buran spacecraft in Sydney at a museum....ah capitalism!
Firstly, my sympathy to all involved.
Next. Has anyone seen the SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2455 (b=abstracts) particularly Paper #: 2455-23 Shearographic nondestructive evaluation of Space Shuttle thermal protection systems
The abstract says
TPS - Thermal Protection SystemSOFI - spray-on foam insulation
This paper is in the proceedings of the SPIE meeting in 1995 on "Nondestructive Evaluation of Aging Aircraft, Airports, Aerospace Hardware, and Materials"
The ionosphere itself wasn't very active either. First, the pre-dawn ionosphere tends to be weaker than after the sun heats things up. Also, the sun's xrays were not strong, and geomagnetic storm activity was subdued.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Tragedy, no. Accident, yes.
Space travel is terribly dangerous, and should be treated as such.
Remember when Prof. Feynman was investigating the accident of the Challenger? NASA told him the chances of a catastrophic failure is about 1 in 100,000.
Obviously rubbish spouted by the bureaucrats. Feynman agreed more with the engineers, who estimated 1 in 50.
So? We've had a bit over 100 flights, and 2 losses. 1:50 is correct.
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
of course it exists, didnt you see the "Under seige 2" documentry?
Kind of reminds me the re-entry of Friendship 7 (John Glenn's flight) when the heatshield had apparently became loose in the orbit. The retro-rocket package that was strapped to the bottom of the capsule was not jettisoned until the last possible moment in the hope that it would hold the heatshield in place. A small chance and a big prayer indeed.
It turned out to be an instrumentation failure
The owls are not what they seem
Then RTFA
This single article is not the only source of information about the shuttle, or how it's systems work. My point was how fragile the tiles are, you could push your finger through one with little trouble. If your finger touched a tile, you would reduce it's effectiveness greatly, just because of the oils on your skin. That hardly seems like a robust material to use for a vehicle.
The other designs that competed with the current shuttle were all based on a cooled titanium skin. They were not chosen because the cost of making a vehicle that size out of titanium was much higher (several times higher) than the current design, which is primarily constructed of aluminum, very much like most conventional aircraft. NASA was authorized enough money to make 4 shuttles of the current design, or maybe make one of the other designs. They chose the cheaper design, thinking that the risks were managable. They chose solid fuel booster rockets because of cost, with the results we saw in the Challenger. They made cheap shuttles, that are incredibly expensive to keep operating, and very fragile in their operation.
The space plane that everyone has talked about was intended to be designed much differently than the current shuttle, and much more like the competing shuttle designs. No one wants to pay for the development of the next generation of shuttles, because the current ones have been doing the job, however expensively, and most of the satellite launching work has been taken back over by single use rockets, since the shuttle launching rate is unable to keep up with demand.
I am writing based on a knowledge of the history of the shuttle, not just one article about the current shuttle disaster. Do some research, you'll find much of the information I've been talking about. No one wants to say those things, because it doesn't reflect well on NASA.
In Fact Columbia is different in regard to changes made in these gap fillers.
"A 1995 paper by NASA scientists estimated that 90 percent of all tile damage on the shuttle belly resulted from the foam "debonding" during liftoff and smacking into the craft. " Read for your self at NSTS
You might want to due a bit of reading before going into such a rant. The STS-107 page alone indicates the detailed level of monitoring in place. In fact Columbia had more monitoring points than the 'production' shuttles.
Although you wouldn't want to try install new equipment straight away, I believe a smart way of testing a new system would to be put the in parallel. The idea is that they would get all the same readings as the current computers, they would make calculations about what to do, but they wouldn't control anything. This approach allows the computers to be tested in situation without effecting the situation. Only when the computer have been tested is semi-operational mode would they be able to be put into full operational mode.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I mean, did the guy forget his medication or does stuff like that exist?
Probably both.
According to several sources I consider fairly reliable, humans currently have technology capable of shattering the Earth. I'm not 100% about that; our technology, while enormously more advanced than the current public perception would allow, we're nowhere nearly as advanced as some previous incarntions of humanity, (Atlatian, Lemurian, etc.), and frankly, even to me, shattering the Earth seems like a fairly inconceivable affair.
Mind you, early work by Tesla demonstrated that knowing the correct frequency of an object gave one the power to make it vibrate using sympathetic resonance from a distance, (the basics of radio), and that if you continually pumped energy into that object in a certain way, you could literally shake the object apart. And as one great mind once said. . , "With a lever big enough. .
Though, screwing up in such a way is supposedly what destroyed the planet which we now know of as the Asteroid belt. And that's not from Lee & Kirby.
This stuff only seems far-out to people because everybody has been led to believe in an excruciatingly simple description of reality. When you start to think and look and overcome your programming. .
-Fantastic Lad --None Rival DOOM!
But the whole point of this portion of this thread is that these computers are soo true & tested that replacing them would be more trouble than it is worth.
It would seem that once you go making new parts for something when the parts are as intricate as a microchip, that you would be blowing the whole reliability thing out of the water.
--something witty
Skill sets have priorities and criteria built in as assumptions. Managers usually have the final say because, normally, bottom-line dictates ("We don't want to screw up cuz we might get sued" is the thinking of a "rational agent".) ... and the decision was made ... ready to go.
If I remember correctly, those who knew the O-rings' thermal characteristics and their track record for blow-by were asked, in the course of one of those conference calls, to "take off their engineer's hats and put on their manager's hats"
Human, all too human, ehh whot?
-- When you look to see how the system works, you usually find that it doesn't.
Full size photo, which was linked to the Sensors and timeline There's also a page of general Columbia information.
FWIW I've created an intereactive presentation of sensor readings.
-- When you look to see how the system works, you usually find that it doesn't.
But here's my point ... Dittemore laid a lot of things out on the table, and in the course of that displayed the priorities: 1) get the crew back, 2) get the shuttle back in a way that minimizes turnaround time. ... ya gotta admit that's really ugly.
Slightly better is to adjust attitude to minimize stresses on a damaged area; this means beating the crap out of the rest of the craft, but pondering the foam impact lead to a possibility of localized structural damage, i.e. the bird gets bruised but lands in one piece, so there's some heavy lifting to be done before it flies again.
Worst case scenario (short of catastrophic failure, of course) is to get the thing groaning and thumping down to an altitude where crew could bail out
But actually, the scenario that developed included this fact: Columbia was flying just fine ... word is that there were no out of nominal indications. Roll trim became active at some point, which indicates that left side drag. Jets fired, which indicates that trim wasn't quite keeping up. The interest expressed was in the way things were developing, where the system was losing ground against increasing drag. /But/ Columbia was acceptably oriented when there was loss of signal.
Even if it's the case that mistaken conclusions were acted on, things weren't just overlooked.
Columbia's flight characteristics did not hint at the doom that was to unfold. Now, /there's/ a basis for real humility.
-- When you look to see how the system works, you usually find that it doesn't.
Yeah, I pretty much agree. The only serious limitation I see continuing with the current Shuttle computers is the reported difficulty on finding replacement parts for them.
I used to work for Federal Systems in Owego, NY, near here, where the Shuttle's computers are built. Indeed, I used to work for the department that developed the 'support software' (HAL/S compilers, assemblers, link-editors, and simulators) used to program them. I was still working there during the 1986 Challenger disaster. (I left in 1995 after Gerstner sold us to Loral as a "reward" for being so successful.) The computers did very well during Challenger, although there's no way they could have held together during Columbia's breakup.
The computers and core memories were shipped to Owego in vats of de-ionized water. The memories were powered up and their information slowly copied onto external media. When decoded what they revealed, apart from standard guidance information and status which was provided to the Challenger investigation board, was that the computers sensed power had dropped off and with their remaining power proceeded to do an orderly shutdown of the computer systems, writing system state into their core memories in anticipation of a restart.
It was a horrible tragedy for all of us, as was Columbia, but it's gratifying some things worked as designed.
Jan Theodore Galkowski, (Oo) http://www.smalltalkidiom.net/ MySQL,PHP,ETL,SQL,MinGW C, and plucking the Web